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.

Strictly Me

In my last post I speculated that the blurb for the book Click might have been written with keywords in mind. Today I checked my Google Analytics statstics and saw that I had a visit to the blog from someone who put "Mark Ramprakash" into Google.

I think this confirms my suspicions that the whole art of blurb (and blog) writing should be about including as many popular keywords as possible.

Look out for future posts on Barack Obama and Paris Hilton and the effect of their books on the publishing industry.

Click

I saw this book Click the other day in a train station WHSmith. Having just published a book on a related subject I was intrigued enough to pick it up.

The back cover blurb starts with what would normally be 3 bullet points (except there are no bullets.) They are as follows:

British teenagers furiously search for "prom dresses" and "limousines" in advance of their end-of-year school balls.

A correct prediction, several weeks in advance of the final show, that Mark Ramprakash would be the winner of Strictly Come Dancing season 4.

Internet user behaviour around visits to the Arctic Monkeys' website from social networks and search engines drive the band to the top of the album chart.

These 3 statements don't make any sense to me. Do they make sense to you? On the face of it they don't tell me anything I might not have guessed. They certainly don't tell me anything I might care about and they really don't tell me much about the book - unless the book is about conspiracies on the internet - but I don't think it is.

I'm tempted to suggest that both the book and the blurb are about keyword searches - Mark Ramprakash, Strictly Come Dancing, Arctic Monkeys and Prom (mistyped as Porn?) but who knows. I doubt the blurb was written by the author but he must have approved it. Anyway I got no further which just goes to show the importance of getting the blurb right. I think I'm probably interested in the subject of the book but already my reading experience is off-putting and I haven't even opened it yet.

I've lots of sympathy though for the poor marketing junior who probably did write this. I used to have write blurbs in the past (and occasionally still do if we're really desperate) and I am rubbish at it. However I don't think I ever produced anything as bad as this. It is a real skill and an underestimated one.

The Estate We're In

4th Estate are coming up to 25 years old. Congratulations. They've published some fine books. In celebration they've created a truly beautiful animated film featuring their books.



Goodness knows what it cost - but I hope it was paid for out of the publicity budget rather than the marketing one as I'm sure it will get lots of publicity but will it sell any books? I doubt it. Oh to have this sort of budget to waste on a celebration.

It did however lead me to what I presume is the 4th Estate's corporate blog - rather confusingly called 5th Estate.* This may be worth a look if you're into that sort of thing.

* Somewhat late it occurs to me that if The Press is the 4th Estate then is the blogosphere the 5th Estate? I've not heard anyone suggest that but presume it is the reason for this blog's title - in which case it is quite clever IMHO.