Blue Shark Reading Guide: How does the niche book business rely on short videos + live broadcasts to get out of the circle?
Author | Chen Shifeng
Edit | Lu Xucheng
Before the 29th World Book Day (April 23), Douyin e-commerce held a "Reading for All in the Live Broadcast Room" event in Beijing. According to on-site data, Douyin e-commerce sold more than 150 million books in the first quarter, and more than 2 million books were sold every day.
As the temperature rises, the book market has also warmed up, which seems to be partly due to the short video and live broadcast channels. According to data released by Beijing Open Book Information Technology Co., Ltd., the size of China's book retail market in 2023 will be 91.2 billion yuan. From the perspective of the composition of channels, platform e-commerce is still the largest channel, with a proportion of 41.46%, followed by short video e-commerce, with a proportion of 26.67%, surpassing vertical and other e-commerce (19.93% in 2023) to become the second largest sales channel, and the proportion of physical store channels is 11.93%. It is worth noting that compared with 2022, except for the increase in the proportion of short video e-commerce, the proportion of other channels has decreased by different degrees.
Driven by short videos and live broadcasts, new and old works such as "Human Letters", "The Right Bank of the Ergun River", and "We Live in a Huge Gap" have achieved good sales. "The connection between books and live broadcast room sales is getting closer and closer, and the book market has undergone structural reshaping," said Wang Qiuling, deputy general manager of the People's Literature Publishing House.
In today's voluminous book market, anchors are increasingly favored by readers to communicate with readers and share good books. Liu Xiaochun, director of the Internet Rule of Law Research Center at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that live e-commerce lowers the reading threshold, stimulates the interest of potential readers, and allows many short video users to directly convert into new reading groups. On the other hand, live streaming and short videos also promote the "return" of high-quality content to the publishing industry, driving book sales and making more people fall in love with reading again.
In the era of mobile Internet, people buy their favorite books through fragmented short videos and live content, and build their own complete knowledge system step by step. It may sound "absurd", but it has become a reality. But can selling books through short videos and live streaming channels promote the sustainable growth of the book industry?
Short videos, live broadcasts to "sell books" ambitions
At the end of the last century, books, as highly standardized products, were first placed on the shelves of e-commerce, which formed a dimensionality reduction blow to traditional physical bookstores, and book e-commerce platforms such as JD.com, Dangdang, and Amazon emerged. In recent years, with the popularity of short videos and live broadcasts, it has also successfully gained a share of the pie in the field of book sales.
As early as 2020, economist Xue Zhaofeng went to the live broadcast room of the "live broadcast sister" Wei Ya to interact and discuss the careful planning of young people. In the live broadcast room, Xue Zhaofeng also tried to sell goods, and sold about 65,000 copies of "Xue Zhaofeng's Lectures on Economics" that night, which caused a shock in the industry.
On March 9, 2020, Xu Zhiyuan, the founder of One Way Space, and Wei Ya held a live broadcast of "Defending Independent Bookstores". During the live broadcast, Xu Zhiyuan had an online conversation with Qian Xiaohua, founder of Nanjing Pioneer Bookstore, Zhu Yufang, founder of Hangzhou Xiaofeng Bookstore, and Yang Yi, founder of Chongqing Classic Bookstore. This live broadcast brought more than 500,000 yuan to the bookstore, and the best offline store on One-way Street (one day) only had a turnover of about 1,000 yuan.
Compared with shelf e-commerce such as Dangdang, JD.com, and Amazon, as well as offline physical bookstores, short videos and live broadcasts can undoubtedly reach consumers more extensively.
"Especially for some consumers who lack the ability to discern and do not take the initiative to buy books, under the 'charm' of the anchor's words, they may passively join the army of book purchases," said a person in the publishing industry.
In this case, content platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have successively increased their investment in books. In April 2021, Douyin e-commerce launched the "Douyin National Good Books Program", hoping to rely on the content, technology and traffic advantages of global interest e-commerce, through high-quality intellectual content and rich and diverse content products, so that new books and good books on the platform can be seen, understood and obtained by more people, and help book sales. In the same year, Kuaishou announced that it would also launch a support program for book education merchants. Kuaishou will launch corresponding policies in account positioning, content, traffic, operation and other links to support the growth and commercial realization of merchants and anchors.
The event that really made the short video live broadcast book selling popular is: In June 2022, Dong Yuhui's Mao Dun Literature Award winning work "The Right Bank of the Ergun River" recommended by Dong Yuhui in the Dongfang Selection Live Room sold a total of about 710,000 copies in 4 months, with sales of tens of millions of yuan, which is equivalent to the total sales of the novel in 17 years after its first edition in 2005.
Li Xue (pseudonym), a person in the publishing industry, sighed: "The Right Bank of the Ergun River is really a reading miracle in the era of e-commerce, and 6 million copies have been sold on Douyin. When this book was first published, it was a niche book for our modern and contemporary literature major. She also said, "Live streaming and video seem to be anti-text in terms of technology, but they have greatly promoted the popularization of knowledge, which is very interesting." Needless to say, political scientists like Bao Gangsheng are also doing live video broadcasts – which has greatly broken the 'intellectual boundaries' of the past. ”
All parties follow up
Around 2020, the growth of the book industry has tended to stagnate, and publishing houses are eager to find new growth points, and live e-commerce is the biggest bright spot in the retail industry in those two years. In addition, the cash flow brought about by the epidemic is tight, and the short video live broadcast brings the funds back quickly, which is something that e-commerce and offline channels cannot do. In this case, some publishers have begun to accelerate their rush to short video live broadcast platforms such as Douyin, from finding influencers to bring goods live to establishing their own short video accounts and official flagship stores.
Motie Culture was one of the first publishers to taste the sweetness. In April 2020, Motie Culture launched the Douyin short video account "Tietie's Bookcase". Through live broadcasts, "Tietie's Bookshelf" can directly increase fans and precipitate a large number of paying users, accumulating a large number of vertical readers with certain spending power. Subsequently, on the basis of determining the potential of live broadcasting, Motie Culture made it clear that the live broadcast business is the direction of the team's long-term investment in the future, and began to match special personnel to do live broadcasts.
The benefits of live streaming are clear. Cao Ling, senior manager of the new media marketing department of Motie Books, said, "First of all, it is to directly achieve sales conversion and profitability, and Motie's own key books have also sold a lot. The company's key products will get stable, continuous and large amount of exposure, helping readers to establish the awareness of the grinding iron brand and playing a certain role in product promotion. "In 2021, Motie's official flagship store ranked first in book sales on the Douyin platform.
Fan Deng Reading and Kuaishou opened an exclusive live broadcast book sales cooperation, and its live broadcast debut data shows that the live broadcast of more than 2 hours has accumulated 2 million online viewers, sold 130,000 books, and harvested nearly 10 million yuan. It is worth noting that in this live broadcast of selling books, books that are difficult to buy in many traditional offline bookstores, such as "Lao Tzu's Heart" and "Fat Yan Zhai Re-evaluation of the Stone Record" and other unpopular books were quickly sold out in just a few seconds.
More people poured into the short video live broadcast platform and became a famous book anchor. For example, the book anchor Sen Ma originally registered for the Douyin account simply to "show the baby", but it has gradually developed into a channel for sharing parenting knowledge and book content. In Senma's live broadcast room, she will also talk about books, but she doesn't think about selling points, profits, and doesn't need the help of merchants to prepare hand cards and selling points, she has to read each book several times, and share her understanding and views on books with everyone after internalizing it. Because of this, such an account with less than 300,000 followers can sell tens of thousands of orders in a "large" live broadcast.
The addition of publishing houses, booksellers, and anchors has made short video live streaming of books gradually popular.
Challenges ahead
However, if you think that the book industry can prosper greatly by relying on live streaming, many people in the publishing industry may be skeptical. In fact, listed book companies, including Reader Culture, do not use short videos and live broadcasts as mainstream publicity channels, but only use them as new media to share and interact with consumers. MCN institutions and anchors such as Gaotu Jiapin do not regard books as a main category, but supplement categories. Even Dong Yuhui, books are just a kind of "spice product" for his live broadcast.
"From the current point of view, live streaming of books is actually still squeezing the original book market share, and the increase is not much. Li Xue also said.
One of the prominent drawbacks of live streaming is that the attention of new books is slowly getting smaller. For anchors, live broadcast selling books is for GMV and drainage, and they will inevitably choose relatively more classic old books (or books by celebrity writers, such as Yu Hua, Mai Jia and other famous works), which will also reduce the difficulty of anchors to bring goods to the greatest extent. In contrast, it is obviously easier to sell "One Hundred Years of Solitude" than "It All," published in January 2022, even if the author of the latter is James Suter, who has been called "the forgotten hero of contemporary American literature."
Li Xue also told Blue Shark Consumption that although some of the new books she is very optimistic about are on the alternative book list brought by the anchor, in fact, the anchor will not explain at all in the live broadcast room, and there is no chance to be put on the shelf. For anchors, it is faster to make money by selling old books. But for publishers, it is impossible to just stare at the old book "Wool". If live streaming cannot promote new books, it means that it is difficult to promote the development of the book industry in the direction of higher increments.
Another reality is that while more books are being sold in the form of live streams, they are not necessarily profitable. Compared with "just need", books are undoubtedly a typical "interest consumption", although thanks to the anchor's explanation, consumers have the urge to buy books, but in fact, the magic weapon of live selling books to stimulate consumers' interest is price.
The most common way to sell books in the live broadcast room is such as "free shipping for 9.9 yuan in seckill", "it's a pity to lose the books that can't be sold", "500,000 books are sold to less than 10 yuan", "100,000 books for 1 yuan" and so on. The ultra-low-priced "one-yuan book" may be the key to driving users to buy more than 2 million books a day on Douyin.
For users who do not have daily reading habits, spending a few dollars to buy a book, whether it is to decorate the bookshelf or pass the time, is obviously very cost-effective, but if it costs tens or hundreds of yuan to buy a book, you may have to think twice. However, unlike e-books, which have infinitely reduced marginal costs, physical books have costs such as copyright, printing, paper, logistics, warehousing, etc., so the "free shipping of 9.9 yuan for the whole site" in the live broadcast of books is basically equivalent to losing money and making money.
"Kochi people who have daily reading habits often have the habit of actively looking for good books, rather than passively accepting the recommendation of anchors, and this part of the population with relatively high purchasing power is the most difficult group to penetrate in live broadcast book sales, and it is also the basic market for books to sell at a higher price," said a person in the publishing industry, "but it is not easy to break this circle of live book sales." The channels that can provide Kochi people with active book selection include e-commerce platforms such as JD.com, Dangdang, and Taobao.
At present, the main consumer groups of short video live broadcast book sales are mainly some users with a clear purpose, such as Bao Ma, out of the psychology of "chicken baby", they will take advantage of the live broadcast to buy a large number of books at a low price. In today's "anxious" social environment, some young users will also have the need to buy psychological and motivational books.
If it is still limited to the original book market, how can we talk about incremental sales of books through short video live broadcasts?