Books are popular gifts, and the Christmas buying season has
traditionally been the best month of the year for book sales. It still is ...
for print sales. With the explosion in eBooks, post-Christmas is becoming
another hot selling season. Not only are empty Kindles popular gifts, but
Amazon gift cards frequently fill stockings and email in-boxes. These
two trends are causing a flurry of eBook buying from December 25 through
January.
(Please excuse my
focus on Kindle. For some reason B&N and other booksellers have not been
able to market gift cards with near the intensity of Amazon.)
The question for
publishers is how to adjust their marketing plans to meet this shift in book
sales. The simple answer is that pre-holiday marketing should focus on print
format, and after Christmas marketing should transition to eBooks, preferably starting a bit prior to Christmas.
Gift givers prefer to wrap a physical item in shinny paper to be
opened on Christmas, and many readers still like to hold a physical book in their
hand. There is still good demand for print books, especially trade paperback
and hardbound books. Publishers should focus their attention on print sales before
the holiday buying season.
Sales of eBooks seem to get an up-tick as early as Christmas
afternoon. My guess is that these are new Kindle owners who are playing with
their new toy. To affect this market, eBook promotion needs to start before the
25th of December.
How do you change the marketing focus? One thing I do is set all
my hot links on my various web pages to my print formats, and then the 22nd
change the links to my eBooks formats. Not very clever, I know. But if I had
this nailed down, I wouldn’t be posting this article in the throes of holiday
shopping.
I’ll do better next year.
Related posts:
eBooks Changing More Than Just Formats
The eReader Revolution is Accelerating
Books Are The Perfect Gift