Category: Sales and marketing

In business, psychology, science and politics, successful metaphors should be as common as one-liners at a comedy convention, as numerous as drunks at a tailgate party, as bountiful as bribes in Chicago politics.

In advertising, GEICO, the insurance company, has successfully grabbed attention with its use of metaphor (or it’s close cousin, the analogy) in its “Happier Than” campaign.
Continue reading “I Is an Other (5): Metaphors at Work”

Sometimes the positively best way to promote a book is by being negative. Why?
Continue reading “Negative Is Positive”

A friend, David Horton, once said, “Some get paid to be critics. Everyone else does it for free.”

We, like any organization or business, get our share of criticisms and complaints. How do we deal with it? Here are my guidelines.
Continue reading “Unpaid Critics”

Someone recently asked me a helpful diagnostic question for those in leadership, a question that helps you get at the big picture. “What causes you to lose sleep at night?” Certainly for me the Great Recession and the sea changes it may be bringing in book publishing have been right at the top of the list for me.
Continue reading “Shatzkin’s Bad News, Good News”

Is the rise of reselling books on the internet destroying publishing? Book lover David Steitfeld thinks it might be.

The explosion of people selling used, nearly new and rare books online means readers can save money if they are willing to wait a while for a new book to make its way to these re-sellers. And it’s not just Amazon. There are over 20,000 such booksellers around.
Continue reading “Are Book Lovers Killing Books?”

What do publishers really have to offer authors? Can’t someone self-publish easily through Lulu or XLibris? Can’t they sell their books on Amazon.com? Retail stores are in decline, so who needs publishers to get their books on the shelves?

Clay Shirky asked these sorts of questions in Publishers Weekly a couple of months ago. He thought publishers were especially well suited to

1. help a book focus a conversation about important topics
2. create social capital by making something that becomes more valuable as others consume it
3. do these two things on a large scale for the long term

Shirky was amazed to hear publishers talk about abandoning these functions in favor of finding authors who already have a “platform.” If an author can already market directly to a group of potential readers, why does he or she need a publisher?

The answer, Shirky thinks, is by publishers making sure they matter to and are trusted by readers. As every publisher knows, however, readers almost never know–much less trust or distrust–publishers. Who publishes Toni Morrison or Thomas Friedman? Readers don’t know. The only people likely to know are publishers themselves.

Shirky’s three functions are good and valuable for publishers to focus on. But I don’t see how looking for authors with platform negates them. The reality is that substantial decline in retail bookstore sales minimizes a traditional channel for publishers. In a bygone era retailers (who might have known publishers) also handsold books to customers. Retailers used to be the fulcrum between publishers and customers, and that fulcrum has shifted to the author. And as I’ve said here before, authors without platform rarely do well.

What do publishers offer, then, with self-publishers offering so much and retailers offering less? Years or decades of experience in knowing how people read, how ideas are absorbed, how story and content flow most effectively, powerfully and beautifully. (In short, editors.)

What do publishers offer? Years or decades of experience in knowing what books people buy, how they hear of them, where they buy them, how they buy them, why they buy them and how much they’ll pay for them. (In short, marketers.)

And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about the contributions of professional book designers, print buyers, rights managers and others. (In short, more.)

Is the publishing world changing? You bet. Do publishers always know best how to deal with that? Not at all. If authors want to publish without editorial or marketing expertise, they can. Many do; some succeed, many don’t. But if authors want such help, they can find it at a publishing house.

When anybody talks about the future of publishing, the impact of the digital world is always front and center. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It is having and will have a massive impact. Tom Woll acknowledges as much in the conclusion to his book Publishing for Profit, as well. But what is really interesting, I think, are his predictions for brick and mortar stores, which many prognosticators ignore.

Eventually, he says, superstores will find that stocking a wide array of inventory that doesn’t sell won’t make economic sense–and therefore having 50,000-square-foot stores won’t make sense either. In a few years’ time the superstore strategy will revert to the mall chain strategy.

When that happens, surprise! The independents will return to the scene. Those, he believes, will tend to be more focused on certain genres like history or mystery or travel.

Is his crystal ball clear or cloudy? I’d be interested in what you think.

Publishers like to complain about returns, but few seem to do anything about them. How do I know? Return rates keep climbing, costing the publishing industry over $7 billion a year.

Why do books come back to publishers from stores, distributors and wholesalers? The reasons are many. Tom Woll offers a dozen in Publishing for Profit. What I find fascinating, however, is that he lays responsibility for ten of the twelve reasons right at the feet of publishers. Only two of Woll’s reasons have anything to do with those who return the books–and even with those two, publishers bear some responsibility.

Most publishers, I would guess, would assign responsibility for returns primarily to others, not to themselves. So where does Woll see publishers creating the returns problem? Among other things,

* Large advances–if they are excessive and therefore require larger sales (and therefore larger print runs) to make the project work financially, books come back.

* Overpricing–this tends to be more true of publishers tied to conglomerates that are margin driven.

* Lack of promotional and marketing support–often only the highest-profile books get backing. Many others are expected to sell on their own. Often they don’t.

* Reprinting too soon and too many–a book that is selling well can generate automatic reorders that may not be justified.

Don’t accounts bear some responsibility? Yes, if they succumb to excessive publisher enthusiasm and overbuy. Yes, if they pay for new books with returns of old ones instead of money. But you can see that publishers bear some responsibility even in these dynamics as well.

Is there a silver bullet for the returns problem? No. It takes discipline and hard work to solve. But the returns on that investment are well worth it.

One of the most convenient “real time” views of how a book is doing is to check out Amazon’s sales rank. It’s simple (the lower the number, the better the sales), it’s convenient (just a click away), and it’s empirical (gotta love those numbers). Alas, as Aaron Hierholzer says, “the Amazon sales rank is a fickle mistress.”
Continue reading “What Does That Amazon Sales Rank Mean, Anyway?”