How Castle Publications Created New Digital Revenue Streams

While some publishers and training firms resist growing demand for digital and mobile access to their content, others recognize a substantial new opportunity to grow revenue. Castle Publications in one such innovator. In this post, we'll explore how they translated 35 years of legal print publishing expertise to into new digital revenue streams.

Company Background

For over 35 years, Castle Publications has presented expertise to HR officials, practitioners, and attorneys. Castle has delivered their expertise in over 20 books and at popular seminars focused on the employment law field, including topics such as wage-hour, employment, labor, discrimination, wrongful discharge and benefits laws.

Key Challenges

For years, Castle Publications has recognized a business opportunity and created multiple channels to deliver their legal expertise. In the past several years, however, it became apparent there was an additional opportunity they were foregoing by continuing with the status quo of delivering their training books in traditional printed formats.

They started to seek solution that would both protect their intellectual property and revenue streams while being simple to manage and access. But they were discouraged by the lack of control other solutions provided over their content and by how large of a monetary cut traditional providers wanted.

Creating New Digital Revenue Streams

Project Goals and Requirements

In identifying a partner to help implement digital and mobile materials, Castle Publications had several key requirements:

1. To protect their current print-based revenue streams, it was essential that Castle maintained control of their intellectual property when it was distributed through digital channels.
2. Given the reference nature of Castle Publishing's content, it was important for users to quickly locate specific terms and topics.
3. The overall user experience had to be simple and pleasing.

In the view of Jane Elliott, Castle Publications Director of Publications & Operations, "“Consumers today are tech savvy and expect their partners to stay modern and deliver digital solutions to content.”

Deploying the Solution

SharedBook’s built-in flexibility and control features were an ideal fit for Castle’s goals. Jane Elliott explains, “Many factors were considered when choosing a partner including distribution costs, fees, control over the distribution process, and flexibility in book versioning. We had to have a solution that was simple for our customers to access while our content remained completely secure. ”

SharedBook provided value beyond Castle’s expectations with its ability to deliver usage analytics and an improved user experience. Castle’s materials are consolidated into comprehensive editions that can reach close to 1000 pages of content. SharedBook’s mobile apps, web reader, and search functionality enable Castle’s customers to quickly access content and display comprehensive search results, thereby improving the user experience.

Business Impacts

A Complete, Affordable Solution with Strong ROI

Jane Elliot goes on to explain, “"SharedBook, unlike other vendors, gives us the flexibility to easily make changes or enhancements to publications and push those changes out to the readers in real time. We did an extensive ROI analysis and compared multiple solutions to the SharedBook platform. SharedBook was hands down the most powerful tool and was highly affordable in comparison to the less complete solutions.” SharedBook stood above the rest in terms of data insights, controllability, flexible sales models and speed to roll out.

Castle turned to SharedBook, not only to protect its intellectual property, but also to grow their business. Castle has experienced real results by implementing SharedBook. Sales have grown by 20% as a direct result of implementing SharedBook’s secure mobile solution.