Report 2013 - Kelly Fagan HERE - Australian Publishers Association

What Does it Mean to Connect Directly with Consumers (cont.)
Focus on Connecting with Readers Online
‘What will replace that serendipity of just walking past a shop window and seeing something in the
window, the serendipity of browsing in a shop The browsing experience online is definitely not as good
as the physical browsing experience …’ 67
The word ‘discovery’ might be one of the most over used words in publishing these days, second only to ‘metadata’.
But both are thrown around with good reason– it seems ‘discovery’ is the riddle of the moment, and while
Amazon have been able to better the physical retail experience when it comes to commerce and convenience, no
one online has absolutely bettered the browsing experience of a good bookshop. As Sara Lloyd points out above,
it’s very hard to create an algorithm for serendipity, try as we might.
Enter Goodreads. At the 2013 Bookseller Marketing and Publicity Conference, Patrick Brown, Director Author
Marketing announced Goodreads’ mission statement: To help readers find and share books they love. The site has
20 million members who in 2012 shelved (marked as books to read) 220 million books. Good Reads holds 24 million
reader reviews and is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. According to Patrick Brown:
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Social will create one of the biggest changes in publishing in the next five years
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Social will drive discovery, especially serendipitous discovery
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Social will connect readers, authors and publishers in new ways 68
In the world of Goodreads, pre-awareness and giveaways are the name of the game, the so-called answer to the
‘riddle of discovery’. Publishers are encouraged to give away advanced reading copies of new books to readers
on the site 3 to 5 months before publication. The goal is get reviews– lots of reviews and early in the life of the
book. The advantage of early reader reviews is that they improve the position of a book on the site, and the social
media aspect of Goodreads means that reviews are shared: on Facebook, on Twitter as well on individual reader’s
Goodreads profiles and to Amazon. Early reader reviews would also seem to be quite raw and unaffected by critical
appraisals published in the mainstream media – but does this make them more or less useful
In terms of traditional marketing and publicity, Goodreads might be cause for a re-think of the traditional timelines
regularly employed by these disciplines. Newspapers, magazines or even the trade press are no longer the first
place a title is reviewed. It also means that marketing and publicity doesn’t have to (and perhaps shouldn’t) start
right on publication.
In May 2013 alone, Goodreads members shared:
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1.3 million progress updates
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1 million quotes from books they were reading
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859,000 reviews on their own social media
The numbers are impressive. Far more impressive I would wager than stats from any individual publishers’ websites
or social media. But back to serendipity… how serendipitous is it if someone who calls themselves ‘a reader’,
who congregates in an online ‘reading community’ stumbles across a book because of an unqualified review or a
giveaway It could be argued that to just rely only on Goodreads for discovery is like the equivalent of only marketing
books to people who are already inside a Waterstones store. It’s tempting, and I can already see the presentations
to authors and agents citing ‘Goodreads promotional campaign’ as the marketing and publicity strategy for a book,
but my instinct is that to really break a new author Good Reads should be but one component in a broader schedule
of activity.
67 Face-to-face interview with Sara Lloyd, Digital and Communications Director Pan Macmillan, 31 July, 2013
68 Good Reads presentation at The Bookseller Marketing and Publicity Conference, 9 July 2013
Author: Kelly Fagan
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