Publishr

The new face of the publishing industry

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Publishng: Ami Greko on PR and Marketing

PR campaigns for books are getting complicated.

The main goal is the same as it ever was: to sell books. What’s becoming painfully clear is that we don’t exactly know what coverage it is that does that. 

To all of the talented publicists out there who just yelled, NPR! The New York Times! Good Morning America!, and all the authors who started yelling, Oprah!—I know. These are outlets that move books. Most of the time. 

I mean, let’s be honest here. Everyone has that story of the author who showed up on a morning show, even after media training, and it didn’t move the needle at all. Or the excellent off-the-book-page features in major media across the country that absolutely should have sold books, but somehow just never translated. 

And let’s discuss that other hard question: how do you even get your author considered for one of these outlets? Assuming his last name is not Sulzberger (Brian, if you took your wife’s name, call me ASAP). The answer to this varies, depending on your size and your muscle, but for a group like us—or any smaller author—I don’t think it’s one really excellent pitch, even if that pitch goes directly into the inbox or ear canal of a major journalist.

So in a landscape where securing a major media outlet always made a difference, it made a lot of sense to throw all of your weight behind that sort of outreach, even for a tiny, scrappy outlet like us. But now? To borrow a metaphor from Cory Doctorow (who I think stole it from nature, so no worries), I want our PR to be like dandelion seeds. I want us to go as many places as possible, and see if we can put down roots.

Which is why you’re hearing from the publicist so early in the game. Experimentation takes time, and once you’re successful, word-of-mouth needs a chance to accumulate before it makes an impact. I’d like for our outreach to start early.

So, Publishng team, since we’re all working together to put this ebook out there, get ready for a modified author questionnaire, which I’ve decided to call the Partner Questionnaire. There are just three questions on it: 

1) Where would you like to see coverage for this project, in your most hopeful moments? What angle of the project do you think that outlet would be of the most interest to them? 

2) Which outlets do you think are especially vital or good for this project? What partnerships? 

3) What outreach can you personally contribute to our PR efforts? For example, are you willing to write guest posts about your role in the project? Broker introductions? 

And readers: if you’re an outlet that would be hospitable to a dandelion seed, you can always reach me via email.

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Posted in Ami Greko PR marketing experimentation publishng
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Rethinking the Marketing Mix: Metadata as marketing priority by Laura Dawson

During this past ISBN Hour on Twitter (every Friday at noon Eastern), I was discussing the use of metadata as SEO. Along with Andy Weissberg at Bowker, I’d just given a presentation about this subject at Digital Book World’s Digitize Your Career editorial and marketing forum, and I was digesting what we’d discussed for those who couldn’t be there.

And one publisher asked me if I felt that a good metadata strategy was better than a straightforward PR campaign for any given book.

My response, at the time, was that it isn’t an either/or situation. You need both. But that got me thinking about the various factors in book marketing – what’s effective and necessary to get your books noticed.

1. A good book. Marketing can solve a lot of things. It cannot solve the problem of a book that is not useful or entertaining. The best books are, of course, both. But even one or the other is sufficient to establish a marketing campaign around.

2. Good metadata. Metadata describes the book. Most book shopping is done online these days – even if people are buying in a physical store, they are doing their research online. Metadata – title, author, ISBN, price, publisher, pub date, description, BISAC codes – is like a big neon sign directing consumers to the book. Without good metadata, you can have the best book in the world and nobody can find out about it. Metadata generates keywords. Those keywords are what your customers are typing into Google. Without good metadata, you’re leaving customers without what they want. It is the ultimate SEO strategy.

3. Word of mouth. This is the least tangible factor – the one that’s the hardest to generate and yet the most important. Creating a word-of-mouth campaign requires that you drop the hard-sell, and appeal to individuals. Is this cost-effective? Well…yes. In a phrase: ENGAGE THE INDIES. The best word-of-mouth comes from independent booksellers. Their livelihoods are on the line. They care passionately about books. If your book is good (see #1), they will sell the hell out of it.

4. Social media. This is word of mouth in another form. There are over 400 million people on Facebook. There are over 105 million people on Twitter. We don’t have any statistics for how many people read blogs, but Technorati indexes over 100 million blogs. The Internet is how people talk to one another when they are not face-to-face. It is how people find out about books. What gets tweeted, blogged about, and shared on Facebook gets indexed in Google. To opt out of social media marketing is to silence yourself and your message. And of course, underpinning social media marketing is…? A good metadata strategy so you can point buyers to where they can purchase the book. So you can use metadata for SEO. So you can track consumers’ responses.

5. Conventional PR campaigns. Yes, people still watch TV. They still read newspapers (albeit online – see #4). They pass a Barnes & Noble with a sign in the window that the author is coming to town. Terry Gross and Don Imus still book authors. These things are – still, even now – important. But without the other four firmly in place, this fifth strategy isn’t going to mean much.

The role of the book marketer is somewhat limited – she cannot control the quality of the book she’s given to market, obviously. She cannot control what booksellers think of the book – however entertaining and/or useful she may find it herself. She cannot control how virally the book will take off on the Internet. Two things she CAN control: how accurate and robust the metadata is, and how much she’s going to spend on a traditional PR campaign.

In the past, publishers sold books to bookstores, and people bought them and read them – and that was the conversation. With an exponential increase in the way people talk to one another, publishers are not dictating the conversation anymore. The marketing process has become democratized. The publisher is only in control of what she owns – the quality of the book she’s acquired, the quality of the metadata around the book, and the amount of money she’s going to spend on advertising. But just because you are not in control of the conversation, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enter it. Nobody likes being shouted at. Engage your booksellers. Engage your readers. Talk with them, not at them. And back up your conversation with what you can control.

Laura Dawson is a 20+ year veteran of the book industry, specializing in its technology issues. She has worked at Doubleday, Muze, Barnes & Noble.com, SirsiDynix, and as an independent consultant whose clients have included McGraw-Hill, Chuckwalla, Scholastic, Capstone Press, Cengage, Alibris, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and Bowker.

She lives in Brooklyn with her two daughters, and a hamster named Batman.

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Posted in marketing metadata Laura Dawson SEO word of mouth PR