Reader Analytics for Publishers

Discover your readers and who your audience truly is.

We all love books, but publishing is a business and as a business publishers have to optimize their marketing and promotional activities to increase sales and revenues. Reader analytics is first and foremost a marketing tool for authors and publishers. Reader Analytics is a tool for how to best utilize scarce publicity and marketing resources. It helps indie publishers stretch a shoestring budget to be something much larger. Even large publishers with serious marketing budgets can spend big bucks only on handful of titles. Reader Analytics helps them prior to publication date which titles will genuinely take off, if promoted strongly. Reader Analytics also informs publishers how to optimize title, cover and description and how to best position the book in terms of the audience where it is likely to achieve strong word-of-mouth quickly and effectively.

Reader analytics is a data-based approach to measuring reader engagement as early as possible, so marketing and publicity campaign can be executed to maximum effect. Spending a big marketing budget on a book that does not strongly engage readers is a waste of money, no matter its brand recognition or literary merit. Similarly wasting advertising by targeting the wrong audience is waste or precious resources. Reader Analytics provides actionable audience insights to publishers so they can avoid such mistakes.

Savvy publishers like Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Elsevier, MacMillan and Bonnier are already making use of reader analytics to maximise their sales and increase market share for their titles. These smart publishers use insights derived from reader analytics to better position, publicise, promote and market their book. In many cases these publishers use reader analytics before the book is published to decide on marketing spend and where to focus promotional and publicity resources. Some publishers are even making better acquisition and portfolio decisions by leveraging reader analytics to understand why books with high expectations did not take off and applying the learnings to future business decisions.

Lord Kelvin said that you can only improve what you can measure. To improve their marketing, publishers need to measure how well their existing campaigns are working. Reader analytics measures reader engagement with books and hence customer satisfaction with the “product”. The technology became possible with the advent of ebooks, but the big players such as Amazon, Apple and Google never shared the data they collected. Jellybooks is the first and so far only company that allows publishers to collect reading data from third party reading applications to understand how readers actually read.

Jellybooks does more than just collect reading data though, we analyse the data and bring it to life. We also survey readers and solicit their feedback so we can interpret the data in the context of reader’s behaviour. We even conduct A/B tests so that publishers can scientifically test one cover option against another or one edition versus an alternative edition.

Jellybooks is unique in providing reading data that gives publishers in-depth insights into how readers engage with books and how to drill this down to the audience or niche that is most enamoured with the book. We distil the data into a few key performance indicators (KPIs) and easy-to read charts and graphs, which we will explore on the next couple of pages before we turn our attention to practical use cases.