Connections. May 2020
Welcome to our monthly newsletter on everything connected with the Glassboxx ecosystem: new features on the apps and admin area, top sales and marketing tips, recent signees, related eBook and audio content in the news, and a peek ahead towards the sort of features and functionality coming down the line.
And yes, you’ve received this as your company has recently signed up – it’s great to have you on board. It’s no surprise that consumption of digital content has reached new heights in recent months, and we’re delighted you’ve joined the community, enabling your readers quick and easy access to eBook and audiobook titles at this critical time.
So with regular monthly slots covering the core areas, we’re confident this newsletter will offer some insights into what’s possible with the new direct sales channel.
So let’s get started…
Brand recognition
The eagle-eyed amongst you may have spotted a recent update deep in the admin dashboard, enabling you to customise those book landing pages with your own branded background wallpaper. Here’s the crumb-trail for the uninitiated:
Dashboard > Products > Manage Products (select title) > Custom Design
Feel free to contact us if you want a walk-through – although you may have noticed some other recent admin area additions which touch on this very topic:
How To videos
These short clips will cover a range of features within the dashboard, positively impacting the customer-facing front-end, including how to embed Buy Now links into Twitter, Facebook etc. We’ll be adding to these over time as new features and functionality become available.
Dashboard > How To videos
VAT drop on eBooks
You may have noticed the VAT line automatically disappear from all Vendor+ storefronts for eBook sales, following the Chancellor’s announcement a couple of weeks ago. Encouraging news indeed – and for those Vendor integrations out there, this paves the way for some innovative p+e bundling opportunities – with VAT now removed…
As with any app development there will always be new releases targeting bug fixes and general usability issues – as well as incorporating new functionality. The latest releases on both iOS and Android have addressed stability issues, but, more excitingly, added a neat little audiobook preview feature on audiobook product pages.
The list of future enhancements is growing by the week and we will update you further in all future newsletters. Watch this space!
You’ve signed up to Glassboxx so let your colleagues, authors and readers know! Glassboxx is a great asset which has the potential to drive digital sales when fully deployed, this means that your colleagues should know of the opportunities it affords, your authors should know of how they can use the buy now links as part of their toolkit and if you have a known customer base then let your readers know of this exciting new development.
Here’s an example of a blog from Veloce Publishing to let their customers know that they can now buy eBooks from their website using the Glassboxx app.
You make more revenue per sale from Glassboxx than traditional retail channels so reflect this on your website by prioritising the Glassboxx buy link. For Vendor clients, this has the added advantage of being able to capture the customer’s details for future targeted marketing.
You’re in very good company – we are excited to be working with a wide range of publishers who have joined the Glassboxx family in recent weeks – pushing their eBooks and audiobooks directly into the hands of readers . . . as fast as possible. Here are just a few of the more recent signees, and some links to a few of their product pages offering their eBooks/audiobooks direct:
Atlantic Books
Flame Tree Publishing
Pavilion Books
Quiller Publishing
As mentioned above, we’ve put together some videos to show you how easy it is to add the ‘Buy Now’ links to your social media accounts and to embed them into web pages. They also explain how to customise your product landing pages with your logo and a custom background image, and how to create discount vouchers and gratis copy codes. You will find these videos on your dashboard but you can watch an example here.
Pre-orders
Feedback which has come in from a lot of you is the power of pre-orders, and there is a common desire to add pre-orders as a feature to Glassboxx. The good news is that this has been shunted up the priority list, and we are targeting a release in June/July for this functionality.
Subscription/Rental
One of the beautiful features of the DRM protection we’ve employed within the Glassboxx applications is the fact that content can be provided to customers either on a perpetual access basis – or for a specific time period… There are a few tweaks within both the apps and admin panel that need to be made to this functionality before releasing, but the ability to make your content available at x cost for a couple of weeks/a month is just around the corner. Bear with us on this.
Bulk application of branding
Following on from the recent brand awareness enhancements we made to the admin area, we’re rolling out a ‘single-click’ application across all your book landing pages – saving you the effort of going into each and every product page to apply the branding. This will be available in early June.
