The New York-based start-up Ganxy, which was founded in 2009 to sell music, is rolling out more tools at the London Book Fair to help small and medium-sized publishers sell and promote DRM-free digital content online. “The point is scale,” says Ganxy cofounder Joshua Cohen. “It’s no more complex to give away one book or 50,000 books. It’s the same process and the same speed.” With Ganxy, publishers and self-publishers can already create showcases with book covers, author photos, and copy that can be used across Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and online sites to sell through retailers or through Ganxy.com, which takes a 10% cut. Now the service, which also earns money through affiliate commissions, will enable publishers to control how they give away content to promote books as well as generate sales.
Ganxy’s new campaign creation tool has been in the works for nearly a year. “We do a huge amount of testing,” says Cohen, citing two factors that determine when a product is released. “The product has to be ready and the market has to be ready.” One last piece that Ganxy is putting into place this week is an e-mail address collection feature to enable publishers to track who has downloaded their material.
Glenn Beck’s Mercury Ink publishing imprint was an early tester of Ganxy’s campaign tool. Last May it used the service to cross promote Chris Stewart’s e-book series, Wrath and Righteousness, to the 300,000 subscribers to Beck’s online video network, The Blaze, with an offer for a free copy of the first e-book in the series. “Mercury Ink is always looking for creative and unique ways to connect our authors with our overall audience. We normally have to throw out most of the ideas, because they just aren’t feasible. And we thought that was the case here, until we found Ganxy. Josh and his entire team transformed a difficult and challenging process into a seamless and effective marketing campaign,” said Kevin Balfe, senior v-p publishing at Mercury Radio Arts. He attributes strong sales across the series to the more than 45,000 subscribers who downloaded the free e-book.
Ganxy can also do more targeted giveaways of not just e-books but other forms of digital content. And it is one of several services to generate cards that can be used at events to sell e-books or provide free promotional content.
