Essay of Martin de Beaune

The book I chose to be treated is The Complete Guide to Book Marketing. This Revised Edition from the original book has been made in 2003. Its author is David Cole: a marketing consultant and writer with thirty years of experience in the publishing business. He a former marketing director and runs his own publishing company (Bay Tree Publishing). He also consults with numerous small and mid size publishing companies. He lives in Berkeley, California.

The book’s Publishing House is: Allworth Press, 10 East 23^rd Street. New York, NY 10010 (www.allworth.com)

Introduction

New markets have opened while others have shrunk and the industry has taken a giant steps toward globalization. As these changes continue to take place, the book publishing industry looks over its collective shoulder at the world of electronic commerce and information exchange. David Cole tries to read the future of the book.

In our rapidly changing world, all changes influence the daily decisions of every publisher, whether small or large:

• How much to invest in a project?
• Which manuscripts to choose?
• How many to print?
• How and where to find buyers for particular works?

This book is most useful for everyone involved in book publishing, from entry-level marketing assistant at large houses to their executives bosses, and for small and midsize publishers, authors and self-publishers. It tries to offer a good introduction to basic book marketing techniques within our changing world. But in a world that is changing as much as ours, what worked this morning may not work this afternoon…

Book marketing industry has its own set of conventions and special vocabulary. This book introduces to this world. It also helps the people who don’t already know the difference between marketing and sales.

Book marketing is, after all, neither wholly different from marketing other products or services, nor wholly the same. Certain basic principles apply, albeit with variations, but anyway publishing houses needs to find readers and more specifically book buyers. The marketing job is to find those people, so they must have the ability to reach out and touch an audience. David Cole tries to give to lecturers the key to succeed.

The main idea I get from this books is that the book marketing is not so far from the main marketing rules. I am really interested in the David Cole’s experience, so I share it with you:

• “I don’t think you will find any voodoo trick or magic formula for developing an effective marketing plan.”
• “When I’m called upon for marketing help, my first response is to look at the books and try to visualise the potential buyers. Who are they? Where can they be found? What do they want? I also spend some time drawing out the author and/or publisher about the book and its audience. My second step is to go through a checklist that includes all the techniques and markets described in the following chapters to decide which might be applied.”
• “I do also try to think outside the box.”
• “I have found over the years that some of my best ideas come from others, especially those with expertise in other subjects and different markets. I would like to emphasize the importance of being open to new possibilities, to listening to authors, who know their audience, and to exploring new markets.”
• “Experience helps a lot.”

The author titled the introduction of his book “marketing is everything” because he thinks it is important to emphasize that marketing really does touch everything you do. From the book you choose to write and publish, to your choice of packaging, to the title you give it, to the price you charge.

I completely agree with him, but I am disappointed because he doesn’t give us a lot… His main advises about book marketing are following. I organized it as logical as I felt it.

4P – Advices in book marketing

ORGANIZATION

Create a budget and marketing plan and put them on paper. You begin this plan with two basic piece of information: your target audience and your sales expectations. Nevertheless, it is also crucial to be enthusiastic, optimistic and creative. The marketing work can begin its work on the book a full year before the scheduled publication. You should get as much feedback as you can about whether you can realistically make the number you project (financial goals).

If you spend more money on marketing, your sales should increase. The trick, especially when you’re marketing books, is to make you marketing cost-effective. Rarely do you sell more than one copy of a book to a consumer, and it’s even difficult to sell several different books to one buyer. Obviously this is a goal that cannot be reached by the marketing alone. So how do you decide how much to spend, and on what? There is no one simple answer. You need to make some projections and calculations and some guesses.

PRODUCT

Create a package that attracts the buyers: enhance the value of a book through attractive physical packaging. Questions of packaging design can influence the profitability.  Nevertheless, packaging choices, which have become increasingly complex over the last ten or twenty years, have become increasingly important as physical books meet ever greater competition from electronic media.

People choose books by their titles, especially nonfiction books. Publishers are concerned that potential readers know exactly what a book is about. They tend to rely on a clear descriptive title to attract the attention of potential buyers. A really good title can and does value to the publishing process, attracting readers with a concept or phrase that speaks to their interest, needs or desires.

While most people are happy to repeat the adage that you can’t tell a book by its cover, there is certainly no doubt that people do in fact buy a books because of their covers. A more attractive cover and interior design may or may not cost more, but again adds value. Design is an important piece in the marketing strategy so – Make it legible – Make it clear when reproduce in black and white – Make it legible when small – Make it clear in a computer screen -

PRICE

Most successful publishers today draw revenues from a lot of sources: foreign sales, subsidiary rights, specialty markets, sales direct to consumers, and college course adoptions, as well as the well book trade.

PLACEMENT

While a bookstore seems like the most logical place to sell a book, there is also a lot of different ways. The difficulty is rooted partly in the nature of the bookstore, partly in historic trade practices, partly in recent changes in the books industry, and partly in the numbers of books published annually and the ensuing competition for readers.

If the library market is important to you, make the effort to contact representatives of library wholesalers and keep in touch with them.

The internet (website): You don’t want to disappoint any of these people. Your site should be set up to answer their questions as well as feed their desire to buy or read what you have to offer. In addition to providing information, you should make every effort to take advantage of the internet’s interactive capacities.

PROMOTION

Advertising: Encourage orders from libraries and bookstores, support attention from reviewers, build publisher identity, and attract potential readers to a new title… As any marketing effort, understanding your target is essential. To be effective, you need to have a clear message. Because advertising is read with less attention and less credibility, it is most effective as a reminder.

Every time you sell a book you should be selling your whole line of books, and one effective way to do this is by placing a catalogue at the back of every book.

Public relations refer to a variety of functions and techniques for cultivating a favourable corporate image and a memorable presence. In book publishing, the term is usually used synonymously with “publicity” and “media relations”. Its purpose, first and foremost, is to get the attention of readers, through the media, for books on a title-by-title basis.

The internet (website): You don’t want to disappoint any of these people. Your site should be set up to answer their questions as well as feed their desire to buy or read what you have to offer. In addition to providing information, you should make every effort to take advantage of the internet’s interactive capacities.

And word-of-mouth is a fantastic/magic way to promote your products.

Conclusion

This book is treating about the American way of publishing books. This may be too selective. Even if USA are precursor in every domain, there is a lot of differences between the European and the American market (and I guess so with the African or Asian market). I can feel a lot of differences and I may not understand all examples related to American enterprises.

Movies didn’t kill books, TV didn’t kill books, and computers didn’t kill books. Nevertheless, the digital age is affecting the role of books, the look of books, the look of books, the way books are used, and the way books are marketed. The ways in which publishing is done is affected with all this changes.

The book is talking about the author/publisher relations (publishers and authors working together). Authors often don’t know what publishers do or how they operate, and so they don’t even know what questions to ask. Publishers on the other hand, struggling with the concerns of business in an ever more competitive environment, forget that the authors with whom they work know little, if anything about books are marketed. So this is not only Book marketing, but also Book management.

Only some of the marketing strategies described here will be appropriate and/or cost-effective. It is a theoretical book.