On the podcast this week, Melanie Jeffs from Orca Book Publishers shares a case study of their successful engagement with middle school teachers, packed with lots of great lessons to apply to your own readers, customers, or stakeholders.
If you’d like to see her presentation slides, they’re available on SlideShare here.
Want to subscribe to the podcast (for FREE)? You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, TuneIn, and SoundCloud.
Thanks for listening! If you’ve got suggestions or feedback on the podcast, you can send them to media@booknetcanada.ca.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
Transcript
Melanie: Ask their opinion. Hands down. This always gets the best response. Sometimes it's not what you wanna hear, but they respond.
Zalina Alvi: Hi, I'm Zalina Alvi, the Community Manager here at BookNet, Canada. And that was Melanie Jeffs from Orca book publishers talking about the successful engagement they've been able to foster with the middle school market. Throughout their history of publishing in the juvenile market, Orca has learned quite a few valuable lessons when it comes to engaging with teachers. And Melanie has put out a few key lessons that will help any publisher engage with this customer base. It's a really interesting case study in general and the talk is quite engaging itself. Hahaha. If you'd like to see Melanie's presentation slides, you can find them at slideshare.net/booknetcanada. Now, here's Melanie.
Melanie: In recent years, the term engagement has become synonymous with social media interactions. But social media is not the only form of engagement, and social media is not effective in isolation. The ability to sustain engagement over the long term is the difference between effective engagement and chatter. Today, I'm gonna talk about the role engagement has played in Orca's success. And in particular, how effective engagement has contributed to our brand building and content development. I'll begin with a little company background.
Orca Book Publishers was established in 1984 when Bob Tyrrell published "A Guide to the Pubs of Vancouver Island." So, yes, a company known now for kids books started with beer. In the early years, the Orca list reflected Bob's personal palate, his connections and his sense of a good story that needed to be told. Orca's first foray into the world of children's books was with the publication of "Maxine's Tree" in 1990. The book was about the Carmanah Valley, which at the time was making headlines, activists were trying to help plans to clear cut the area.
Now, a community of loggers found out about this book's radical ideas about saving trees and tried to have "Maxine's Tree" banned. As a result, the book receives far more media attention than was ever anticipated. So Orca's first picture book was a wild success. The company followed up with the publication of many more picture books, many of which had a West Coast flavor. Then they added novels for all ages, and on it went for several years.
Then a little more than a decade after the publication of "Maxine's Tree," the entire staff of Orca, all five, were assembled in a meeting that would radically change all of their jobs. Starter was on their way to bankruptcy at this time, and the rights to a number of books had reverted to author Beth Goobie. Goobie wanted Orca to pick up her books, and revive the series the books had been part of. This was a collection of hi-lo fiction called "Series 2000." Now the term hi-lo is used to describe short books written at a low reading level with a story that interests older readers. So "Series 2000" books have plots that appeal to teens, but were written at a grade three to five reading level.
Publisher Bob Tyrrell and then director of US sales, Andrew Wooldridge, presented the idea to the rest of the group. They passed around samples of the books and everyone was invited to give their opinion. Unfortunately, I could not find cover images to show you today, but they weren't the prettiest books around. So everyone was really excited about the opportunity to do something with this series, particularly marketing director Maureen Colgan. She was over the moon about acquiring books that would meet the needs of the teacher she met at conferences.
The newest staff member, at 20 something, who answered the phones and processed orders was familiar with the series already. At her previous job, she had placed dozens of "Series 2000" books into the hands of eager teachers. She was as she told the group, "Stoked at the idea of seeing this series revitalized." Now in some offices, the stoked 20-something might be tolerated in a meeting, but largely ignored. This didn't happen. The 20-something remembers feeling like a full participant in that meeting. It was decided that Orca would launch a new series. They would start with some of the titles from Starter, and they would also solicit new submissions.
In the months that followed, everyone met regularly to discuss the design, the name of the series, which titles would launch the series and how it will be promoted. Publishers didn't talk about branding so much then, but that's what was happening. That series was "Orca Soundings." To date, Orca has sold over a million books in the "Sounding" series. Next month, there will be 100 titles available. And every one of those titles is still in print and continues to sell. In an industry where we struggled to keep backless titles in print, this is kind of amazing.
A major ingredient in the success of this series was staff engagement. Because of that meeting, every staff member was invested in the project. The result was creative, effective work in every aspect of branding the series. There is a huge host of information and literature that states the obvious fact that an engaged staff is more productive. We're lucky in publishing, we tend to have more engaged staff. But there are things we can do to ensure that our staff remains engaged.
If you're not making publishing decisions with the input of an inclusive editorial board, you need to reconsider this. If your staff is involved with the publishing programme at the acquiring stage, they're gonna be invested in those titles. Another thing we do at Orca is we have an annual staff retreat. We leave the office for the day and we talk about where the company is at and where it's going. And we really go to a lot of effort to structure that day to encourage everyone to be engaged. Okay, so that's Orca.
What about teachers? Well, prior to the "Soundings," Orca wasn't really scoring big with teachers. We were trying. We were advertising in teacher magazines, and getting booths at teacher conferences. We weren't seeing huge results from any of it. But at conferences, our marketing people, Maureen, who I mentioned earlier, they were talking to a lot of teachers and learning a lot. This is how we heard about teachers' struggles getting their students to read.
Equally as important at conferences, we learned what teachers didn't like. They would tell us why a kid might not choose to read a given book. Much of this informed the decisions we made about the "Soundings." Remember those marketing people? They were part of every decision that went into building that series. And we still use interactions at conferences to inform our decision-making. We don't get all of our feedback that way. And I will talk about other methods for feedback in a little bit. But these casual interactions are really helpful. Teachers are experts on kids learning behaviors, and they're generous with their knowledge about the reading and book rejecting habits of their students, if you catch them in the right mode.
Another great way to engage with teachers is when they call the office. We always answer the phone at Orca, and we encourage our customer service people to have conversations rather than transactions. Our main phone person attends our weekly marketing meetings. And many of us, including our publisher, answer the phone when things get busy. It's a great opportunity to learn what's going on with your customers. It is such a core factor in Orca's success that I almost called this talk, "Why you need to answer the phone?"
So trade shows and incoming phone calls. What do those have in common? Both are instances where the teacher initiates the conversation. I know this is like old-fashioned dating advice, but it's totally true.
So after the "Soundings" launched, the relationship between Orca and teachers changed quickly. Every week, we were getting feedback from a teacher that was something like this. Can you guys read that? And then before anyone knew what was going on, the "Soundings" series was being presented by teachers at huge conferences. Teachers were traveling across North America promoting our books to other teachers. Now, we had send samples to all sorts of contacts, but we hadn't asked this of anyone. I know what some of you are thinking. You can't make that kind of thing happen all the time. And you're right, luck and timing worked in our favor. But we had engaged with our market. We found out what they wanted and we provided it. When you have a clearly defined market, you can do that.
Today, publishers have so many tools to gather information. And there is no shortage of data. Sales statistics are a powerful piece of data. That's how Oracle got into the business of kids books. They sold well. So Oracle published more and then more, until eventually, it was all we did. When we learned about teachers doing talks about the 'Soundings,'" we tracked down those teachers. We gave them free books and we asked them questions. They were happy to answer, not only because teachers are awesome, but because with the "Soundings" we had proven to them that their feedback wouldn't be a wasted effort.
We have a file called "raving fans." It's a contact list of influencers and frontline educators. There are people on that list who've been with us since the launch of the "Soundings" series. When we're thinking of doing something new, we contact them, and we listen. So high school teachers are really happy with Orca at this point. But we had this new group of teachers who were becoming annoyed with us. These teachers were frustrated because their middle school kids who weren't quite ready for the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the "Soundings" really wanted to read the books. So we published the ""Orca Currents"." And then the athletes still weren't reading. So we published the "Orca Soundings." And I just wanna mention here when I was pulling this together, I used old covers because those are the covers we launched with, and they got a lot more attractive. And then I tried to add those covers by pulling them off of our website from my hotel room, and it didn't work, they were too tiny. So if you wanna see the much more beautiful new covers, you'll have to go visit our website.
So these three series have become the foundation of our brand with teachers. And the validation we've received from teachers gives us the confidence to claim that we publish the best books for struggling readers. So teachers also often asked if there were teacher's guides to go along with the books. We approached some educators that we knew were working with our books. There were quite a few to choose from. And we hired some of them to write teacher's guides for us.
Again, these got better looking also, this is the first teacher's guide we put out. So this is a bit of an ongoing theme at Orca, our customer service people are very much in the habit of never saying never because they've learned that if we get asked for something often enough, we will eventually start producing it. This responsiveness encourages our teachers to continue to feed us useful information. So technology comes into play for us now.
We have these black and white PDF teacher's guides and we want to offer them for free, but we can't really afford to print them off and mail them out all over the place, so we put them online. Initially, they were available on the ugliest website ever. I wish I'd kept screen captures from those days, our first website was designed in FrontPage, Microsoft's disaster of a web editing programme. And for a time, I took care of it. And you've seen some of my design work here, it was not pretty. But still, the content was what teachers wanted. So they use the ugly website.
But then here's where things start to get really interesting. We've got a growing list of free teacher's guides on our website, teachers start asking if we offer the guides as a bound collection. They say they'd be willing to pay. We were dubious. But listening to teachers had worked for us so far. So we hired a teacher to write some frontmatter. And we bought a cerlox binder. And we started selling teacher's resource guides. We don't hide the fact that individual guides were available for free. In fact, we made sure teachers were aware that they could download 90% of the content for free. This was in 2007. And to the best of my knowledge, we have yet to receive a single complaint about charging for the printed copies.
So another thing we were doing around the same time, was we were selling collections, and you can see in that image on your left, that's another teacher's resource guide, we would patch them all up, initially, in plastic bins and mail them out. And then we got a little fancier and we made boxes for them. So teachers loved these. They could spend their budget without spending a lot of time looking for material. This put us in an enviable position when we started to sell things like digital subscriptions.
After a time, we offered the teacher's guides on CD. This kind of thing had been in the educational market for years so they were an easy sell. So our CDs were DRM-free. Teachers could print out pages as many copies of anything they wanted. We got a lot of mileage out of teacher's guides, we still do. We update the resource guides every year with the new books, and they continue to sell in print, on CD and as PDF ebooks. What was initially a marketing tool has become a source of revenue. And what a branding tool, teachers and kids look at the name Orca Book Publishers every time they use a teacher's guide, it doesn't hurt, that's for sure. So teacher's guides and our ongoing conversations with educators have led to other projects.
This one came to us via Alex Bantul, who had been writing teacher's guides and "Orca Soundings." So this is called text-to-reader. It's a reading programme for middle school teachers. Each issue contains book excerpts with exercises to go with them. So when Alex proposed the project, it once again was in line with what we were hearing from teachers, they were short on time to plan their classes and they were expected to provide different text types on the same subject. So they were expected to find resources that were graphic novels and nonfiction and fiction, all with a unifying theme so that is what text-to-reader is really.
So we chose the middle school market for a number of reasons. First of all, at the middle school level, we could offer a broad range of content. And we have a lot of content for that age, both hi-lo and what we call at-level titles. Also, middle school is a key time for literacy development.
And finally, probably most importantly, we knew that in the US, at least, middle schools had budgets with allotments for digital resources. So text-to-reader, or T2R, is just a PDF. It's prettier and more detailed than the teacher's guides and the delivery model is different. T2R is offered online as an annual subscription. When a teacher purchases a year subscription, they receive access to all of our past content as well as all the new issues that come out during the year that they are subscribed and there's no DRM. So teachers can buy a subscription, log on. And if they want, they can just download four years worth of content onto their devices, we let them.
So initially, we offered text-to-reader on a Drupal site. But there were technical limitations. And we had all of this content that was piling up teacher's guides and various other resource materials. We had a good e-commerce site for our books that operated in US and Canadian funds. And we sold the Adobe DRM ebooks on our website as well. And we had pages for the downloading of teacher's guides. But we were looking for something that could do all of this in one place. We're still looking for that. But in the meantime, we've developed a site with a company called Tizra.
So Tizra has a lot of flexibility, free and paid material can be offered together. And there are great bundling options. We also have the ability to include subscriber content. So this is the homepage of the site that we have with Tizra. And if any of you wanna visit the site, the easiest way to get there is actually to go to www.orcabook.com and select the teacher resource button on the bottom right there. Or you can enter reachingreluctantreaders.com or text2reader.com. So this is our students section. And our students section provides some general resources for students, but its main purpose is to host additional material that students can use when they're working on texture reader assignments. Everything here is free.
And here you can see, there's a mix...I don't know if you can read the blue smudge there, says free. So here you can see the mix of free and paid content for teachers. So one of those sections under for the classroom is Reader's Theater, which is another thing we'd been asked for for years. So when Alex came to us with this idea to do text-to-reader, she said she wanted to include Reader's Theater in it, and we were totally behind that idea.
So we've since pulled the scripts out of text-to-reader out of the back issues and we sell them on the site as small collections and individual scripts. This is not the only way we repurpose content. We also sell individual text-to-reader issues based on theme. So here is the text-to-reader portion of the site. Please note that any visitor to the site sees this, they can view the topics in each issue and even look at a table of contents. But then once they try to get into the content, they get this, which is an invitation to buy text-to-reader.
We do also offer one student worksheet for free with every issue of text-to-reader. And that worksheet can be used in isolation. You don't need to buy text-to-reader to use that worksheet. And we figured by offering this little piece of value for free, we're encouraging people to buy.
So text-to-reader is in its fourth year. And it's worked for us on many levels, we get direct revenue from the subscription sales, we also get additional content we can parcel out, and it functions as a marketing tool since the excerpts we use are from our books and those of our partner publishers. It also has provided us with great opportunities to engage with teachers.
So now's the time for me to get back to that promise subject of other means of engagement with teachers. First of all, I will tell you that the reason I'm not discussing social media engagement is because teachers are pretty quiet in that space. I wrote a blog post about that on the book net website that goes into this in a little more detail.
So around 2004, we started collecting email addresses at conferences. And today, we use Constant Contact to send email newsletters on a regular basis to a list of about 44,000 contacts, over 15,000 of those are Canadian educators and over 20,000 are US educators. Our newsletter has a fun and friendly tone and includes news items about our books, new publications, reviews, awards. And we usually have some kind of freebie. We give away a lot of ebook and audiobook downloads. Those cost us nothing to provide and teachers love free stuff. So that's a great way to reach out to teachers. But how do you get them to engage with you?
Hands down, this always gets the best response. Sometimes it's not what you wanna hear, but they respond. So a couple of examples. When it came time to plan the 2014, 2015 T2R year, we wanted to make a few changes to the programme. And we wanted to know what teachers thought about our ideas. Now, we had a dedicated text to read our email list, but we wanted a wider range of responses. So in one of our newsletters, we included a link to a survey. We asked specific questions about the changes we were considering. And we asked open-ended questions about what they wanted. We got some thoughtful responses. We use them in planning the next year of text-to-reader. And here's where it gets kind of interesting. We also sold subscriptions to teachers who had previously been unaware of the offering.
Now, we'd advertise text-to-reader to these teachers over and over again, teachers on the same list. But it wasn't until they were asked their opinion that they really looked at it and realized it was something they wanted. The survey results were also shared with the whole Orca team, and the knowledge we gained has gone into all sorts of decisions since then.
In addition, we asked teachers if they would like to participate in a focus group. And we now have a 50-teacher focus group that we can contact pretty much anytime and ask questions of. So one of the things that the Tizra site doesn't do is send email alerts for expiring subscriptions or alert subscribers to new content on the site.
For the first couple of years, we sent professional-looking Constant Contact emails to anyone who had a subscription expiring soon and to update them about monthly content. We had only about a 40% renewal rate, which was not pleasing. We decided to change our approach a little. We started sending individual emails. And we'd ask them what they thought about the programme. So we got some great feedback, including that we learned that teachers were buying the subscription, and then never using it despite the fact we were emailing them once a month with this pretty looking email saying, "Hey, there's new content." They still weren't looking at it.
So we started sending teachers emails about a month or two after purchase date. Again, not through the email service. In this email, we reminded teachers of some of T2R's features, and we asked their opinion about the programme. Since we made these two changes and how we email teachers, we're now seeing a 75% renewal rate. And we get a regular flow of useful feedback. So that feedback has contributed to us developing this.
So our US customers have asked for common core resources. Common core is a huge topic. If you wanna sell to teachers in the US, it's in your best interest to familiarize yourself with common core. So remember, I talked about teachers who are going out promoting the "Soundings," we didn't know who they were. One of them was Kate Schrodinger, who has... So she started as a fan. And she has since written teacher's guides for us. And now she's written this common core reading programme. So we have our fans actually developing content for us.
So I'd like to talk briefly because it's tech forum about ebooks and teachers. Because teachers are our biggest market, we've paid careful attention to what they have to say about ebooks. And this is definitely an area where they have been very generous in letting us know their dislikes. Teachers are under a lot of pressure to provide digital resources. And they don't have a lot of time to research the multitude of options. They want ebooks to be affordable and easy. To make things easy for them, we try to ensure that our ebooks are going to be available through their preferred channel. So we work with any reseller we can.
On our website, you have direct ebook sales, which they hate, actually, they're Adobe DRM and teachers hate those. They were actually an initial point of contact for us with teachers about ebooks. And we learned a lot by putting them out there and having teachers really hate them. So and we also have buy buttons for all of the major resellers.
So with ebooks and DRM, teachers are a little tricky. They have let's say, 30 students in a class, and when they buy an ebook, they want that book to be available to every student in the classroom, or they want to be able to print it out and photocopy it. We learned this by selling Adobe DRM D books. So obviously, we can afford to sell them DRM free ebooks, it would be nice, but we simply couldn't afford the loss in sales, or the loss of the trust from our authors.
So after years of trial and error, we found what we thought was the best platform to sell digital subscriptions. The easiest way to describe our digital subscriptions is to say that they're like overdrive on steroids. They're multi-user access, students can read books instantly using the online reader or they can download them to their own device. Remember those images of physical book collections I showed you a few slides back? Well, that's how we sell digital subscriptions as well. We have what we call complete collections with those teachers get every available title in a series. So for example, the "Orca Currents" plus free new releases for the duration of their subscription.
We can build custom collections quite easily on the platform. So we offer custom collections. And we sell those at the school and the district level. So this is what a patron or student will see when they log in. The collections are along the top there. Once they select a book, they have the option to read online or download. We've done quite well with digital subscriptions. And incidentally, when we changed our approach with text-to-reader, with those renewal procedures, it was because of digital subscriptions.
So until about a year and a half ago, I was doing all of the customer support for the digital subscriptions. And I was sending personal emails about a month after they purchased them to make sure that they were having no difficulties with them. And I was sending them personal emails when their subscription was due to expire and I had really good renewal rate. So when I looked at text-to-reader and saw what was going on there, I thought, "Well,, let's just see if using the digital subscription method works." And it did so that was great.
So I've used a lot of historical information so far. And that's because the "Orca Soundings" and "Orca Currents" is the origin of our engagement with the influencers who helped us to grow. That staff of five that attended that first meeting is now a staff of 17, plus three more who work in our US warehouse. But I do have a recent example to share as well.
This was a series that was published in 2012 called "Seven". So this is another project that was initiated by an author. Eric Walters approached us with the idea of seven connected novels by seven different authors that will be published simultaneously. And again, the idea was brought to us at a staff meeting. The staff response to this project was a little along the lines of, "You want us to do what?" across all departments. But even in that first meeting, it was evident that there was a willingness to rise to the occasion. The idea was good, we all saw that. But these books were a design challenge, an editorial challenge a marketing challenge, how did you make the books look the same and yet unique? How strongly did we wanna brand them as a series? Would we suggest a reading order? And then there was the fact that we had to coordinate all marketing and editorial efforts with seven authors. There were many meetings.
Wow, I didn't really think that would get that much of a laugh. That's great. There were many meetings and there was much lively debate. The series got a dedicated website. And the URL was on all of our marketing material. And it got a book trailer, which I'm not gonna play for you. And it's not there now. But we had a cool little countdown widget to generate excitement. And there was a signup form to become seven VIP, which was, of course, our clever way to capture email. We were engaged. We basically lived and breathed "Seven" for most of 2012.
The results? Our first print runs of the titles were sold out almost before they arrived in our warehouse and sales have been steady ever since. What's really interesting, though, is the market breakdown of sales. We really wanted this series to be successful in the trade market. We had specials for retailers, and we went big on social media. And we were quite successful with that.
So here, you've got the orange and the lighter blue, the light blue is Indigo and Amazon. So it's what we call Canadian chain. And the orange, which looks kind of red actually is Canadian independence. So between those two groups, retail was about 40% of sales overall. Canadian retail was 40% of sales overall. Canadian wholesale was at 33%. That's that other big chunk of darker blue. But the majority of these wholesalers actually sell to schools. We no longer sell directly into the classroom in Canada that's taken care of by Nelson, so they would be in those numbers.
So when you factor that in the Canadian educational market makes up about 38% of overall sales. And the US educational market came in at 6%. And then we know from our conversations with retailers that a lot of their sales were to teachers. So despite the fact that our focus was trade, teachers remain our biggest buyers. As an aside, "Seven" is really unusual for us in that Canadian sales outperform US sales. Typically US sales are stronger or at least equal.
So what do all these things have in common? A high level of engagement, or hi-lo fiction, text-to-reader and seven all started with an engaged author. These authors brought their ideas to Orca because they knew we would give them serious consideration. And our staff participated in a meaningful way from the beginning. And we engaged with our data.
The initiatives that we choose to build upon, we select after we've seen data indicating that our efforts were successful. We're responsive to customers adapting our list to meet their needs. And they, in turn, promote our books for us and continue to give us useful feedback and relevant content. So engagement isn't something you make your customers or your staff do, engagement is a conversation one we hope to continue to have for a long time.
So publishers, here's my suggestion to you. Go look at your data. Find your best sellers in the last three years or maybe find some weird bump in sales, something that you can connect to a single market, identify that market and research them. Find out what other things they like, find out where they are, and go hang out and make new friends. Find out what they're looking for, produce it and then keep the conversation going.
Zalina: Next week, we've got MJ Delia sharing the nine startup strategies you should be using now. If you want to learn more about what we do, you can find us at booknetcanada.ca. Thanks to Melanie for speaking at Tech Forum, and to everyone who attended or helped put it together. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada book fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
