Industry insight interview (Random House Australia)

Industry insight interview (Random House Australia)

Anna Maguire is Head of Production and Interactive at Random House Australia (RHA). RHA works closely with their UK parent company Random House Group (RHG) in experimenting and exploring various areas in the digital world. In Australia the Interactive team are responsible for launching new digital marketing initiatives online, managing email communications for marketing, and launching e-book programs and other digital content formats.

What challenges do writers currently face if they want to embrace new technologies and engage with the ‘empowered consumer’?

Distribution will be the main challenge. Consumers now have access to so much information from a variety of sources and the challenge is sorting out ‘relevance’ to their particular interests and desires. We’re all suffering information overload so sorting through is now taking too much time. Consumers will engage with trusted brands that deliver what they want, and ignore or delete what isn’t meeting their needs.

Anyone can now ‘self publish’ their own digital content – but it will be quality that rises to the top. Traditional publishing has, and will continue in the digital age, to offer that quality filter and distribute only what meets their quality guidelines. Editing of content along with marketing, distribution and being alert to piracy are some of the services that a publisher like RHA offers that will be difficult for digital writers to access on their own.

What steps is/has RHA taken to move ‘reading’ into this new environment?

We’re excited about the new digital environment and the chance for us to engage with consumers we may not encounter in a traditional book store. Some of the ways we are experimenting include:

• launching an e-book program to include both backlist titles as well as our new releases. Shortly key titles and authors will be available simultaneously in print and digital form working with RHG in the use of ‘View Inside’ widgets – allowing consumers access to around 10% of selected titles, and then the ability to purchase them. Widgets will also allow people to place these samples of titles on their own websites.
• uploading our wonderful book trailers to YouTube to reach new markets [http://au.youtube.com/randomhouseaustralia].
• enabling book marking of our book campaign mini sites on a variety of social networking sites experimenting with mobile marketing, downloads of phone screensavers and even Australia’s first book ‘theme music’ mobile ring tone for our bestselling series Ranger’s Apprentice! (While the Ranger’s Apprentice campaign is now over, at [http://www.rangersapprentice.com.au/index.asp], as well as on [http://www.brisingr.com.au], you can see some other interactive elements we’ve experimented with.)
• creating wallpapers, blog icon/avatars, crosswords, quizzes and a forum for fans from all over the world to talk about our titles supporting various online reading groups and providing chapter extracts, discussion questions, special offers.

RHG have ‘web published’ one of their popular titles online to experiment with a new model of offering the content but engaging with consumers through user-generated content, and creating revenue from banner ads on high traffic sites [http://www.goodguides.co.uk/].

We’ve made large investments in staff and infrastructure in order to store our book assets digitally, and be able to provide content in a variety of formats on a variety of networks for consumers – we know that we need to engage where people are. Some would say ‘Fish where the fish are’ – and more and more the ‘fish’ are online! We also network with professionals in the digital arena and RHG have created a new role of ‘Digital Thinker’ who will continue to lead us to new frontiers. Other exciting developments that we are working on will be launched over the coming months … Stay tuned!
   
What business models do you think might work here?

This is a tough one for us as it is possible that for a period of time our investment will be larger than the return. We see possibilities for a variety of business models, but don’t have knowledge of what will work for us as yet. Models may include:

• ebooks, mobile reading and listening
• print-on-demand, widgets, viewing pages and chapters
• online rental and subscription models
• adding user-generated content and blogs
• advertising supported titles
• pick-and-mix chapters
• online/offline hybrids
• multimedia libraries

We haven’t yet delved into all these options; we just see that this is the potential future.

What business models do you think might work for writers writing for the digital environment?

As yet we haven’t delved into digital-only books although any publisher can see this may happen in the future. Our focus is on supporting, distributing, promoting and earning royalties for our existing authors. Our encouragement to digital authors would be to invest in good editing to create a quality product.

And what about writers who are writing games or is this less relevant for RH?

Correct. This won’t be a focus for us in the short term, although we encourage and promote games and engage our readers with our books, for instance see [http://www.rangersapprentice.com.au/only_games.asp]. 

Can you comment on what RHA is looking at in this space?

We will be launching our e-book program with Dymocks and celebrate the fact that e-book readers like the iLiad are now available in Australia. There is a new e-book reader compatible with the iPhone and we support any initiatives that will bring books and reading to a new and wider audience! That can only be good for both publishers and for consumers.

RHA is watching the international market and expectations are that we will see a steady increase in digital consumption of content over the next few years. We accept that our investment is likely to be larger than our profit for a number of years, but we believe that readers will want to consume content in a number of ways and formats and we intend to support that.
 

 

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