Marketing Survey

Read to the end to find the surprising question

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My book proposal course starts in 2 (two) weeks! Time to commit!

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When dreaming up a product to sell, one would imagine that product-makers would think about the potential people who might buy the product. But with book publishing, the market is accounts, not people. More often than not they skip over the question of “who will want to read this?” to focus on another, less personal one: “which entity will want to sell this?”

“Which accounts will be interested?” is a question that is broken down into categories, including “nationals” (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), indies (indie bookstores, responsible for a much smaller fraction of total book sales than many might guess), libraries, “special sales” (museums, national parks, gift stores) and others, including, at Arcadia “SBT” or “scan-based trading,” such Walgreens and Ace Hardware.

Marketing to accounts is a very different way to sell products than marketing to people. It means spending money to have a booth at tradeshows, which might be sponsored by indie bookstores, or museums, of the American Library Association, or numerous other organizations. It might mean paying to have your book get better search results on Amazon, or for giveaways on Goodreads, or for instagram ads, or to send tiktokkers gift packages, offer indie bookstores co-op funds, or buying ads in Publishers Weekly. The money goes not to potential book buyers, but entities you are trying to sway to sell your book—which, of course, is the same thing you are doing—trying to sell your book.

All of these forms of paid marketing are very common, and you might be surprised to learn that many of the times you’ve seen something about a forthcoming book is due to someone paying someone else to show you the book. But, as is conventional wisdom amongst many in publishing, “marketing doesn’t work”—or, the ROI on many, many of these “spends” (I used “spend” as a noun in a work meeting recently and was terribly disappointed in myself) is very low. Publishers keep doing it in hopes the next time it will work, or because they fear sales will be even worse if they don’t, or because of that one time it did work a decade ago, or because it’s become part of being a “good literary citizen” to send some organizations sponsorship money year after year. Or, hey—maybe they have reliable data that is does work and the wisdom is wrong.

Marketing—which means, usually, something you pay for—is often connected to publicity—something means, usually, something you pitch, but is free. Publicity is probably more commonly understood by writers and readers and others not in publishing per se—it’s the endless emails sent to editors of book reviews, or NPR shows, or morning TV shows, in hopes a producer writes back, requests a galley, and perhaps, fingers crossed, later decides to talk about this book in a paper, website, radio, television. Publicity is also not focused on people, but instead of accounts, it focuses on media (“coverage").

I won’t be breaking any news when I note that a growing conventional wisdom within publishing is that “there is no book coverage left,” which is another way of saying publicity, or the work of publicists, is seeing a lower and lower ROI, as newspapers close and sections are disbanded.

So if marketing is a perilously uncertain process of sending money to organizations in hopes of gaining the attention of accounts, and publicity is an ever noisier place with increasingly fewer ears listening, how the hell do people hear about books? And how should publishers approach marketing with individuals, not entities, in mind?

This is where we get to social media, which is of course famously a way to connect to actual live human beings. And it is because social media is (in theory) about one person talking to another person that the dreaded “author platform” become an increasingly large factor in whether a publisher (or agent) will offer an author a contract. “Authors have to be able to sell books now” is this conventional wisdom, often misunderstood by disgruntled prospective authors as an abdication of the work a publisher should undertake, but is really (or also) about the the increasing difficulty, wrong-headedness, and shrinking possibilities of what most publishers conceive of as “marketing and publicity” as described above. Because social media is about people and a publisher cannot be a person, Citizens United notwithstanding.

BUT, one more new conversational wisdom: the power of social media is waning. In fact, it may never have had any power to sell copies; we just thought it did because we misread the data. Should a publisher, developing a marketing plan that relies less on middlemen accounts, and acknowledging shrinking publicity possibilities, double-down on social media, on author platforms, on paying titkokkers? That strikes me as possibly a very decade-ago thinking.

What would be decade-to-be thinking?

And wait—where do people find out about books anyway? Here I am, this deep into this newsletter, this deep into working in this business, asking the most basic question of all. And I have no idea what the answer might be!.For me, as a reader and not a publisher, it has been, of late, on social media, but more particularly, the social media posts of people who I know, having followed them for awhile, be they workers in books or not, share my reading tastes. It’s completely random. It’s not someone promoting their new book, or a publisher promoting their new release, or an “influencer” talking about their last book read. It’s “random person I vaguely know” mentioning, in a reply, that they really liked x or y. So I would not call this “social media” per se but more like the proverbial, golden “word of mouth.” But it’s also social media.

Is my experience typical? I asked Bluesky (social media)—"where did you find out about the last good book you read?” and the answer was very much the same as mine: a person casually mentioning it on social media. A few people mentioned they heard about it in an author interview (publicity), and a few browsing shelves at a bookstore or library (accounts). No one amongst this group of people who surely read book reviews mentioned a book review, though one mentioned a newsletter that aggregates reviews.

But of course that “survey” was as random and unreliable as are reader recommendations on social media (or presidential election polls in May). So I will ask you guys if you would help me expand my survey responses (still another non-random sample, I know):

Where did you hear about the last book you enjoyed?

If you are game to reply (and if so thank you so much!!) , feel free to add the last two to three books you enjoyed. They need not be recently published. Feel free to also mention where you heard about the last book or two you read and did NOT enjoy. Thanks for playing along!