Gardening is one of those pastimes that are highly dependent on the vagaries of locale. Growing a tomato in Virginia is different from growing one in New York, and no one knows this better than Roger Waynick, president of the regional Tennessee-based gardening house, Cool Springs Press. With more than 250 books on the subject, broken down by region, Cool Springs is taking its content online. The house is launching an innovative gardening site, digplantgrow.com, in December, geared to tap into the large audience—according to Waynick, more than 100 million Americans—who engage in the leisure activity.
Planned to include 50 mini sites, each dedicated to a different state, digplantgrow.com will host content from the house's 125 authors, all of whom, Waynick said, garden where they live. In addition to allowing users to download excerpts of the house's books—Waynick said a price for this has not been set—the site will also offer its users fresh information about what's happening in their region that will affect how and what they do in the ground.
“We had a freeze here in Tennessee in early April, and it was devastating,” Waynick said. “But there are things gardeners could have done to prevent [damage to their flower or vegetable beds]. I think those are the opportunities that will make the site sticky,” he said. Digplantgrow.com will send regional e-mail alerts to users about inclement weather and other topics.
The alerts, which will go only to members who sign up for them, will be mostly editorial in nature but will also advertise the house's current and forthcoming titles. “We're going to be probably 85% informational and 15% sales,” Waynick said. The site also won't feature ads, but Waynick noted that there will be a presence from “industry partners.”
While Cool Springs will emphasize the site's local content as one of its major selling points, the excerpts are something Waynick thinks will be particularly attractive to gardeners. While users will be able to access nearly all the content from the house's backlist, Waynick thinks many will opt to download and print out what they need. He said that research shows most of Cool Springs' readers take their books into the garden or to the nursery. The site will, he thinks, therefore allow them to zero in on what they need. “Currently, [if you have one of our regional titles] but don't grow, say, roses, you still have to take the roses section with you. Now we're saying, if all you want to do is grow veggies, just take the veggie section.”
