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Tom Peters’ The Brand Called You article in Fact Company is spectacularly relevant to everyone in ebooks. His ending sums it up really well -

It’s this simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You. Except this: Start today. Or else.

Branding and Relationships are really important for ebooks because the whole Publishing Industry is going through a transformation -

During this transformation a lot of the brands people used to buy from will disappear.

While lots of companies are trying to sell eReaders and eBooks, very few of them seem to be aware that actual people with emotions and feelings will be buying these books.

Companies that survive (perhaps Amazon) and new companies that thrive (perhaps Google) are not guaranteed to take over all of Branding and relationships. In fact, at some level, they aren’t prepared for the sheer amount of personal connection involved.

Here is where a big opportunity arises.

First, let’s look at some fundamentals.

What happens when people buy a particular brand they know/like/love?

There are lots of ways to describe what happens when customers choose to buy from a particular company -

1. Brand Awareness - They know/recognize you.
2. Trust - Customers trust that a particular company will only sell quality products and provide good value for money.
3. Relationship - Customers feel an attachment to a company and a de-facto relationship.
4. Committment and Consistency – The more a customer buys from one company the stronger the committment. That means following purchases are more likely to be from the same company.
5. Shortcut Building – It’s easy to go with what you already know. You don’t have to do 500 things like decide whether the company can be trusted, enter credit card information, and enter your mailing address.

These are all fancy ways of saying – If a customer knows and trusts you, it makes it likelier (all other things being equal or close) that the customer will choose you.

This isn’t just a vague concept. Marketing speak makes it seem that way.

Branding and Trust have very strong underlying psychological explanations.

Trust is Perhaps as Important as Product.

We obviously have to have a quality product to satisfy and possibly even delight customers.

However, customers will choose us only if they are aware of us and trust us (or have no other option).

While it is true that large, nimble online companies will tend to beat slow, inefficient local bookstores, it’s the physical constraints of local bookstores that are killing them - their personal touch is still an advantage.

This is where the twist comes in.

1. Branding and Relationships can be scaled.
2. The cost for taking care of customers can be cut – without sacrificing quality, and often times by increasing it.
3. Gary Vaynerchuk did this with wine. Michael Arrington did this with tech news.
4. Lots of bloggers are doing this in lots of areas.

The part that’s missing is realizing that once you have that relationship with customers and their trust – You have the most important part.

The Big Opportunity is creating Customer Relationships

In particular – the biggest opportunity is to create points of trust and build relationships.

Provide value and a top-notch product and you can become the next biggest brand in ebooks after Amazon and Google.

That brand will be worth billions – and your name might be written all over it.

It’s not only possible – it’s inevitable.

It’s going to happen and since hardly anyone else is doing it, you just have to show up.  

• A great local bookstore owner can help a thousand people a month. The best book review blogger will be helping millions.  
• A great distributor/wholesaler agent can build dozens of relationships with authors. Mark Coker of SmashWords can build great relationships with tens of thousands of independent authors.
• The best eBook and eReader blogs will have the trust of millions of ebook readers.  
• A great librarian can change a city’s reading habits. Online, she could change a country’s. 
• A literary agent superstar could unveil 2-3 star writers a year. With the right tools they could unveil 10 online, or perhaps create a platform that helps ALL writers.

 5 people could form a bigger brand than anyone imagines

Combine these 5 people into a technologically well thought out alliance and suddenly you guide the flow of Publishing -

1. The best known literary agent.  
2. An online publishing platform or the foremost online publishing guru. 
3. The best book reviewer. 
4. The best eBook industry blogger.
5. A top-notch, Internet aware author (like Coelho).

They would be guiding people with -

• What eBooks to buy.
• Where to buy eBooks.
• Where to sell ebooks.
• How to publish. 
• What’s worth following.
• What’s news. 
• Customer Issues.
• Direction for the industry. 

This might seem like forming the equivalent of a Top 6 Publisher, and it is.

This 5 person alliance would need just a skeletal support staff. They would become the biggest brand in Publishing. They could eventually become the single biggest stream for sale of ebooks.  

Will 1 Person Mega Brands and 4-5 People Mega Alliances happen? 

Yes for the former. Perhaps for the latter.

The Internet tends to magnify success - the best in a field are found by everyone. They then wield huge amounts of influence and can provide value to millions and millions of people.

A lot of authors, literary agents, publishers don’t realize the opportunities -

• The fact that you can go straight to customers.
• The fact that you can write once and reach millions of people.
• That you can build a thousand relationships in a few days (perhaps even in a few minutes).
• That everything accelerates – the rich do get richer.
• That you can scale every aspect and reduce costs along every dimension.

Take TeleRead and MobileRead – those two sites account for over a million people a month. Not just people – some of the most interested and committed readers.

They could turn an author into a success just by promoting his work (with no marketing cost). Only Amazon can match that.

Opportunities like these exist in every nook and cranny of eBooks.

Filed under: publishing Tagged: | future of books, future of publishing