LiteraryBot
Find a next book to translate
I got a first specific feedback from a chief editor. It's more or less clear that it would be an experiment. This and future feedback would help me to develop a better newsletter and better product overall.
Free list of emerging non-fiction bestsellers is now tested end to end. Hooray!
It's just a handful of recipients. It still feels great to finalize it.
You can take a look here:
https://yadi.sk/d/qRYXG4CcuKoLkA
Today we get an idea of how to filter out bestseller list for it to be useful.
Also, I have a principal idea of how to get historical data on any given book. Now I don't have to wait for half a year to get train data for fresh bestseller model.
I trying to test a landing page conversion. It's still massively unclear me, but it felt worth to share
So far, structure and all copies and ready.
I plan to add a report example and screenshot. Maybe I would also add the team section. I also want to change a hero illustration. I think it would not be a good idea to leave one from the template I used.
It's still not clear how to drive book publishing industry people to the page.
I realized that there is an issue with trust in sales. I'm an outsider for the industry. So, I decided to set up a free newsletter which could immediately bring some value, a paid exclusive newsletter for publishers and a tool to collect book information all over the internet.
All these products are technologically part of the predicting system I'm building. So, the overhead is not that big.
Hopefully, if I could bring enough value with a free newsletter and simple paid service I would have enough trust to sale a modeling service too.
#Ask-IH I was thinking about pricing. I don't get a clue.
I doing a service to find a next book to translate for a non-US publisher. So it's a B2B market.
I don't have any sales yet. However, I have some interest and discussion with the potential client. I want to estimate what could be the price. Both for the "MVP" and for a more or less final point.
This is the info I collected so far:
- There is a market for such a service. Literature scouting agencies are providing such a service.
- Agencies exclusive contracts. It's one client per country per book type (child, fiction, non-fiction). It could be around 10-30 clients in total for an agency.
- I get a piece of information that for the UK market it costs around 10-20k$ per year for an average publisher.
- In Russia, an in-house scout for this costs around 15-20k$ / year. Publicly known about one publisher. It has a team of scouts working on a task.
Should I anchor the price versus costs of an agency?
Or should I, perhaps, base the price on the cost of an in-house scout?
My main goal is to validate the business model right now. What is the price for MVP serving this goal?
What are your thoughts?
How would've you approach this?
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#2:
It's how agencies currently operate. It's also an order of magnitude number of clients. You can't supply the same information for many publishers in the same country.
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Helping vs replacing:
People are good with intuition and having a context. Computers are good with a massive amount of repetitive work. A service is solving the same problem in a significantly different way.
So, it's not so obvious.
In a small publisher, they would have no dedicated role for scouting. So, an editor would be filling it. For such a publisher it could be an alternative to hiring and training a dedicated person for this or a way to free some time of an editors team.
For a bigger publisher, it would make more sense to use it as an efficiency tool. I believe it could make one person as effective as a team of few.
It could be fewer people working on this task with the same result. Alternatively, it could give the ability to produce a higher volume / lesser risk for a publisher with a given team.
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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Thanks for the specific number :)
It's less scary for me to actually think of something close when somebody else thinks this level of pricing could be reasonable.
It could be a good idea to make a discount.
It's still not clear if the discount would make it easier to sign those first clients.
I had a sales discussion today. It feels that it's more of a trust issue than price question now.-
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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Unfortunately, an expert said that he needs more time. Meanwhile, I did look through books myself and it felt good enough to share.
I chose five genres relevant to a publisher in the communication. I pick a book for every genre rated high by the model. And send those books to the chief editor asking for a comment. Fingers crossed.
For those who interested in books, the list is below.
Parenting: https://www.amazon.com/Baby-Sign-Language-Basics-Communication/dp/1401921604
Non-fiction: https://www.amazon.com/All-Cats-Have-Asperger-Syndrome/dp/1843104814
Art: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Authenticity-Principles-Clarify-Artistic/dp/0972872329
Business: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592534597
Self-Help: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684859769
I added data about authors history:
- How experienced he is?
- Did he have successful books before?
And other similar features
This, however, didn't show any metric boost.
I finally collected and added data about known translations for a book. This both helps with a modeling quality and will help me to lower amount of manual work to filter a book.
Tomorrow I will have a session with an expert, former book scout. I'll hope to get some intuition on how manual selection is done. Also, I will validate the first books selected automatically. I will move to a demonstration phase right after.
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