When it comes to selling baseball books, you won’t find any curve balls at the Baseball Online Library, a vast repository of searchable baseball lore that recently began featuring excerpts from new and backlisted titles, with links directly to that major-league slugger, Amazon.com. As the first sales from the site were batted home last month, the library proved an instructive case study for how publishers can deploy content on the Internet to market topic-specific books.
“We want to give publishers free advertising and free sales opportunities,” explains James G. Robinson, editor-in-chief for the Idea Logical Company, which produces the online library. Baseball maniacs have been flocking to the free site, which is hosted by CBS SportsLine, a portal that racks up eleven million page views per day and is the primary sports content provider for AOL. Fans sift through profiles of some 6,000 ballplayers and peruse a complete baseball chronology from 1845 through the 1990s, with selected entries linked to relevant book excerpts provided by publishers. Once at the excerpt, visitors are naturally offered the chance to purchase titles, leading to what Robinson calls a “win-win-win”: the publisher sells a book; SportsLine takes home a cut of every sale through its affiliate relationship with Amazon, and gains additional advertiser-friendly traffic for the site; and the Idea Logical Company scores a wealth of free content.
Although just 18 titles were listed last month (including a sneak preview of S&S’s Me and Hank, Sandy Tolan’s new memoir about Hank Aaron), there are plans to add as much content as possible, all fully integrated into the site’s database of baseball trivia. While certain publishers have not yet seen the advantages of lending content to the site, S&S stepped right up to the plate with an initial round of 12 titles, with more on the way. “It’s a perfect match,” says Sandy Flynn, senior marketing manager for S&S Online. “They make it very easy for a baseball fan to come to their site, learn about baseball, and then purchase a book.” Flynn says syndicating content has been a major focus for S&S, so much so that the publisher maintains its own site where partners can download title information, jacket images, excerpts, and even, as in the case of Stephen King’s e-novella, special buttons and banner ads. Flynn says that other S&S partners include CNN, which uses the publisher’s assets when an author or topic is mentioned in the news, and programs such as Good Morning America, whose reps contact the publisher for excerpts or title information to place on their Internet site when an author appears on television. Flynn hopes to work more closely with the Baseball Online Library to use S&S’s content in similar fashion when baseball-related features appear on SportsLine’s main page.
The Online Library recently launched an email update for baseball buffs that notifies them of new additions to the site, and Robinson is working on adding more links to and from other baseball sites. All of which should help fend off competitors such as TotalSports.net, which is excerpting serial chapters of Darryl Brock’s new novel Havana Heat, and carries online updates of the Sports Illustrated 2000 Sports Almanac and other titles. As Robinson points out, the beauty of such sites lies in the maximum exploitation of a narrow niche. “To most people, this is a lot of meaningless information,” he says. “For baseball junkies, it’s gold.” Proof of that concept lies in the fact that the first book to sell from the site wasn’t the Aaron book or even Ted Williams’ popular Science of Hitting, but the seemingly arcane Baseball in World War II Europe (Arcadia). And the same holds true for any niche market. As Robinson puts it, “It’s replicable. It doesn’t have to be baseball. The whole point is to get an audience for your book. And it doesn’t get any more targeted than this.”
