After spending millions of dollars training a generation NOT
to pay for content, the app industry has discovered that it really needs to understand (and adapt to)
its audience if it wants to get any more money from them. In less than six
years, a global media sector has been turned on its head – pivoting from Paid
to Free, in one irreversible step.
Advertising
It might start simply – a banner ad across the bottom of
your Kindle screen, plus a few seconds of streaming video ads, every other
chapter. At first, these ads would be fairly generic, but after a while you'd start
to notice things. You're enjoying an Inspector Morse novel and the banner ads
just happen to include one for London Pride beer and another for a new
recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle. You might also find that ads were being
delayed, so they'd be less obvious. After all, if you read The Silence Of The
Lambs, it's reasonable to expect a few ads for L`Air du Temps… but not today.
From midway through any novel, eerily accurate
recommendations for other books would start popping up. Reading on, the ad
frequency would steadily increase as you approached the pivotal chapters,
culminating in a blizzard of banners and a timely [Pay to Remove Ads] button.
In-Book Purchases
(IBP)
Removing Ads has always been a popular in-app purchase and
its applicability to all kinds of content ensures its inclusion here. But what
else might readers pay for?
Paywalls certainly aren't new – and you could argue that
Amazon's "Try a sample" button is effectively just that: giving a few
pages for free followed by the option to purchase the rest. But imagine if the
book's publisher could set multiple paywalls, wherever they wanted in the text. Rather than appearing after an arbitrary
number of pages, the paywalls would be exquisitely placed at twists and
cliff-hangers, creating the strongest possible emotional need in the audience
before asking them for their money.
If the above seems a bit… well, manipulative, then how about a Pay Per Chapter (PPC) model instead?
Readers would be able to audition new books and, effectively, pay an amount
commensurate with their enjoyment. If they finish the book, they pay full price;
if they can't get into the story, they pay a tiny fraction.
Of course, this approach relies on the book chiming with as many
readers as possible. Are there perhaps ways to broaden a book's appeal?
Adaptive Content
Again, it could begin with something simple. You might think
it's just a coincidence that it's raining outside while you read the opening chapter
with the hero trudging through a sudden downpour… but is it? Context sensitive
narrative might easily cross-reference the Kindle's location with weather
services, modifying the displayed text to build resonance between the reader
and the protagonist. But that's not the only thing that could adapt.
If a book contained multiple versions of the text, then
subtle cues (quietly mined from social data) could shift the protagonist's age,
gender, religion or ethnicity, to be more compatible with that of the reader.
Authors and editors could watch the behaviour of early
readers – identifying where people seemed to lose interest and stop reading.
The problem chapters could be tweaked or replaced, with updated versions of the
book downloaded automatically. But why stop there?
Using a process called A/B Testing, it's possible to split
an audience and measure how each segment responds to something. So at any given
time, 10% of readers reading the same
book might be presented with a slightly different plot – and whichever
version showed the highest completion ratio, or received the best reviews,
would become the new "standard edition" of the book.
Social Reach
Last but not least, it's worth considering how a book's
social reach might be extended through digital techniques. There was a time
when audiences went looking for content but now, increasingly, content has to
go looking for an audience. We're seeing more and more innovative methods of
publicising titles and it's not hard to predict a time when the amount you pay
for a book could be reduced by the number of friends you tell about it. After
all, everyone knows the importance of studying the algorithms that drive the
digital stores and recommendation pages. But app developers also know that
people are busy, that people are forgetful. So perhaps ebooks will start reaching
out to readers if they've been gone for a while – a friendly nudge via
push-notifications or social media, complete with a one-page reminder of the
story so far. Re-engaging the audience is so important… especially if there's a
Pay Per Chapter model on the horizon.
Thankfully, the fact that you can do something doesn't always mean that you should do it. True, the above ideas are all based on real
techniques from the apps business, but there's no reason to assume that this is
the future for ebooks. Although, now that I think about it, the Pay Per Chapter
approach might just work, especially for a series crime author like myself.
Perhaps even digital clouds have silver linings.
