The challenge of publishing and marketing books today

Marketing the author properly is a challenge for the book publishing business

Posted by Mike Shatzkin on September 3, 2014 at 4:49 pm · Under Authors, Direct response, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Supply-Chain

A few years ago, trying to explain the difference between how books had weathered digital change compared to other media, I formulated the paradigm of the “unit of appreciation” and the “unit of sale”. The music business was roiled when the unit of appreciation (the song) became available unbundled from the prevailing unit of sale (the album). Newspapers and magazines presented individual articles that were appreciated within a total aggregated package that were the unit of sale. The ability of consumers to purchase only what they most appreciated shattered the business models built on bundling things together.

The bundling was acceptable to consumers when it was a requirement for delivery (I can’t just drop the baseball scores on your lawn; I need to deliver a whole newspaper) but often rejected when the individual content components were available on their own. (And, of course, it was even more damaging to the established media when units of appreciation like box scores became free!)

This played out in a more complicated way in the book business. For novels and narrative non-fiction, where the unit of sale equaled the unit of appreciation, simple ebooks have worked. That’s been great for publishers, since the ebooks — even at lower retail prices — deliver them margins comparable to, or even better than, what they got from print books.

But there is a big challenge related to this paradigm that the industry hasn’t really tackled yet. The “unit of appreciation” for many books is the author. And the “unit of appreciation” is also the “unit of marketing” and therein lies the problem. Because the industry hasn’t figured out how to bring publishers and authors together around how to maximize the value of the author brand.

Marketing requires investment. For an author, that means a web site that delivers a checklist of functionality and appropriate social media presences, as well as what any competent publisher would do to make the individual book titles discoverable.

But authors inherently do not want publishers to “control” their personal brand, particularly when so many of them have more than one publisher or self-published material in addition to what they’ve sold rights to. And publishers don’t want to invest in marketing that sells books they don’t get revenue from or to build up an author name that could be in some other house’s catalog a year or two from now.

The net result is an industry hodge-podge. Many authors have fragmented web presences, with pages on publisher sites, sites of their own, and Google Plus and Amazon author pages that are imperfectly managed (or not filled in at all), even though they are actually critically important to the success of a book.

This is a problem that has no single or simple answer.

Where the solution must start is with authors (which also means agents, but also means all writers with by-lines, whether they’re now writing books or not) recognizing that the author brand is a proprietary asset that, if properly nurtured, can grow in value over time. The value is reflected in email subscribers (to newsletters or notifications or whatever an author cares to offer that fans will sign up for), social media followings, and web site traffic. When it becomes large enough, the following becomes monetizable.

In our Logical Marketing work, we have encountered one literary agent who was focused on this. “I’m not concerned with title metadata,” s/he said. “That’s the publisher’s job. I want my authors to become list-gathering machines.” So we looked at three of the agency’s authors’ websites and made recommendations specifically addressing how to gather names. The agent is in a position to urge the authors to take the right follow-up actions.

But we’ve also found flaws in the web presences of authors that publishers asked us to evaluate. When that happens, we — actually they — often hit a brick wall. The marketing people don’t have access to the authors; those are relationships handled by the editors, often through agents. Editors don’t have the same understanding of web site flaws that marketers do, even after we explain them, and the agent-author relationships have other elements that are more important to the editor to manage. It is difficult for a publisher, with whom an author signed so they would market the book, to spell out a list of tasks the author should do to market their books (or themselves). It opens what can be a difficult conversation about who should do what and who should pay for what.

In another case, we worked with a publisher that has a celebrity author (in a how-to field) who has split his publishing between our niche-publisher client and a Big Five house. The author’s own web site is a critical part of the marketing mix and it promotes the books from both publishers. When we evaluated the author’s web presence, we suggested a range of improvements that suggested a rebuilt site was required. When the small publisher and author went looking for a developer, they were hit with an estimate of $60,000 to build what they wanted. In the meantime, we have found the resources necessary to do the site for a fraction of that cost, but it still isn’t free. Who should pay for it? That remains a question.

As it happens, the author rebuilt the site for something more than we’d have charged but less than the extortionate $60,000 price. It looks fine. But it is an SEO disaster. He isn’t registering for the most fundamental search terms relating to his books and expertise. The optimization is SO bad that his link traffic is exceeding his search traffic. So he’s got something that looks good to him but isn’t adding commercial value.

In fact, we have often seen stunningly bad author websites in our reviews, even for very high-profile and successful authors who have spent real money building their sites. Lots of video and flash may make something an author finds eye-catching, but it doesn’t help them get discovered or engage their fans.

Perhaps there will never be an “industry answer” to maximizing the marketing clout of our core “unit of appreciation”: the author. But we know that every author who has more than one published piece (book or article) on the Web under their name and who has the intention of publishing more should have the following built into a web presence they control and manage:

* a list of all their books making clear the chronological order of publication (organized by series, if applicable)
* a landing page for each book with cover, description, publisher information (including link to publisher book page), reviews, excerpts, and easy to find retail links for different formats, channels, and territories
* a clear and easy way for readers and fans to send an email and get a response
* a clear and easy way for readers and fans to sign up for email notifications
* a clear and easy way for readers and fans to connect and share via social media
* a calendar that shows any public appearances
* links to articles about or references to the author

They must have an active and up-to-date Amazon author page and Google Plus page; that’s critical for SEO. Twitter and Facebook promotional activity might be optional, none of the rest of this is if an author is serious about pursuing a commercially successful career.

And every publisher and agent should be urging authors to see these minimum requirements as absolutely necessary, offering advice, help, and financial support whenever possible. Authors should be wary of publishers who want to “own” the author’s web presence but they should expect publishers to be wary of any author who doesn’t nurture their own.

My marketing whiz partner Pete McCarthy’s recommendation is that the authors own their websites but that the publisher run a parent Google Analytics account across author sites. That would enable them to monitor across authors, use tools like Moz to improve search (that would be beyond most authors’ abilities to manage and understand), and provide real support to authors optimizing their own web presence. This kind of collaboration is particularly appealing because it is reversible; the author can at any point install their own Google Analytics and remove the site from the publisher’s visibility. What this takes is for a publisher to set up the “parent” Google Analytics account and make a clear offer to authors of the support they can provide. As far as we know, only Penguin Random House — using an analytics tool called Omniture subsequently acquired by Adobe — offers this capability. Pete set it up a few years ago when he was there. As far we know, nobody else has done so.

This solution allows authors to own their own sites and email lists — ownership of email lists is a massively underdiscussed point between authors and publishers — but for publishers to have a sense of what’s going on. That means they can make recommendations about marketing, employing what is usually (and should just about always be) their superior marketing knowledge on behalf of the shared objective of selling more books.

We still haven’t made the switchover from Feedburner, our frustrating email non-delivery service. If you didn’t see the post before last about how a Google-Ingram combination could create a meaningful challenger to Amazon (and I think that’s the only way one can happen — or at least I haven’t thought of another), you should take a look.

http://www.idealog.com/blog/marketing-author-properly-challenge-book-publishing-business/