1. One Main Message. A chinese proverb goes: “A man who chases two rabbits catches none”. Likewise, try to have only one message in each marketing effort, to ensure that you get just that.
2. Distinction. We are all busy, so to stop us in our tracks it takes something extra. The approach much be distinctive in order to stand out and get some attention.
3. Catching headline. Your headline or subject must make you want to read more.
4. Focus on “them”. No one cares about what you offer unless it’s relevant for them. Don’t spend 99% of your message on what you have. Instead turn it around and angel it so that the prospect feels like they are the center. Explain more about why they should reach / buy than what they get. Unfold a story that tells the prospect the benefits they get.
5. Call to action. Do not forget to emphasize what it is you want the reader to do. The more clear and simple the better. This should be 100% aligned with the “one message” mentioned above.

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Reasons to use Trello as a publisher

1. Freedom of placement. We have people in different locations and countries and some working from home some days etc. and therefore the paper archive had it’s limitations.
2. It’s free. We choose Trello for our online system, since it’s free part was important in the beginning, so we could test without costs.
3. Easy-to-use has proven to be more important than first anticipated, since we constantly need to involve new people (and even though they are ‘new’, doesn’t mean they are young and easy adapters).
4. Easy-on-the-eyes sounds like a superficial thing, but it turns out that many archive/update tasks will not be carried out, since we are busy and will rather prioritize something more rewarding. So when the system is easy-on-the-eyes (or fun) it dramatically helps people to do it. Just placing a check mark in a box is fun — more fun than writing ‘ok’ somewhere in an Excel spread sheet field no one else sees. There’s a whole science on motivational incentives / behavior called gamification.

How Trello works

Trello consists of boards. A board is a project – or a department. The basis layout is 3 lists (columns): ToDo, Doing and Done. Then a task is created as a card in the ToDo list and when started, it’s moved to the ‘doing-list’ and then to the ‘done-list’. Easy to understand. Each member will have a profile picture that can be placed on a card, to indicate that they have something to do here.  Besides the involved members, under each card you can have descriptions, check lists, attached files and much more.

How we use Trello at Scandinavia

To begin with, we just choose an area – product development – and created a board for that. When we started listing all the projects we had going on – and ideas in our heads/notepads, we were quite surprised. There was a lot. Even though we can’t go into all projects at once, it’s still nice to get the ideas out of your head and into a system where they can be tested and either grow or be properly terminated.

Here is the current board “Product development” where card are moved through different stages from idea to printing.

Hope you will also find Trello helpful.

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Almost opposite of regular book sales, the add-on enthusiast looks for products with a lot of parts – like a book series with a lot of titles. This is due to the fact that once the sales gets rolling, you want to reap as much and as long as you can. The marketing needed to launch a 4 volume book series and a 50 volume is almost the same, but with the latter, the sales should be higher.

Photo courtesy of ©photl.com/Studio Cl Art

Let’s have a look at some real life examples of add-on campaign and what was done to make it happen.

3-step campaign to sell 2,7 mill. books

The Brazilian magasine house Abril took in The 30-volume Adventure Story Bible and launched it through a huge 3-step campaign via the kiosks and newsletter stands. The first volume was printed and distributed in nothing less than 200.000 copies.

Below you can see the estimated sales of the 30 different books in the series.

So, how did they do this? Well, the overall strategy included 3 steps:

Step 1. Primary target – BtC at full price

The main sales channel was to sell single books to private people through kiosks and newspaper stands. These would be published 2 at a time with one month intervals for 15 months. First volume in the series was free, if you bought vol. 2 and 3. Those who took the offer would therefore already have 3 books in the series and therefore be more likely to continue buying until the end.

Although many buyers stopped buying after the first 1-4 volumes (where some kind of special offer was made), a lot wanted the whole set, once they got started. This tendency was enforced by several intentional and product specific elements:

1. All 30 volumes are needed to complete the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelations. Had it been individual stand-alone stories like a series of fairytales, it would not have had the same effect.
2. On the spine of the books, part of a picture is printed, so that when all 30 books are placed together, the whole picture is revealed. This also appeals to most of us as a trigger to get the complete set. After all, we might feel incomplete ourselves, if we don’t finish what we started.

Step 2. Secondary target – BtB at discounted price

After publishing and distributing all 30 books a few at a time, they were gathered in sets with one of each of the 30 books. These were then offered wholesale to businesses, ministries and publishing houses at a discounted price. Despite forecasting the demand and printing different quantity of the different volumes, they had more stock of some books than others, so a little reprinting was done, in order to gather as many complete sets as possible.

When all 30 volumes was published, a box was made to sell the complete set and provide some protection to the now heavy product.

Step 3. Clearance – BtC at discounted price

The final step was selling complete sets to private customers at a discounted price. This was done through Avon – a huge door-to-door network in Brazil.

At the end, the remaining books was destroyed and reports showed a stunning conclusion: More than 2,7 million books was sold in this series. The truth is that Abril had hoped to sell even more books than they did – and faster, so to begin with they did not look at this as a down right success. Later on though, when they looked back, they admitted that their expectations had just been too high, but that it was in fact a very good campaign, bringing in a lot of money and new customers.

Abril also mentioned that branding themselves together with a bible product gave them a good reputation, which was also a thing to consider.

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An Add-on is an item, like a DVD or book, that is often sold with, or added onto, a magazine or newspaper.

Add-ons can consist of:

• Creating an editorial series or a collection of enticing gadgets or digital devices
• Offering it to readers at an attractive price by utilizing an advertising campaign
• Selling it with the magazine or newspaper as an added option for a discounted price

The magazine and newspaper business is different in every country, but every publication has:

• Strong brand awareness and credibility
• A huge distribution network
• The ability and power of self-advertising

These are all aspects that can be used to take advantage of the Add-on opportunity and be helped by it. 

Why magazines and newspapers should offer Add-ons

1. Promote sales – Add-on products will attract new customers that would not normally notice the magazine or newspaper. Furthermore, when the new customers begin buying the magazine or newspaper in order to receive the Add-on, a portion of them will want the entire series. Therefore they will continue buying the magazine or newspaper until they have the complete series. By then they will have fallen in love with all the features in your magazine or newspaper and continue to be a customer.
2. Generate new income to increase profits – When selling an additional product you will receive added income depending on the profit margin. If you want to offer it for free it you may be able to obtain the product for free by convincing the supplier of the benefits of marketing both brands together. This way you won’t incur a loss.
3. Enhance the perceived value of your brand – By choosing high quality or respected products as Add-ons, the perceived value of the magazine or newspaper’s brand is enhanced. Furthermore, when people get a good deal on a product they want, they will cherish the source of that deal, which adds to the magazine or newspaper credibility.

The value offered

The value proposition offered to the reader when choosing a book series as an Add-on would be:

• An impressive book collection, which is unique, original and exclusive
• Offered for at least half of the normal retail price or if at a similar retail price, with high added editorial value from your magazine or newspaper

The only condition: To receive the Add-on at the price or deal offered, customers must also buy the magazine or newspaper.

Check out these real life add-on campaigns:

• Add-on case 1 – Abril
• Add-on case 2 – Reader’s Digest USA (to be published)
• Add-on case 3 – Poland (to be published)
• Add-on case 4 – Hungary (to be published)

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We have been using this service for some years now and have gathered some experience, that we are now sharing with you. So, here is a few suggestions / advice when using 99designs.com

1. Get the brief right from the start

When creating a contest on 99designs, you create a brief (that’s the name they have given the job description). Here you describe what you want and upload pictures for inspiration or use in the design.

I usually count on using 2 hours to do the brief, since the time spend here is saved many times later on. The first few times I ran contests on 99designs, I did the description somewhat fast and with a lot of internal terms and in general the explanation was too flawed. A few hours after I started the contest, the designers started asking questions and I had to explain what I actually meant. So i learned that I could probably set up a contest for a new cover design in 10 minutes, but that would mean that I needed to spend a lot of time later on post-developing the brief / explaining and furthermore. Furthermore, the designers might not even participate if they didn’t get the idea from the first look at the contest.

2. Feedback trumps price

This is quite a claim, but in my experience, you can get quite good results with a low priced contest, if you just give fast and constructive feedback to the designers that submit designs or ask questions. If the contest is made open (opposed to a closed contest), designers can see each others designs + feedback and learn from them / get inspired. This is good for the contest holder (CH) since you can then guide all designers with feedback to one.

3. Don’t ask for too much

After a few successful contests, I started to add elements to include in the final package, for the winning design. I demanded that the winner would deliver several different files and so on. But that backfired! The result was that only the desperate amateur designers with lots of time on their hands participated and I ended up cancelling 2 contests in a row, before returning to a more realistic expectation of the outcome. So, what I learned from this is that 99designs is about getting the right design (almost on the idea basis) – and first after that is in place, you can ask the designer to do different versions, 3D cover images etc.

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To get more bang for the buck (‘buck’ is time in this case), we can outsource. One easy-to-use online service is Fiverr.com. Here you can hire people to do something within their expertise – prices starting at $5.

Tasks we have successfully outsource to Fiverr:

1. Webdesign. Landing page or poster. For example this Power Point / Key note poster to fit into a marketing slide show. I send the text and some guidelines and got this back within a day.

2. Webprogramming. Wordpress or other common platforms are well represented here. I have fixed a ton of website errors this way.

A free online tool here is the Awesome Screenshot extension to the Chrome browser. This little tool let’s you choose an area of your screen to make a screen shot of and then you can make arrows etc. to explain something. When you’re ready, you click and get a link to that picture that is now accessible online. With most other screen shot tools you need first to save the image on your harddisk and from there upload to your Fiverr message. With the Awesome Screenshot you just send a link along your text and voila, visual explanation made easy!

An example could look like this:

3. Vector graphics and image recreation. We did some biblical maps this way. Send the scanning / photo to a graphic designer on Fiverr, who then vectorizes the whole thing and make all text editable (and sharp).

Auditions – testing to find the right people

Not all people on Fiverr will deliver top quality as promised. But don’t be discouraged if your first encounter is not fantastic.

You need to find those who really lifts you up to a higher level in your work and you are on the same page with. And like any other hiring, we need to set aside some time for it to work out. But once we have good people, it’s such a blessing – and a time saving one as well. So, like with the Pareto principle, the time used in preparing is given back many times in the outcome.

One efficient way to find the good people is to make an audition – send the same task to 5-10 people and see who’s best. This is possible since the cost is only $5 per nose. And once the task is prepared and described for one possible supplier at Fiverr, it’s easily copied to others. Then you spend some time back and forth afterwards and most likely end up with one or more long term contacts that will be able to proform a certain task for you for many years ahead.

The downside to fiverr

1. Upfront investment of time. As mentioned earlier, it takes time to find the right people – and this often make us postpone these kind of platforms for too long – we just don’t feel like we have the time.
2. You can only communicate via Fiverr. When using Fiverr, it becomes clear that the admin is extremely focused at keeting all trafic (and payments) betweek the parties on the Fiverr platform. It’s not allowed to exchange e-mail addresses or Skype accounts, which would actually be very helpful at times.
3. High admin fee. Furthermore, the gig-owner (the one who offers the service) actually only gets $4 of the $5 – so that’s a 20% fee and a quite high one. From a buyer standpoint that’s irrelevant though – if people want to offer, that’s their issue.

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At Scandinavia Publishing House we have especially used 3 online tools to improve our product development and made it cheaper.

99designs.com

At www.99designs.com you can create a contest and have graphic designers from all over the world bring their proposal to the table. This means that you are no longer dependent on a single internal or external designer to hit the perfect cover design within a reasonable time frame. Now you can describe what you want, post it and have multiple people submit their entry that you can then evaluate and give feedback on. Within 7 days you’ll have a great design for sure. The price for one project (a cover design for instance) starts at US $299.

Before we had outsourcing to scale our business – we now have crowdsourcing. Let the crowd do the work. They learn from the debate or each other, they are cheap and you only have to pay the one you like the best – and none if you don’t like any.

See an example of how we used 99designs.com at Scandinavia: Link

Fiverr.com

At fiverr.com more than 3 million people are offering their expertise for the simple price of $5. Well, that’s where the services starts – often you pay more when you want additional services made, but it’s still in the cheap end. We use this service quite a lot. In fact I like to have one fiverr job going on every day – gives me the feeling that I get something done, without doing it myself. Also, i need to wrap my head around an idea and send it off – all the time – and that’s a great exercise. The fact that I don’t need to do the actual writing, programming or design myself makes it manageable. Then I can focus on planning and giving feedback.

See an example of how we used fiverr.com at Scandinavia: Link

Trello.com

This is also a great online tool, although completely different from the two above. Trello is really just an online todo list – with the possibility to become an easy-to-learn project management program. When you first create a profile, your first ‘board’ is created. On this board you have 3 lists: ToDo, Doing and Done. You can then create tasks (called cards) in the ToDo list and move them to Doing and Done once you complete the cards task. See a short introduction video here: Link.

We now use Trello to manage our product development, production, order flow, employee goal setting and a lot of other projects. It has given us a better control of the details and the big picture at the same time.

See an example of how we used trello.com at Scandinavia: Link

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Then, already in chapter 5 – in the first of 66 books – the begats rise like a wall that blocks your reading and makes you want to surrender right away.

Photo courtesy of ©photl.com/Studio Cl Art

There are several passages in the Bible (especially in The Old Testament) that are hard to get through. That’s one good reason most Bible reading plans contains a little portion from different places in the Bible to read each day.

For children, these family tree chapters and lists of men of Israel’s 12 tribes or material for the Temple are even more dreadful. So, if a kid should want to go through the whole Bible chronologically, a Children’s Bible is a good tool. Not only are the stories and texts selected carefully, but it comes illustrated, so each page is new and exiting.

The top 100 most important Bible passages for kids

To make the Bible more appealing to kids, Scandinavia has developed the product “100 Best Bible Stories”. As the title states, this is a selection of the hundred most well-known stories from the Bible. This project has several advantages:

• Fits the age group. Kids age 4-7 can read only the best suited stories for them.
• Focus on the message. Besides selecting suitable stories and telling them at eye level, the selected Bible passages contains great life lessons, that this age group can understand and make use of.
• Getting the big picture. When Learning these stories, the child gains an overview of the highlights of the whole Bible – and by that an idea of who God is and through that the history of Mankind and who we are.
• A window to more. All the stories in the book contain Bible references, so if the interest goes further than the sparingly selected text, it’s easy to turn to the Bible to read it all.

So in conclusion, reading the Bible with kids can be a challange, but is helped a lot by compelling children’s Bibles like “100 Best Bible Stories“.

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The input that our kids have to tackle every single day is exploding and they need to process so much information, that you start thinking “who knows what sticks”. Those of us who are interested in our children keeping their faith, have a challenge to find time and material to teach them about the Bible.

Here are 3 powerful reminders of why it is important for parents to read with their children:

1. Good routines. Reading the Bible on a daily basis helps build good routines regarding reading in general and studying the Bible regularly.
2. Knowing the Bible. I remember one Bible scholar and leader of a big American Bible organisation saying that the foundation for his Bible knowledge came from his childhood. His grandmother would read a children’s Bible with him daily and through that he learned more about the Bible than he did studying theology. Furthermore, children’s Bibles (or some of them) have the advantage, that the points or key messages are explained so that everyone can understand them.
3. Time together. Even though we all try hard to get as much time with our kids as possible, it can be difficult and in the end of the day you might conclude that it didn’t really happen. One solution is to build in a nighttime routine, that includes time together. In these precious moments reading seems like a sound activity. Reading aloud seems more social than watching a movie together. This also builds for an excellent opportunity to discuss the message of the story and feed his or her with good thoughts.

Read and pray through the Bible in a year

Scandinavia has developed “The One Year Bible” – a 496 pages Children’s Bible for age 4-7.  There is a story with a Bible reference and a prayer For each day.

These are daily readings – going through the whole Bible in a year.

The One Year Bible – Product page

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