Save $125 on FOLIO

FOLIO show is barely a month from now, and we hope to see you there. If we do, you’ll see the coolest Nxtbooks, the hottest Nxtbookers and get to join us with City Running Tours as we take in the sights! Still not sure? Use the code below to save $125 when you sign up!

Nxtivus for the Rest of Us!

This December, show appreciation for your readers and add something a little extra flashy to your winter issue. With no extra effort, drop your readers into a winter wonderland with a dash of our special Nxtivus animation.

For your December issue cover, we will add falling snowflakes from top to bottom. It will even gather whimsically across your masthead, just like in this issue of Connections. An elegant red banner delivers a holiday message to your readers, and can even be sponsored by an advertiser. Click here to view Nxtivus magic in action.

Contact your Success Manager to set up your Nxtivus promotion early to make your winter edition uniquely festive for your readers.

A Webinar for You Education Types

Looking for some insider information about how to use digital editions in the education industry? We’ve got you covered. We have asked industry expert and long-time senior editor Sherri Miles to talk about some of the best practices she’s seen in digital publishing for educational facilities.

To hear Sherri Miles speak, you can click here to register for a webinar hosted by University Business and Nxtbook Media next week, October 4, at 2:00 pm EST. The webinar will touch on points such as why a digital edition is crucial to your audience today, what kinds of questions you should ask when looking for the best platform, and what kind of results you should look to see.

Click here to register. To read more information about the speaker, you can visit her website here.

Can a Nxtbook Run on the New Kindle Fire?

So Amazon is lowering the price of the Kindle and coming out with a sweet looking tablet called the Fire, just in time for Christmas. You’re probably wondering if your Nxtbook will run on it.

The answer continues to be, yes, BUT…. meaning:

YES – Your content can be displayed on the Kindle. But because the screen is smaller than your magazine (likely), you’d be better off creating a text accessible version.

YES – Your content can be on the Kindle, but if and only if, you charge for it. Amazon continues to not be interested in helping controlled circ titles get read. 

Nxtbook Media Offers Video Services. Who knew?

One of the products offered by our Creative Services department is full video production capabilities. For those of you located close to our Lancaster, PA headquarters, that means we can serve as a fully-featured provider of all sorts of videos. And for those of you further away, you can use us for editing, graphics, storyboarding or anything else.

Why do I mention this? Simply because our team just finished this fundraising piece for the local science museum. It’s a perfect example of the type of work available for the asking. 

Does Your Brand Have Klout?

There’s an interesting article over at FOLIO ranking magazine brands according to their number of Twitter followers. Getting to be #1 on the list requires nearly 3 million, yet you can crack the list with a bit more than 170,000.

But Twitter followers is just a piece of the story. After all, anyone can get a ton of followers, but that doesn’t mean that your brand’s content is being consumed by people, which is sort of the point. And for that, there’s Klout.

What Klout does is look not just at your number of followers, but how likely they are to consume and forward your content. AND they do it for a wide variety of social media platforms, not just Twitter. As such, your Facebook, YouTube, etc. activity all help to build your Klout score.

Because Klout is new, it’s not perfect and – not unlike the FOLIO article – perhaps a bit too much of the score is influenced by the number of Twitter followers. However, it is all relative, and I found it interest that People’s KLOUT score was nearly identical to Men’s Health, despite the fact that the latter has only 20% of the followers as people.

So what’s your Klout score?  

Not Another Holiday Card

Don’t look now, but the holidays are coming. Before you order your standard corporate holiday cards, let’s explore your options.

Oh yes, there are options.

You could not send a card and be villanized as a Scrooge. You could send singing telegrams, but your interns may protest.

Or you could go digital!

A digital holiday card lets you express your company’s attitude and gratitude to your clients in a unique way that won’t get lost in the avalanche of cards sure to decorate their desks.

Abandoning the traditional in favor of being original opens up a world of animation, audio and design possibilities that will leave a lasting impression and have your clients wondering how you’ll top that next year!

Our Creative Services Team has their elf hats on and we’re ready to help you stand out this holiday. Give us a call or drop an email and we can brainstorm in time for the holidays.

Digital Catalog Webinar LIVE in a Week

Next week, September 27 at 2:00pm EST Multichannel Merchant in conjunction with Nxtbook Media is offering a strategy-based webinar for everyone who has ever published or ever considered publishing a digital catalog. (Click here to register.)

In this webinar, two speakers will share their stories about what worked and what didn’t when approaching digital catalogs. You can expect to hear some of the following:

  – Why going digital works: Discover why these companies ultimately decided to go digital, and how their catalogs work with – and surpass – other media

 - Which features matter: With all the bells and whistles available today, hear which ones make a difference in these real scenarios

 - How it all comes together: From production to publishing, learn what processes and benchmarks to use, and how to measure your success

Is It the Category Or the Provider?

Of the things that frustrate me about our industry, one of the greatest is that it’s often difficult to tell whether or not we have industry limitations or if individual vendors have limitations.

Case in point:

Over at Publishing Executive, Thea Selby writes a column about her vacillating love for digital magazines. The reason for the current plunge in adoration is because she says Zinio can’t do slideshows. While she clearly points out that she’s talking about Zinio, she lets this vendor limitation affect her feeling for the category. This would be akin to going to a Hummer dealership and then lamenting there are no economical cars on the highway. To be clear, Nxtbook offers slideshows for the browser and iPad, with quite a few ways to customize them. Ask your Project Manager for details.

 

Digital Editions and Hosting

It’s a question we hear fairly often: "Why are Nxtbooks hosted on your servers? Why can’t they be hosted on mine?"

Unlike some low end digital edition providers, Nxtbook does all of our own hosting. There are essentially two key reasons for this:

1.) Tracking. With Omniture Analytics custom built for digital editions, we need to host the books to provide what we consider to be the most robust analytics in the industry. Everything people open, read, click, etc. is captured and available to you, because of the robust reporting we’re including. And if that isn’t a big deal to you, I’d hazard a guess you’re not doing a great job of monetizing your digital edition. The value of the offering is made most apparent when you understand how your digital edition is performing.

2.) Stability. While this isn’t to say your other web properties are stable (we hope they are!), Nxtbooks are hosted and backed-up in such a way to guarantee maximum uptime. In fact, we’ve got a guy who watches it like a hawk. Anything glitches, BANG! he gets a text message. We’ve got automatic fail-overs in the system and manual over-rides for those. In short, we exist to make sure your Nxtbook can be viewed whenever anyone wants to read it, and that can only happen if we’re the ones hosting it. 

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