• A lot of people talk about taking the power of “community” and leveraging that into a publishing brand, but few do it.
• Eoin Purcell of Dublin, Ireland discusses his achievements in launching “The Irish Story,” a community web site about Irish History and publishing John Dorney’s The Story of the Easter Rising 1916.
Editorial by Eoin Purcell
Eoin Purcell
DUBLIN: This is the story of trying to build a community of interested readers, in a small niche, with little or no money. It’s not a fairy tale, but it’s not a horror story either.
I’ve often talked about the need for publishers to foster community and to build attention through their content. I wanted to the test the theory I’ve discussed for some time and to show that for a small publisher, a smart community strategy could be effective and even profitable. The secondary goals were practical wishes for the project. I wanted to create attention. I wanted to recruit community leaders. I wanted to sell books (in some form).
Having decided on the project, I had to select a niche to build my community in. I’ve commissioned Irish history since I first became involved in publishing, so it seemed a natural fit, and in October 2009, I commissioned five short histories on key events in Irish history and set about building a community in the space called “The Irish Story.”
How did I get on?
I launched in early 2010. The site was built on WordPress and I avoided anything with an expense attached, using off-the-shelf plugins and themes with only the barest of HTML/PHP/CSS coding required. The result has been, I think, an easily navigated site that displays the content relatively well.
The site itself has proved modestly successful. Several of my authors and their colleagues have submitted content, other have challenged articles and agreed while several academics have taken part in audio podcasts and submitted book reviews.
The overall traffic puts The Irish Story at about one third the traffic of the established Irish History magazine’s website, HistoryIreland.com. We are already rivaling several established Irish history publishers. Our search traffic is good because although we don’t rank highly yet for general terms like Irish History, we score very well for specific search like “Irish civil war” and “Irish war of independence.”
The five books have now been delivered and the first, The Story Of The Easter Rising, 1916 by John Dorney, has been published in a variety of formats –- from PDF to POD -– with the others to follow in the next month or so. Sales have been slow, but not totally disappointing, especially in directly downloaded PDFs which are, in any case, the most profitable form for The Irish Story. So money making, of the three is the least advanced.
What do I know now, that I didn’t know then?
The first thing I learned about building communities is that many of them already exist. Most of them are simple sites that allow discussion and little else. One, a subset of the huge Irish message board actually dominates the discussion of Irish history online.
The second obstacle to the site’s progress is the sheer mass of content online from early web pioneers. Sites that have been around for over a decade featuring great content (much of it without comment threads or other social networking enabled) dominate the search listings, unless you target specific search terms, as TheIrishStory.com has been doing.
Thirdly, and I feel most importantly, TheIrishStory.com suffers by only offering digital products and print on demand products.
Which leaves us where?
My experiment is working. That gives me some comfort, but the overall success is hard to show conclusively. But smaller established publishers should take two important points on board. First, where they have for some time been publishing into a niche, they have pre-existing content that provides value and which can be used to build the core of a content led community. The second is that they already possess community leaders in their authors, making two of the most critical stages less of an issue for them.
If TheIrishStory.com can start a community with no content, no authors, no reputation and no readers, and grow it to a position where it has a solid base, some sales, a decent set of contributors and authors and perhaps some of the best freely accessible content (some bias here I’ll admit) on Irish History, all at little cost, what’s stopping established small publishers doing the same in their niche?
DISCUSS: How Can New Niche Micropublishers Compete with Large Established Publishers?
7 Comments
Interesting – and to take this one step further – what about authors themselves who set up online communities? This is what I’ve done for readers and fans of my Stonewylde Series. Initially I set up a basic community site to cope with the many people who contacted me and wanted to discuss my books and the green, ecological and spiritual issues which feature so strongly in the series. I’d found myself unable to keep up with all the correspondence, and many people were bringing up the same points over and over again.
The first online community I started was, after a slightly slow start, successful. I soon realised that once members had discussed Stonewylde for a while, they wanted to move on to other discussions. Eventually we had to move sites to a much larger one with better functionality. People post photos and videos, create blogs, customise their profiles, start new discussions, send private messages, post events, etc. It became a real community and true friendships (and a couple of romances!) have been formed.
Today we have over 700 members. Many of them meet up in little local pockets and we’ve had a couple of large gatherings too, with people actually travelling from Europe to join in. It’s strange meeting people when you only know them by their avatar! This has achieved more than I’d ever dreamed of, creating a rock solid fan base who all root for me, spread the word about Stonewylde and are very keen for publication of the fourth book in the series.
So, online communities aren’t just tools for publishers but authors too. I’m so glad I did this and although it takes about half an hour a day to maintain (I do try to visit daily) it’s more than worth it in terms of building a fan base and retaining reader loyalty.
No reason at all why authors can’t do this for themselves. The key barrier is content and a sensible strategy, but from the sounds of it, you have that sorted!
Eoin
As a self-published author I did not establish a community on my own site because I already belong to many others out of necessity. Recently I joined two more, joined only groups devoted to my niche market, and posted previews of my books on some free sharing sites just to drive traffic to my site. This costs me nothing also. But one of the problems with establishing a community is that it is a time suck when you are trying to finish a book. My latest is still not finished and I started writing it in 2008, so you can imagine my chagrin when I must keep track of all the messages, comments back and so forth online, and also add to the pile to grow sales. So I have to resign myself to the fact that marketing in this way takes up about 80% of my writing time, and that each book will probably take longer to write for the future. I am up to 11, by the way, so you see the pickle I am in.
why is having your content only digital and pod a problem. incidently, i went to the website trying to find a way to ask this question and couldn’t find a contact us section. so, not so navigable.
Hello Lisa,
Sorry you didn’t find the site navigable, I’ll remedy that this evening and make sure the contact section is clearly visible, thanks for the feedback.
The main issue with the POD and digital i simply that the Irish ebook/digital market is not yet very large. That means a greater emphasis is placed on print by authors, readers and media alike so digital/pod only companies don’t get as much attention. It’s not insurmountable, but it presents issues locally.
All the best,
Eoin
Theresa,
You’re spot on. It’s not necessary to actually build or curate a community. Being part of one is almost as important and valuable!
Eoin
@Lisa
Following up on your feedback I’ve recast the home page as a home & contact page (http://www.theirishstory.com/home/), please don’t hesitate to get in touch with queries, comments, complaints and demands!
All the best,
Eoin