Hiptype, the new platform for data-driven book publishing, will launch this week—providing publishers’ e-books with engagement and demographic data. The goal of Hiptype, according to cofounder James Levy, is to help clients determine the "DNA" of a successful book.
“Book publishing is still one area where there's a lot of mystery surrounding what works and what fails,” said Levy. “There's some anecdotal evidence and trends regarding everything from cover design to ‘chunking’, ‘book trailers’, etc. But without data there's no way to really separate the signal from the noise and understand what really is affecting a book's success.”
The process is simple: a publisher just uploads a book to Hiptype's Website, and the analytics plugin is automatically added to the book.
Among the information Hiptype provides is performance data (how far readers are getting through titles and the areas with the highest reader attrition) and anonymous, aggregated audience insights. The latter, to help publishers understand who is reading their books, is not shared with any third parties and a reader, notified at the beginning of the e-book about the anonymous usage statistics function being enabled, can choose to opt out. According to the company's privacy policy, physical, electronic and managerial procedures have been put in place to safeguard and secure the information collected online.
While Hiptype’s analytics are a natural fit for educational publishers—Levy stated that one “very well-known” educational publisher has requested that they can disclose that their titles use Hiptype to demonstrate the publisher’s commitment to improving the quality of its books—the software is beneficial for any type of book, whether it be fiction or YA or reference. That’s at least in part due to Hiptype’s use of the Facebook Ads API to automatically manage and optimize advertising campaigns using the software’s audience insights. “We're already seeing that these data-driven Smart Ad campaigns have 2-5x effectiveness for click through rates and cost per clicks,” said Levy.
