bEST SEllER The digital era has resulted in a paradigm shift in the book publishing industry, reducing the bricks-and-mortar bookstore’s role in the marketing equation. Now publishing companies including Random House, Scholastic and St. Martin’s Press are stepping up their digital efforts to market their stories directly to the next generation of readers. By ChRistine BiRkneR | stAff Writer
cbirkner@ama.org
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How we read—and where we buy what we read—has changed drastically over the past two decades. It wasn’t too long ago that mega-bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders were expanding, leveraging their ability to serve as gathering places for avid readers by adding cafés and comfy nooks, and beefing up their portfolios with music and movie sections, and increasingly inclusive newsstands. In the mid-1990s, the battle was between those mega-chains and the mom-and-pop booksellers that they were putting out of business. Then came Amazon.
That seismic, digitally driven shift in the book business was just the start of the evolution of the industry. We now find ourselves in the era of e-books. Borders has been shuttered. Barnes & Noble recently announced plans to cull its retail outlets by one-third in the next 10 years. E-readers and tablets have replaced consumers’ bookshelves, bearing the weight of innumerable volumes in a matter of bytes. To get consumers’ attention in this new age of reader enlightenment, retailers no longer serve as the primary B-to-C marketing channel for new titles. Publishers have had to step out of their predominantly B-to-B marketing roles, pushing beyond encouraging retailers to carry and promote their new titles, and connecting with the readers themselves.
Earning a Spot on the Shelf
In the pre-digital era, the marketing of a best seller on the publisher’s end was mostly B-to-B. Back then, publishers invested in some consumer marketing efforts, such as distributing press releases, running print ads and arranging book reviews in The New York Times, but they left much of the consumer marketing to bookstores. While those traditional tactics are still in play, the digital era has changed publishers’ marketing scope, connecting the big book brands directly to end users. “Increasingly, the business is oriented toward engagement and transaction. Before, a marketing plan was, ‘We’ll tell Barnes & Noble that we’re taking out a quarter-page ad in The New
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York Times Book Review, and that’s going to get Barnes & Noble excited enough about the book to get behind it and promote it.’ It [used to be] an indirect signaling to retailers and now it’s a conversation directly with fans. It takes the publisher closer to being able to influence the transaction in real time,” says Peter McCarthy, founder and principal consultant at New York-based book marketing consultancy McCarthy Digital, who previously worked as a marketing executive at Random House and Penguin. “There’s a more direct-to-consumer orientation,” agrees Jeff Dodes, executive vice president of marketing and digital media strategy at New York-based St. Martin’s Press, a publishing house owned by Macmillan whose authors include The Da Vinci Code’s Dan Brown and suspense novelist Stephen Coonts. “Before, we had the relationship with the retailer and then they had the relationship with the consumer. Now we need to have a relationship with the consumer, as well.” This paradigm shift in publishers’ marketing strategies is a result of the increasingly social and digitally minded consumer base, as well as the new distribution models for publishers—as the book industry has now been cemented as, first and foremost, an e-commerce-oriented business—and the resulting major shifts in pricing and competition. E-books, often blamed for the book industry’s latest evolution, have been less of a factor, marketing-wise. (See sidebar on page 45 for more on e-books.) “The way people now get information has had more of an influence in terms of the way we’re now marketing our books,” says Amanda Close, senior vice president of digital marketplace
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“There’s a more direct-toconsumer orientation. Before, we had the relationship with the retailer and then they had the relationship with the consumer. Now we need to have a relationship with the consumer, as well.” Jeff Dodes
St. Martin’s Press
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development at New York-based Random House Inc., owned by Gütersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann AG. Adds Dodes: “It’s less about how e-books have proliferated … and more about how people are communicating and what channels are out there. It’s much more of a digital approach. Even internally, there’s confusion where digital marketing equals trying to sell e-books, versus doing a print ad [means] we’re trying to sell physical books. That’s not at all how I look at it. There’s lots of different marketing levers you need to pull. I don’t care how people want their book.”
Engaging With an Audience
To pull the right marketing levers, publishers focus first on audience development, using more sophisticated consumer data to find potential readers now than ever before. Random House, which now accounts for a quarter of Englishlanguage book sales after its merger with Penguin Group in October 2012 and publishes titles such as the blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey series, trains its marketers in social media management and uses social media listening tools like Radian6 to better position its titles, Close says. Random House also has beefed up its investment in consumer preference studies to determine how to allocate marketing dollars in a more sophisticated way. “We have access to incredible amounts of data and tools that, five to eight years ago, we didn’t have. We’ve done a lot more
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surveying, focus groups, online panels and segmenting. As we have more sophisticated tools, it’s really the cornerstone of how you position an author, how you find them new readers if they’re an established author or how you break someone into the marketplace if they’re a new author. Consumer insights are really critical to what we do as publishers and we’ve seen all of our publishing divisions, in the last couple years, become much more sophisticated in terms of doing that work,” she says. “Now we can pulse our campaigns in a new way and change things mid-flight.” For example, the marketing plan for Defending Jacob, a suspense novel by William Landay that centers on a district attorney defending his teenage son in a murder case, shifted when Random House found, via social media listening tools and online focus groups, that the book was resonating with a different audience than expected. “The team ran some limited advertising and PR, then listened to the response. Although it was a thriller, it was resonating much more with moms and people who were thinking about the parenting aspect of the story. They ended up spending more money, then, targeting moms when they could’ve gone very masculine. They actually changed the copy in the ads because of this,” Close says. David Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision, an Atlanta-based marketing consultancy that produces marketing materials for the book publishing industry, says that online information has become gospel for authors and publishers. “It shows if they’re getting any traction and whether their marketing is working. The
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old model was a more broad approach. It was far less targeted. You were throwing it out and hoping people would respond. Now everything’s becoming far more targeted.” New York-based Scholastic Inc., publisher of the Hunger Games and Harry Potter series, invests heavily in analytics, as well. “The power of digital lies in analytics and we review the analytics constantly, shifting ad dollars for active campaigns as well as informing future campaigns,” says Stacy Lellos, Scholastic’s vice president of marketing and multiplatform publishing. Scholastic also puts digitally driven insights to work in its R&D process, using existing online reader feedback to determine the content of future titles. For its children’s mystery series, The 39 Clues, Scholastic created a website with an interactive message board that features messages from the series’ main characters. “It allow[s] readers to feel like the characters are friends. We had the characters, for instance, post New Year’s resolutions and ask for the resolutions of kids on the message boards. Characters post codes that they need help cracking or ask for theories as to what their enemies in the book are up to. All of this contributes to an audience that feels more engaged by the characters,” Lellos says. “Because readers … get into heated debates about their favorite characters and what they want to happen, we tailor upcoming books to exactly what the fans want. We found out that the fans got really riled up about one of the secondary characters … so his role has grown in the books until he’s almost a third main character.”
“Consumer insights are really critical to what we do as publishers and we’ve seen all of our publishing divisions, in the last couple of years, become much more sophisticated in terms of doing that work. Now we can pulse our campaigns in a new way and change things mid-flight.” Amanda Close Random House Inc.
‘Creating Content About Content’
Such content marketing carried out via social media is an important marketing tactic. Six months prior to a book’s publication, for instance, St. Martin’s Press’ marketing team determines all of the book’s themes, scenes, character elements and relationships to other characters in literature, and compiles a timeline of questions, comments, images and ideas into a Facebook and Twitter posting schedule that is given to each author for posting. “We’re creating content about our content to engage consumers,” Dodes says. Scholastic also creates content calendars for its social media sites, including its Hunger Games Facebook page, and has launched Facebook pages dedicated to certain genres, including a page called “This Is Teen” to market all of its young-adult titles. It hosts Twitter parties for various titles, as well. A January Twitter party with Baby-Sitters Club author Ann M. Martin, in which fans asked questions, answered trivia questions, and entered to win signed books and a signed Baby-Sitters Club director’s chair, reached 64,000 people and generated 360,000 impressions, according to Lellos.
Scholastic’s Harry Potter Reading Club website is designed to further engage young readers.
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Top: An ad for Barnes & Noble’s Nook focuses on the pleasure of curling up with a good book. Bottom: Random House partnered with Politico to sell its titles directly to consumers via an e-commerce “bookstore” on Politico’s site.
In March, Scholastic will conduct a “Great Girls Day” Twitter chat tied into the publication of Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality, by Elizabeth Eulberg. “We know that teens love interacting with the authors, and providing the forum where they can do that builds author and brand recognition, which leads to future sales by that author or in that series,” Lellos says. Just as many publishers have been including book-groupfriendly questions and character development information in the back of their books for years, publishers now are creating digital and social-media-oriented tools to enhance the reading experience. To appeal to parents and teachers, Scholastic created online digital educator tools designed for use in the classroom, including smart board activities, Q&As and discussion guides for
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its Infinity Ring history series. In fall 2012, it launched The Harry Potter Reading Club, a website for teachers and parents with activities designed to bring kids into the Harry Potter franchise, kicking it off with a live webcast with author J.K. Rowling. In 2011, Random House acquired Smashing Ideas Inc., an app developer, to create new digital products associated with its titles, including a Pat the Bunny children’s book app. “We’ve really used them in partnership with every division, at this point, to develop different kinds of digital products, whether it’s a really fantastic e-book or an app that’s relevant [to a book],” Close says. Random House launched a Facebook app in January called BookScout, which provides readers with personalized book recommendations based on their Facebook timelines and recommends popular titles published by both Random House and non-Random House imprints that readers can “like,” share and add to their bookshelves within the app, presenting best sellers from all publishers broken out by category. The publisher can then track which titles consumers are buzzing about via the app’s analytics. “It’s an easy way for people to see what their friends are reading. Word of mouth and specifically recommendations from friends and family really drive people’s decisions to buy. We knew people were talking about books on Facebook, but we wanted to make it easier for us to read the information and understand what consumers are talking about,” Close says. The app serves a purpose similar to online book forums such as Goodreads, Figment, Teenreads and Wattpad but offers Random House a chance to get the word out on its own titles and
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compile the results. Publishers also build websites around genres associated with their books. Like BookScout, these sites often include titles from other publishers. St. Martin’s Press controls two Web communities: HeroesandHeartbreakers.com, focusing on romance titles, and CriminalElement.com, focusing on mysteries and suspense thrillers. St. Martin’s Press also chartered a book club with SheKnows.com, a women’s lifestyle site, to promote its women’s fiction and romance titles. Publishers’ digital strategies extend beyond social tools to include direct-to-consumer sales efforts. Random House has a partnership with the political website Politico to run Politico Bookshelf, a bookstore within the site. “We’re trying to reach those readers without assuming that we have to drive them into our world. We said to Politico: ‘We’ll build a bookstore, we’ll brand it so it looks like Politico, but you’ll have this great addition to your ecosystem of having books on current affairs and politics that fill out the editorial representation. It adds authority.’ For us, it was great because we get to put our books in front of readers who are interested in those topics. As rich as our list is, the reason Politico wanted to work with us is we offer them the entire market. It’s a great opportunity for us to reach readers where they live, where they’re spending time,” Close says.
The E-book Explosion E-books—which as of January 2013 average $8 per title versus $28 for a hardcover, according to Digital Book World, an educational platform for the publishing industry—are quickly gaining ground. Revenue from e-books, not including children’s books, exceeded that of hardcover books for the first time in the first quarter of 2012, according to the Association of American Publishers. E-books generated 21.2% of industry revenue in 2012 and are projected to grow to 31.8% of revenue by 2017, with demand for traditional books continuing to support the industry until 2017, according to IBIS World.
Promoting the Act Itself
Beyond the changes to book offerings and the way that people consume them, publishers have another considerable marketing challenge: other forms of entertainment. With the proliferation of cheap and accessible entertainment options—DVR-ed TV programming, Web-streamed movies and the like—publishers are finding it necessary to try to influence consumer behavior by promoting the act of reading, itself, rather than just the actual reading material. This is a problem, especially among younger consumers, Lellos says. “Kids are only a tap away from choosing something other than our books, so we have to work harder to make what we have more compelling. But at the heart of it, it is about a great story, great characters and great writing.” Seventy-eight percent of Americans read at least one book from October 2011 to October 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, but publishers still need to work to find new audiences, experts say. “In recent years, the actual percentage of adult readers who buy books has been stagnant or declining,” says Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, a Rockville, Md.-based research firm for the media and publishing industries. “Our research tells us that most people … don’t have much of a commitment to reading and it’s very scattered. The industry needs to acknowledge that they not only need to sell a book, but sell the activity of reading in order to get more people to join the fold. Over 100 million adults in this country didn’t buy a single book in 2012 and if the industry wants to raise their fortunes, that’s where they need to start looking.” Retailers including Barnes & Noble and Amazon recently have been focusing on the act of reading in their marketing
strategies, airing TV spots that focus on the pleasure of curling up with a good book. Publishers are taking similar tacks. Random House and Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press’ parent company, participate in World Book Night, an annual event started in 2012 that raises awareness of reading. “We’re competing with other forms of media, in terms of both share of time and share of wallet. Are people going to buy a book or spend their time at a movie theater? We’re aware that people’s time is very valuable and they’re going to make a decision based on what they think is right for their lifestyle,” Close says, “so we’re active in terms of promoting the concept of reading and how valuable it can be.” Changing consumers’ behavior is daunting, of course, so to get their existing customer bases to invest in their titles over others, publishers have to concentrate on the biggest marketing engine out there, experts say: a peer’s recommendation. “Word of mouth ultimately creates best sellers,” McCarthy says. “The only way someone recommends a book to someone else is if they’ve read it.” m
•com For more on marketing in the book industry, check out the March 7 issue of Marketing News’ e-newsletter, Marketing News Exclusives, at MarketingPower.com/newsletters.
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