![]() ![]() I have deep respect for what publishers do, but it’s not my background. What specific kind of experience are you bringing to this space?Īn appreciation for the consumer. You’re coming to Open Road from Everyday Health, and then before that, from Disney. We’ll spend a lot of time and energy and cash on growing our audience of consumers, because that owned audience really de-risks the business for us. We had to reorganize to make sure we could do that. From August to December, we took on a thousand books per month. Pardon the expression, but what’s down the road for Open Road?Ģ018 was to fine tune our Ignition product, which really didn’t begin until towards the end of the second quarter. We’re much faster and more flexible, more facile. But you can come to us and say there’s a reason why we want to advertise this book today and we can advertise it for you. Who do you see as your competitors in this space? Those 30 partners have seen, on average, an increase just shy of 3X. We’ve done better with some other publishers. ![]() We’ve been able to increase Grove Atlantic’s sales on their books by 300%. We’ll put it on Facebook, we’ll advertise on Google. We put it in front of the right audience. We take the book, we redo the metadata, we redo the straplines, we redo the descriptive copy. Grove Atlantic Morgan Entrekin, for example, is super happy with what we’re doing. We have 30 publishers who are working with us to one degree or another. Which publishers are working with Open Road?Įverybody. If you seem to enjoy Amish romance, we will put more Amish romance in front of you, but also maybe experiment by putting narrative historical nonfiction in front of you, because we’ve noticed that people who like Amish romance also happen to like narrative historical nonfiction. We will watch your open and close rates a little bit and we’ll watch what you’re clicking on. If you come in and you sign up for a newsletter, there’s an opportunity for you to tick off those things that you’re specifically interested in. How are you driving discoverability and matching readers to the kinds of books they want to read? Whether they’re men or women, rich or poor, suburban or urban. Mostly what we’re looking for are people who love books. It way over-indexes for household income and education. Our audience is primarily female and over the age of 40. Yes, through adjacency, but we’re not too concerned about that. Are you looking to reach younger readers? About 50% of them are active book buyers or subscribe to our newsletters, and another 50% are people who are coming in and out of the websites and just enjoying the content we have there.Ībout 75% of your subscribers are ages 45 and up. We have approximately two to two and a half million people who love books who are coming to us routinely. Is your audience mostly subscription-based? it will continue to be in data, because every decision we make here is backed by data. As we go forward, our investments will continue to be in tech, because that’s how we’re able to scale. Our investment over that period of time and going forward has been putting together a world class data team, putting together a really great and very productive tech team and building an audience. PAUL SLAVIN: We’ve almost doubled revenue in the last two and a half years. Slavin said Open Road is profitable, with sustained revenue growth over the last three years, and he expects growth next year of at least 35%.ĪdExchanger spoke with Slavin about targeting titles to readers, growing sales and people who love books.ĪdExchanger: How are you planning to reinvest your growing revenue? “To you or me,” he said, “a book that came out 20 years ago on a subject that I’m interested in is a new book.” But Slavin questions the value of even making that distinction. Today, Open Road focuses on connecting consumers with a publisher’s backlist titles, which are older books that have been around for a while, instead of more recently released titles. While Open Road built its business on the strength of that digital catalog, it soon realized the value of its technology-driven marketing engine, called Ignition, and data analysts, which could present to consumers the content they’d want to buy. “ and a team put together a really strong catalog of books which became the wellspring of Open Road, and that catalog is something we still possess.” “When we put a book in front of somebody, when we market that book, you will see it grow,” said Slavin, who became chief exec in 2016. Slavin is the CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, a digital marketing company founded in 2009 by HarperCollins global CEO Jane Friedman. Don’t tell Paul Slavin that book sales are stagnant. ![]()
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