“When we were offered BookSnacking it answered our prayers, since there was a gap in our ability to promote the available titles.”
Philip Davies, Director of Information and Promotion, Welsh Books Council
Background
The Welsh Books Council is a national body, funded by Welsh Government, which provides a focus for the publishing industry in Wales. It provides a number of specialist services (in the fields of editing, design, marketing and distribution) with a view to improving standards of book production and publication in both Welsh and English. It also distributes grants to publishers. The Books Council actively promotes reading and literacy in Wales.
The WBC have previously worked with YUDU on app projects, for both magazine publishers and book publishers. Recently, they have developed a new app, which offers WBC affiliated members access to YUDU Publisher to publish content directly into the app themselves.
The challenge
As WBC rolled out their app strategies, they realised that they required a more effective method of marketing and promoting the books inside the apps. More specifically, a tool that would allow them to publish and distribute snippets or samples of their library of illustrated children’s books to readers (mostly parents and children in this case) easily and effectively, thereby increasing discoverability.
Most importantly this had to be accessible on all devices, it couldn’t alienate any potential group of readers. It also had to be easily shareable for WBC staff and member pubishers.
The Solution
YUDU’s BookSnacking solution was an ideal fit to meet the WBC’s new requirements for browser-based content.
BookSnacking is a marketing and promotional tool for book publishers, allowing easy publishing to the browser from a PDF. The content can be distributed via a single link, viewable on all devices.
This was ideal for the WBC as it allowed them to push their published content out through social media channels, with full assurance that the sample content from the book would display regardless of the device used to access the link.
The WBC were also able to restrict the exact number of pages that readers were allowed to view before being prompted to input login credentials, underscoring BookSnacking’s usefulness as a tool for distributing samples of content. The target readership, parents, can then go on to purchase books for their children, if they feel the content is appropriate. These samples are now linked to the titles in the app through a “see inside” button within each title on the app and the BookSnacking samples then linked back to the app with a “purchase now” call to action at the end.