October 19 , 2017

Imprint strategy

We've received a lot of positive feedback and creative ideas from many of you regarding our new imprints. So far this transition has gone very well. But, there is so much more to do.
Step One of our imprint implementation was to separate our books by imprints on our e-commerce site. This has been completed. If you are curious, have a look at http://www.sunburypressstore.com/IMPRINTS_c161.htm
Step Two was to produce monthly bestseller lists for each imprint. This has been completed and has provided new energy for many of our fiction books. Suddenly, we have more than one best-selling book. It gives us more to talk about. If you have not seen the lists yet, they have been posted on our blog:
We also have a sales baseline for each imprint to compare to as we roll out the strategy. Following are the imprints from strongest to weakest:
Imprint % of Titles Sold % of Sales$ Ratio $/Title
Sunbury Press 52.67 70.27 133.42%
Milford House Press 24.43 19.13 78.31%
Brown Posey Press 10.69 6.1 57.06%
Hellbender Books 6.1 3.38 55.41%
Ars Metaphysica 4.58 1.02 22.27%
Speckled Egg Press
1.53
0.1 6.54%
Nearly three-quarters of our titles sold and nearly 90% of our sales dollars come from our two top imprints -- Sunbury Press and Milford House. Sunbury Press's titles typically sell 33% more than the average book company-wide. Milford House's fiction sells at 78% of the average book. This again confirms our sales bias towards nonfiction. In other words, the typical NF book returns almost twice as much in sales as a typical fiction book. (This is not unique to our press -- it is true within the publishing marketplace.)
The bottom four categories are most interesting and have the most upside. These are smaller categories that have been peeled off from the behemoths and appear to be weak and unsuccessful. This is because they have not been differentiated in the past. Now that they are parked in their own category, we should begin to see a leveling effect. I would expect Brown Posey and Hellbender to approach Milford House levels in ratio while Ars Metaphysica trends towards Sunbury Press. Speckled Egg barely has a pulse and needs some new titles to get moving again.
Look for some other activities regarding imprints in the coming months:
1) Cross-marketing with other books in the imprint -- at Amazon and within the books themselves.
2) An imprint promotion plan where we run regular specials in each imprint.
3) (Eventually) development of more imprint-specific web page design within the e-commerce site.
4) A newsletter for each imprint sent to customers who buy within the categories.
There are many other ideas we will try. It should be a lot of fun!