How (not) to Market Books

Emma Barnes from Snowbooks has been moonlighting on the excellent How Publishing Really Works blog. In her post Emma basically says that retail promotions sell books and consumer marketing and advertisements don't work and she claims to have the evidence to prove it.

I basically agree with Emma, though with some reservations. Emma is talking about 'trade' books and in particular ones that are available to retailer promotions. Not all books are like this. I see Snowbooks publish on martial arts and cycling as well as fiction and would expect that advertising these books in the specialist press and on specialist websites would show more sales than any retail promotion - if one were available.

Some publishers don't have the option of retailer promotions or indeed mainstream press coverage generally because their books are more specialist or technical. In these cases reviews and advertisments can be the only way to alert your readership of the existence of your books.

What I think is interesting about Emma's post though is her business-like approach to this question. She tries new things and crucially gathers evidence as to their effectivness. I don't think enough publishers try this. A few years ago when I was working for one of the country's largest publishers, one of the marketing managers decided to mark the publication of a major book by producing baseball caps and temporary rub-on tattoos featuring the title and a device from the cover. I don't know how many baseball caps were made, I'd guess 100, but I do know thousands of the tattoos were printed. When I left the company a year later nearly all the caps and tattoos were still in boxes on the top of the cupboard in the marketing manager's office (though I've still got a couple of the tattoos someowhere). No one had thought how they were going to distribute these marketing pieces and to whom. What I couldn't understand was why they were allowed to do this and why no one asked 'how many extra sales do you think these caps and tattoos will make us?'.

As a result I generally ask our marketing manager how many sales they expect to make from any advertising they do even though I know this is an unfair question and they hate it. However it is good to focus the mind and at the very least I think they should know how many additional sales will need to be made just to pay for the advertisment.

For example, just recently our marketing manager placed an advertisment in a pretty high circulation magazine. The ad cost £600 for a quarter page. The book is priced at £19.95 and our average discount is approx 38% on it. This means we'll take home on average £12.37. Subtract another 10% from this for distribution costs and 10% for royalties and ignore any returns, that gives us an income of £9.90. Subtract another £4.00 (approx) for the unit cost and we should make £5.90 per book. That means we'll need to sell an extra 102 copies just to pay for the advertisement - and that can be a tall order. But this is a moderately high price book with a moderately low average discount. Do the sums again for a trade paperback at £7.99 and 50% and you see you've got to start selling hundreds.