Report 2013 - Kelly Fagan HERE - Australian Publishers Association

The Evolution of Marketing and Publicity Activities (cont.)
Collingridge believes that the reason campaigns stick so rigidly to these formulas of posters and trade promotion
is that ‘there is not – nor has there ever been – any empirical understanding of which combination of marketing
strategy and tactics works.’ 49 To this end Collingridge created Bookseer, ‘a market intelligence service for books’.
Bookseer captures the real-time data ‘exhaust’ of the web, combines it with promotional information provided by
the publisher, and builds a picture of the variations in performance of thousands of titles.
‘Bookseer collects as much information about these books as possible. It captures price on Amazon,
hourly sales rank, print and e-book sales data (uploaded by the publisher), what is being said about a
book or author on Twitter, Facebook or in the media, and on the wider web, which marketing is being
engaged with, the makeup of bestseller charts and so on.’ 50
I was interested to learn from Collingridge that after early excitement Bookseer failed to gain any real traction
with UK Publishers – and indeed several marketing managers that I spoke to were either unenthusiastic about its
usefulness to them or were unaware of its existence altogether. I asked Collingridge via email why he thought this
was and he listed the following thoughts:
▪▪
Fear: maybe data shows they are bad at their jobs or waste money on stuff that doesn’t work
▪▪
Inertia: change is hard
▪▪
Lack of technical proficiency
▪▪
Lack of data skills
▪▪
Lack of a CEO telling them this is important 51
From my limited experience in UK, I have to wonder however, if the reason that the service failed to gain traction with
publishers is cost. That’s not to say that what Collingridge is suggesting here is untrue, just that publishers already
pay for and have access to data on their campaigns and sales: through Nielsen Bookscan; through marketing and
media monitoring agencies; through social analytics companies; and, to some extent, through Amazon rankings.
Whilst the idea of a tool that can pull all of this information into one report does sound appealing, is it worth the cost
on a campaign by campaign basis My suspicion is that publishing houses are already looking into the creation of
such reports in-house, and so were reluctant to take on the extra spend.
So is a poster campaign in 2013 the same as a poster campaign ten years ago, as Collingridge asserts Sara Lloyd
says not:
‘Where marketing does remain in more traditional media, from broadcast to outside to print media and
so on, digital features are going to become included in all of these areas. Digital elements such as QR
codes or digital tagging, calls to action online, call-outs for digital channels will all become part of the
campaign. And they are becoming part of the campaign where I work.’ 52
49 http://www.enhanced-editions.com/blog/2012/02/book-promotion-analytics-and-a-new-marketing-approach-for-publishers/
50 http://www.enhanced-editions.com/blog/2012/02/book-promotion-analytics-and-a-new-marketing-approach-for-publishers/
51 Email interview with Peter Collingridge, Publishing Entrepreneur, 9th November 2013
52 Transcript of Dutch Foundation for Literature 8th International Non-Fiction Conference, 29 January 2011 (courtesy of Peter Collingridge)
Author: Kelly Fagan
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