They’re Talking About You…

There are a lot of great ways to see what people are saying about you and/or your brand. Twitter has its own search function as do most other forms of social media.

Still, one of my favorites is Board Reader, because it searches message boards and internet forums. The advantage? Twitter search will show you how many people are blabbing about your content, but Board Reader goes one step further, giving you the ability to see how many people have responded to the initial comment. Here’s a search of people talking about Nxtbook content, each one building free readership for our publishers.

Of any of the digital publishing companies, Nxtbook seems to have the most content showing up on the boards, thereby proving that a.our customers have the coolest content and b.our interface is more share-friendly than most!

The Future Isn’t Here, But It’s Closer…

Word comes this week that the first full color flexible e-reader is coming. Soon perhaps. Or maybe not. It’s hard to say.

 

Nxtbook iPhone Version Released

We’re proud to announce the release of our iPhone version for Nxtbook. Our version includes several features uncommon to the digital-magazine-for-the-iPhone market, including:

* Live links on ads. If you’re going to drive readers to the iPhone, don’t you think your advertisers will want clicks? We thought so, too, so all ads have live links.

* Sponsor images. Sponsors pay for premium real estate and we’re all about sponsorship.

* Integrated analytics. As readers move to more and varied devices, publishers will want to know who’s reading their content where. If your readers are on the iPhone, you’ll know it.

* Text or Image Choice. As serious readers of this blog know, our early efforts into the mobile space were with Nxtbook Liberty, a text-based version of our product that enables readers to read without zooming in. For Liberty customers, we’ve integrated the text choice into the iPhone choice, allowing readers to choose a high fidelity version requiring zooming, or a text-based one, requiring none. We firmly believe that it’s this type of user choice that will be paramount to success on these types of devices.

 

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch, here’s a short URL you can use to see one done with our text-based Liberty Version incorporated: http://bit.ly/3cofCg

Thinking of Going Digital Only?

You’re not the only one. Our customer Advanstar’s the latest to announce the change, as covered by FOLIO.

Of course, going digital-only means you should look at a lot of things differently, in terms of layout and design. To help ease you into the transition, be sure to check out this cool guide prepared by Nxtbook Design Manager Jeremy Smith.

What the Market Will Bear…

I have no idea if you can sell your magazine online, so I really have no idea what you should charge for it. Understand, we have lots of opinions and lots of ideas, and we’ve got a flexible enough DRM to let you try them, and that’s really the point. Try everything and see what happens.

The most dramatic example we’ve seen of late? Author Cory Doctorow’s latest short story collection. Depending on how you want it, you can have it for free, $10,000, or many options in between. I don’t know which one will be successful but the concept of massaging the offering at various price points is brilliant, both in terms of what he’ll learn and what he’ll earn. 

Josh Gordon Has No Problems With Self-Confidence

As mentioned before, we’re a sponsor of a study media expert Josh Gordon is putting together regarding revenue generation inside digital magazines. Gordon details his forthcoming tour of the results within a blog post titled Oct 27th: The day publishers learn to sell ads in digital magazines.

Assuming you miss "the day," Gordon will also be presenting at FOLIO’s virtual show and a BtoB Webinar on November 3. 

For our money, we’d recommend the November 3 webinar, as it also features Nxtbook Media customer Brigitte Johnson from Tree Farmer Magazine. But either way, be sure to catch the Gordon show at a venue near you.

E-Magazines Won’t Have Links Just As Soon As Your Mortgage Company Stops Accepting Those Pesky Payments…

So Josh Quittner’s post we blogged about last week was the form of reference for Erick Shonfeld’s rebuttal over on TechCrunch, all of which is a long way of saying that it’s almost silly to suggest that digital magazines will exist without links. Simply put, while there are many thoughts about click-throughs, the reality is that clicks are the commerce of the Web, and any argument that fails to acknowledge this is one with little regard for how business is conducted online.

The idea that so many voices wouldn’t acknowledge this simple truth is fairly disconcerting until taken in the context of this Seth Godin quote:

"…the products and services that win (if win means you can make a good living and make positive change) are rarely the products and services that are beloved without reservation by the true believers."

For every person who doesn’t like zooming in on a digital magazine, there’s a publisher who figured out that a critical mass of their readership doesn’t mind.

For every person who thinks that links disrupt a "lean back" reading experience, there’s a publisher who uses the links (and the clicks) they create to make a living.

Unless your business model is based on a trust fund, don’t even wonder if your digital magazine should have links. Just put them in.

Somebody’s Got Good News…

Amid all the doom and gloom, some magazines are having great years. Here’s a slide-show of 22 magazines that are having a great 2009.

The Three Rules of Digital Magazines

I’ve written about this before, but a publisher asked me to make it all pretty-like for an upcoming issue, so I did. Or at least, I hope I did:

The Three Rules of Digital Magazines

When working with publishers new to digital magazines, one of the first questions we hear is, “How is a digital magazine different from my website?” This is a great question. In today’s age, we don’t have extraneous budgets or time to produce multiple products that do the same thing.

Rather than discuss product features, though, let’s focus on how readers treat the two entities differently, for it’s the unique reader behavior that really gives publishers additional property to market to advertisers.

Since we started producing digital magazines in 2003, we’ve come to form these “Three Rules of Digital Magazines,” and have yet to have a customer that they haven’t proven true for.

Rule 1:
You will have more visitors on your website than your digital magazine.

Think about it: If I send you a link and say you have to read this, you’ll probably click on it. If I drop a magazine on your desk and say the same thing, you likely will put it aside until you have time. As a society, we’ve already conditioned ourselves to click in and out of websites quickly, but we view all magazines – not just print ones – as something requiring more time. And time is something we have less of today.

Your move: If you’ve got an advertiser only concerned about page views, steer them to your website. You’ll have more there.

Rule 2:
You will have longer engagement times inside your digital magazine.

The average website visitor across all categories stays about one minute. Last month, the average Nxtbook reader stayed inside the digital magazine nearly seven minutes. What’s more: the number four most read Nxtbook had an average engagement time
of fifteen minutes.

Your move: Savvy advertisers are looking to engage with readers. Long engagement times make the digital magazine an ideal vehicle to position to those sponsors who want to make sure their messages are seen for longer periods of time.

Rule 3:
You will have a significantly higher click-through rates inside your digital magazine.

Advertisers tend to ask about page views, but that’s not really what they want. They want lead,s and leads come from clicks. Rules One & Two show that digital magazine readers are more highly engaged than website visitors and they demonstrate this time and time again with click-through rates that are typically four to six times that of our publishers’ websites.

Your move: If your advertiser is selling high volume products and treasures leads, the digital magazine may be a better buy for them. In addition, the significantly higher click-through rate can often negate the lower page views of the digital magazine as well.

Understanding the difference between your digital magazine and website is the first step in helping to position these two products in your portfolio. Properly understood, they represent unique buying opportunities for your advertisers and additional property for your ad sales team to market.

 

E-Ink Or Not…

Gawker did a nice job this week bringing you up to speed with all of the e-Reader devices coming (or rumored to come) to market.

Meanwhile a fairly thorough report from Gizmodo says these devices aren’t prepared for the future:

"E-ink is a great digital tool for emulating what books were. But a horse with rollershoes can’t keep up with the automobile, so why should we expect a digital book to keep up with modern media habits?"

In the end, Gizmodo’s probably right, but that doesn’t mean you should be waiting for the technology to catch up. To push the Gizmodo analogy further, did manufacturers stop producing product until trucks were here to ship it? Of course not. They experimented with what was available to them at the time, while keeping a firm eye on the horizon.

In a nutshell: the Kindle won’t revolutionize your magazine’s business plan, but figuring out how to get your content on all of these devices without breaking the bank might. And of course, Nxtbook can help.

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