Welcome to the penultimate Better Books post.
Raincoast publicist Dan Wagstaff and I are having an on-going discussion about books and technology, which will no doubt continue tomorrow at BookExpo Canada, publishing’s annual trade show.
Here is our question for this week:
With the shrinking space for media coverage of books is the best way to market now through making a splash with innovative marketing campaigns?
How can that be done cost effectively with the small budgets allotted to marketing and publicity?
Dan says:
Innovative marketing campaigns are very short term to me. Yes you need to be innovative –- you always need to be innovative –- but the words “innovative marketing campaign” are just like publishing shorthand for cheap, flashy and ineffective.
Take something like the Craig Davidson The Fighter boxing match. I am probably the only person in publishing who didn’t think it was a brilliant idea (it is nominated for a CBA award by the way). To me it was just something that publishing types (and their friends) thought was cool. It got TONS of column inches in TO but the book has only done ok. Penguin might tell you it’s done more ok than it would’ve done without the punch-up and they’d probably be right –- it’s just that the numbers are so pitifully small it’s hard to work up the will to live, let alone get excited about it.
For those of you who don’t know, Craig Davidson engaged in a punching match with another author to promote his book The Fighter. Craig is a regular guy. The pre-match featured Craig’s publicist in the ring. Another regular guy. It was quite the spectacle and got a lot of press for Penguin and the book. So much attention that I think it was effective for that reason. As a publicity stunt it tapped into the “Fight Club” culture at the time, it did something that was totally different than a couple of cocktails and some light jazz.
In regards to not selling books, we’ll that is the ultimate financial goal, but telling stories is the true goal. The Fighter boxing match certainly gave the publishing industry new stories to tell about itself, which in turn were told in the media to readers.
Only measuring sales as the return on investment for any marketing plan is misguided. That’s why I think we need to start measuring campaigns in terms of good content, user participation, engagement, and a viral effect.
I think Dan would agree with me on that.
Dan says,
To be effective of course you need to be innovative, but, as I suggested earlier, it is also about getting the basics right –- being smart, knowing your market and getting your numbers right, mailing out galleys to book review editors EARLY (getting galleys in the first place in some cases!), making sure you follow up, working with the media, getting the books in store on time, making sure the bookstores are complying with co-op. PUBLISHING BETTER BOOKS. THEN worrying about innovative marketing.
We’ve talked about this a few times now [Monique and Dan] and I think the Japanese car industry, notably Toyota, is a really interesting model for publishing. There was a great article in the New York Times a couple of months discussing Toyota’s big innovation. It wasn’t innovating inside the cars themselves, fiddling with the extras, it was revolutionizing how cars were made in the first place. The manufacturing innovations enabled Toyota to produce an affordable quality product, whilst being flexible to consumer demand. I would say there is a certain amount the book industry could learn from that!
Second question for this week:
Book trailers and more visually stimulating multi-media marketing:
Does this detract from the actual product for sale or is it an effective way to entice the potential reader to purchase the book?
Dan says:
I don’t know who watches “book trailers” and the ones I have seen have been universally bad. In the same way books are not music, they are not movies either. Trailers aren’t a particularly cost effective way of advertising given you have to create them from scratch and they’re not really advertising your product in the same way as movie trailers advertise movies.I mean if you have the right title and you can do something interesting that looks professional, great –- do it.
A more cost effective option is probably author interview videos or podcasts …
Honestly though, I’m more interested in user-driven content –- getting the readers to make movies about the book etc.
BookShorts is one example of the book trailers Dan is talking about. I’ve seen a couple and I think the ones that are short are better than the longer movie-trail style shorts. Maybe that’s personal preference. I don’t mind investing a minute or two watching a video clip. I’d rather watch an ad about books than one about socks or toothpaste.
I agree though, the stuff that readers and fans create is always much more interesting in the long run than the stuff that marketing companies produce. It’s more genuine at least. The catch-22 is that fans can be spurred on to create their own ads or videos when the corporate-produced ones are really bad or when they are really good. We need either excellent models to follow or horrible moulds to break.
I’m tired of the questions about tight budgets though. If you want to sell your stuff, people need to know that it’s available to buy. This is the basic concept of sales and marketing. If you are producing stuff and not spending any money on getting it into stores or into the hands of reviewers (paper, radio, tv, internet) or advertising well to consumers, are you surprised that your book sales are down?
To echo Dan, we need to publish books that are worth reading. We need to find ways to connect readers to books and authors. And we need to be much better at doing both.
Maybe Dan and I will put up some cost-effective marketing plans next week as our final post.
Thanks for reading.
Better Books—a conversation in multiple parts:
* Introduction
* Part 1. Market challenges.
* Part 2. The music industry and the book industry.
* Part 3. We go on a bit, discussing what we’ve learned.
* Part 4. Ebooks and POD.
* Part 5. POS materials.
* Part 6. Marketing plans.
