[Note from Tom: I know no other bloggers experience this, but with our book publishing work directly with authors at WME Books and our other blog work, Yvonne and I feel like we don't get enough time to post in this blog and engage with our A-ha! readers. So we're very happy to have some more help ...
New to A-ha! ... introducing ... Posts by Greg!
Greg Bell, our new A-ha! blogger, is a partner in D.S. Leach Consulting, with his wife Dianna Leach. Both of them will be posting about book publishing here and about blogs at our business blogging blog, WME Blogs. Greg has much to share from his experience both in book publishing and in building and publishing blogs (check out his Jazz@Rochester blog), so let's just dive right in with Greg's first post on A-ha!]
According to a recent report on the Publisher's Weekly website, a survey of a sample of 813 readers conducted by the New York advertising agency Spier-New York found that 18% of readers have been to a publisher's Web site and 23% of those polled had visited the site of an author. A higher percentage of those who visited authors' (35%) or publishers' (21%) sites were under the age of 35 (which as the post notes, is not surprising). The survey also found that 50 percent of those asked said they purchased a book as a gift within the past year. While 89% of those who bought books as gifts apparently bought from a brick-and-mortar retailer, there were still 28% of them bought their book gift online. Also encouraging is that 86% of those buying books as gifts bought at least two books. Using the total number of books sold in a year (it was over 709 million units in 2005) the actual numbers of readers involved could be pretty impressive.
So, is there anything to take away from this survey? To start, it shows that people are still buying books as gifts. And, most importantly for A-ha! readers, an author's or publisher's website (or blog) is becoming increasingly important in driving those sales.
Comments