Doubleday‘s associate director of online marketing, Jeffrey Yamaguchi, opened up to Book Business about relaunching the publisher’s website with WordPress, “[simulating] the look and usability of a blog while maintaining Doubleday’s integrity and standards as a publishing house.” Indeed, the new Doubleday.com has the two-column structure of a blog, but it’s front-loaded with information about new releases, including video clips, readers’ guides, and collations of media and blogosphere mentions. (Second-level pages for specific imprints like Flying Dolphin Press or Doubleday Business showcase cover galleries of recent releases.)
“We have no illusions that this site is a major destination site,” Yamaguchi says of the redesign. “It’s a source for information about Doubleday Publishing Group authors and things that are going on.” The look and feel, he explains, are primarily a way to break out of the old-school format of just slapping catalog copy online and hoping that’ll be enough information to get by—but ultimately, even as they make their online homes more attractive publishers need to “go where the people already are” if they really want to build their audiences. It’s a point that’s worth repeating: Publishers counting on the Internet to help them move beyond the current economic holding patterns into real and sustained growth are going to need to learn to measure the right metrics.