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Steve Colca, Marketing Associate

PatronMail Client Since:  November 2006
Starting E-List Size:  2,346
Current E-List Size:  2,396

Steve Colca is the Marketing Coordinator for Trade Books, and has been at since July of 2006. Like many in the publishing industry, Norton is learning about the best avenues to present books online, and Steve's job has been to start up a lot of online marketing initiatives.

He's been developing appropriate online marketing approaches, seeing what works, and making sure they're doing it effectively. Before coming to Norton, Steve was working in the editorial department at Yale University Press in New Haven, CT.

Last time we talked about how your job has been to explore various new e-marketing options. Have you actually starting creating online videos yet?

We have done a couple of videos with our authors so far, short documentary-style interviews. We hired a production company to do them, and they also handle the distribution for us. That involves posting on all many online video sites -- Youtube, of course, but many others as well. It's been a great experience so far, and successful: in the first three days, our first video for Michael Lewis' book The Blind Side got 4,000 views, and now that it's been up for a few weeks it has around 6,000 views. [Click here to see the video.]

Norton has also been really good about developing relationships with other more book-oriented sites, like Fora.tv. There are so many books out there it's always hard to choose the next one to read. This experience is getting much better when you can get so much information about a book before deciding if it's right for you. You can watch a video, read other reader reviews, listen to an mp3 of the author reading an excerpt, or read their blog. Just to name a few. I know that  Amazon.com is starting to look into a lot more, adding all kinds of elements to their book pages.

The one catch to videos is that this kind of full-scale professional production is too expensive to do for all the books we publish. So we're also developing the ability to produce more affordable videos in-house as well.


You had also mentioned social networks - is W. W. Norton on Facebook or Myspace?

No, we're not.

Aside from the bigger social networks like Facebook, there are also plenty of niche networks. The most notable that are relevant in the publishing world are Shelfari, Goodreads, and LibraryThing. These are sites with passionate readers that are eager to learn about new books.

For the more mass-appeal social networks, we have individual authors who have success with them, but at this point, Norton has not joined in. The majority of readers don't distinguish between publishers, so the brand is in effect the author, not the publisher, so it's just a question of whether it makes sense as a marketing approach. So far we've found it doesn't, although the social networking ground shifts daily and we are continuing to keep up with those changes.


With all this high-tech stuff going on, what's your main e-marketing goal for the future?

While I've definitely been very focused a wide range of new marketing opportunities, one important goal is to focus on growing the size of our e-mail list.

Up to now we've been quite passive about it, which you can probably tell from our lack of significant subscriber growth in the past year. There are just a couple of avenues for people to sign up. But now that it's more established we'll be focusing more on increasing the size of the list going forward. This will include more actively collecting e-mails at conferences, collaborating with affiliate publishers that have a newsletter of their own, and making subscription through the Norton Web site more user-friendly.


Visit W. W. Norton's Web Site

Now you can read and subscribe to regular updates from Patron Technology's President, Eugene Carr. Gene's blog provides a snapshot of his perspective on what's going on in the e-marketing world now, and how it relates to arts marketing.

If you haven't been reading, here's a quick look at what you missed last week:

Homage to Danny Newman - Hero of Arts Marketers and Hater of Single Ticket Buyers: Recalling his legacy and questioning its relevance.

The Future of Television Isn't: Live TV may already be a thing of the past.

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