Visit bookstores| online bookstores that don't sell bestsellers

Editor's note: In the past two years, many bookstores have closed and many bookstores have transformed. Some bookstores explore the path of "bookstore + cultural creation"; some bookstores create thematic style, decoration or exquisite or retro or avant-garde; and some bookstores, coffee and desserts have become a major feature... Even so, the traditional physical bookstore is still in the inevitable demise, for the bookstore, this is not a friendly era, not to mention the multiple rounds of the epidemic impact.

In this atmosphere, we have a sense of closeness to those who are still with books, try to get closer to them, read books, visit shops, and observe how bookstores will change in our lives in the era of drastic changes in the knowledge dissemination system. The first bookstore we chose was an online bookstore.

Wang Hongtao/Wen "No matter how impetuous the times are, human beings always need something heavy, and all we do is open a scene and then get people to pay attention to it." This is a sentence said by Li Zhihua, the founder of the Prophet Bookstore.

Li Zhihua's Prophet Bookstore, focusing on the field of humanities and social sciences, has no physical storefront and only sells academic books selected by himself. As an online bookstore, it never follows various lists to sell best-selling books, does not do short videos, does not live stream goods, and only relies on one book review article after another with graphic content to sell books at the original price without discounts.

this...... There seems to be something offbeat.

Books that no one cares about

Before founding the Prophet Bookstore, Li Zhihua had been deeply engaged in the field of humanities and social science publishing for many years, in the words of Li Zhihua: "Some books have been published, and some awards have been won." The work experience of the publishing house let him know what a really good book is. At that time, Li Zhihua had little success in his career. "The editor-in-chief asked us to publish a niche book with 8,000 copies, and I dared to print 10,000 copies."

However, the publishing house's work experience also tells Li Zhihua that high-quality humanities and social science books always can't find readers who really like them. The rise of the mobile Internet has also caused a great impact on paper books. At the same time, many traditional media people and publishers have fled and started the business of paying for knowledge. In a collaboration with Luo Zhenyu, Li Zhihua was inspired: through content marketing, niche humanities and social science books can also be revitalized. Therefore, he decided to make his own online bookstore that only sells a selection of good books, and explore another possibility of bookstores through good content marketing.

In 2016, Prophet Bookstore was founded. Li Zhihua said: "We are to let the thick, niche, thoughtful books realize their due value." ”

In the first two years of starting a bookstore, the "prophet" spent time in exploration and trial and error, and how to make these books find the corresponding readers is not an easy task. Although the Prophet Bookstore obtains customers with content, it is not self-media, and self-media is chasing traffic, while Prophet Bookstore is supported by the content of selected books and continues to output in-depth content.

Nevertheless, for a time, several public accounts of prophet bookstores, like other self-media, only produced content, but could not sell books, and experienced two years of silence. After various attempts, Prophet Bookstore obtained the first 100,000 plus articles, Li Zhihua was mixed, and the joy was that Prophet Bookstore finally let more and more people know how to convert the reading volume of articles into book turnover.

The real turnaround occurred in July 2018, when a publishing house contacted Prophet Bookstore to launch 500 sets of "Yang Xiaokai Academic Library (Nine Volumes)", hoping that Prophet Bookstore would be sold on a trial basis, although Yang Xiaokai had a high reputation in academic circles, but there was little interest in the mass reading market. At that time, most of the people in the Prophet Bookstore did not agree with making this set of books, perhaps out of the intuition of entrepreneurs, Li Zhihua still held the mentality of trying it out and did the content marketing plan of this set of books.

From July 4 to July 7, in order to launch the article on the day of Yang Xiaokai's anniversary, Li Zhihua led the team of editors to repeatedly polish the content of the article. Once launched, more than 200 sets of books were sold, and the Prophet Bookstore was also "a hit", and Li Zhihua "took advantage of the victory to pursue", first negotiated with the publishing house to increase the printing volume, and got the exclusive right to sell. Subsequently, prophet bookstore for Yang Xiaokai's books specially opened a Jingdong store, established the "prophet Xiaokai's world of thought" public account, to promote sales continue to climb, just like this, a set of niche academic books, actually became the annual hit.

Within a year of its launch, Prophet Bookstore launched more than 50 WeChat tweets around the "Yang Xiaokai Academic Library", of which there were dozens of "100,000 +" original articles, and finally sold more than 3,000 sets, which is a huge success for a large academic book. So far, Prophet Bookstore has truly achieved a breakthrough in profitability and laid a solid foundation for future topic selection operations and content marketing.

It's not about bringing people to read

In the operation of prophet bookstore, the WeChat public account plays an important role. In Li Zhihua's view, the biggest difference between Prophet Bookstore and other traditional bookstores and self-media is to drive content marketing with planning, open a window for serious academic books, and let public readers understand and understand it, which has always been a difficult point in book marketing.

Compared with e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Dangdang, Prophet Bookstore is a manual selection of books, not algorithms. And because of the manual selection, the Prophet Bookstore can only focus on 1,000 categories, which almost reaches the limit of people's attention.

The ability to make academic books into "explosives" actually stems from Li Zhihua's experience of reading a large number of best-selling books. Li Zhihua likes to read books, and every time he reads a book, he is also required to write a book review or a post-reading feeling. Because of writing book reviews, Li Zhihua was discovered by the publishing house and entered the publishing house, and at that time Li Zhihua knew that the best-selling books he read at the beginning were not necessarily really good books.

Whether a book is selected for inclusion in the catalogue of the Prophet's Bookstore is first of all ideological and contemporary. Reading books and selecting books is the primary job of prophet bookstores. Li Zhihua's favorite book over the past year is Barbara Tuchman's. Li Zhihua commented on Tuchman's book, "Although it is a historical work, it can be read in one breath." He said that a book first depends on whether it is ideological, followed by the writing attitude, and the most difficult thing is that it also needs to have a high level of writing, and Tuchman's book meets these three characteristics at the same time.

Books are selected and book reviews are produced for content marketing. The book review texts of prophet bookstore, each article has three elements: knowledge reserve, text expression, advertising and marketing, the text is not written by a single person, but requires the whole team to work together and polish repeatedly, and polishing is an energy-consuming process. In the polishing, each topic is done as a problem solver, with more intention than opinion. Li Zhihua believes that this process is not to take users to read books, but to create a scene where users can discover the value of books.

Now, in addition to the 5 public accounts, the Prophet Bookstore has 300 different distribution accounts, and the division of labor of these accounts is different, some copy the content of the Prophet Bookstore to the circle of friends, some complete the public account reprint, and some complete the dissemination on other platforms.

In the process of content planning, Li Zhihua plays three roles: a planner with textual ability, a coach who can teach people, and a manager with leadership ability.

Reading values

At the moment when short videos and various audios are popular, accepting fast food-style knowledge feeding seems to have become fashionable, and all kinds of short videos selling books and lecturing books have also greatly replaced bookstores and led the tendency to read, and for books, which are old knowledge carriers, new marketing tactics are also percussion.

Does Prophet Bookstore do short videos? Do you do live streaming with goods? Before throwing out this question, in fact, Li Zhihua had already asked himself countless times. The answer is not to do, as for the reason, Li Zhihua said, "Our gene is to do graphic birth, if you do short videos, on the one hand, the talent reserve is not enough, and more importantly, short videos are not in line with the values of prophet bookstores." ”

This value is about the value of reading. The original intention of the founding of Prophet Bookstore is to make niche academic books more easily accepted by people through content planning, so as to achieve in-depth reading and realize the market value of books. However, short videos and live broadcasts with goods, from the content presentation of fragmented information, from the marketing orientation are more discounts, advocating deep reading bookstores to discount and sell their own claims of "good books", which is awkward and contrary.

That being said, the pressure is real. Not doing short videos does not mean that short videos do not constitute a squeeze, and now the cost of customer acquisition on WeChat public accounts is also rising, which requires the content marketing side of Prophet Bookstore to make more sophisticated book reviews.

After more than 5 years of accumulation, Prophet Bookstore has precipitated a large number of good books, and the independent thinking and deep reading it advocates have gradually gained more and more recognition from more and more people under the impetus of its high-quality content marketing. Nowadays, after realizing the accumulation of one item after another, Prophet Bookstore has connected each single item into a line, arranged and combined more than 3,000 selected books, and formed different book lists according to different problems, users only need to put forward a keyword, and Prophet Bookstore can complete the selection of books.

Focusing on humanities and social science books, but also let Li Zhihua look at things, revealing the thinking of the times, which may be the natural attribute of readers, for how to find books, how to read books, how to sell books, in the operation of prophet bookstores, gradually have a set of model reasoning. This bookstore, which has no physical stores, has more reasons to exist and develop.

As Li Zhihua said, at the beginning he just wanted to sell books, do it, and found more possibilities.