Report 2013 - Kelly Fagan HERE - Australian Publishers Association

Overview
With book marketing, everything has changed. We are now in the uncomfortable middle of not knowing
what will work or what that even means. We don’t know. An uncomfortable middle needs then to be a
time of great fear leading to passionate experimentation. The genetically-quotable Clay Shirky put it best
when he said ‘Nothing will work. Everything might’.
Kevin Shockey, O’Reilly Media
Marketing and publicity for books has long been a subject of debate.
The original proposal for this fellowship report was to research the role of marketing and publicity in a new,
increasingly digitised publishing landscape. The scope of this project, and the issues at its heart, are vast. The very
reason marketing and publicity is often called into question is that it is daunting, if not near impossible, to quantify
their efficacy and relevancy with sheer numbers.
Until recently most trade publishers have operated with a marketing department focused largely on retailer promotions
and mass communication and a publicity department charged with promoting a book through traditional media
channels and author tours that engage with readers directly. Today’s rapidly changing retail environment paired with
continual consolidation of the traditional media, however, has challenged the way trade publishers have historically
communicated with their readers forcing a re-evaluation of marketing and publicity roles within many of the major
Australian houses.
The rise of social media and direct digital marketing has afforded the industry the unprecedented opportunity
to circumvent traditional media and speak directly to their consumers. The challenge now is how to market and
publicise books effectively to an increasingly fragmented audience in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner
across genres and retail spaces. In 2010, the Australian Government established the Book Industry Strategy
Group (BISG) ‘to identify the key priority issues for addressing the need for structural change across the industry
supply chain and to recommend appropriate actions to be taken to meet emerging challenges’. Among the key
recommendations from the group was ‘to improve industry skills in marketing and communications’.
This report aims to examine the more advanced UK book trade, and discuss how publishers there, are tackling
the challenges associated with marketing and publicising books in a digitised world. Originally I had hoped to be
able to perform some kind of empirical analysis on traditional marketing and publicity activities; however several
things made this near impossible to achieve. Firstly, as with other Unwin Fellows before me, I found it impossible
to organise an interview with Amazon, UK publishing’s largest customer. Without being able to speak directly to
buyers and merchandisers within Amazon, it is almost impossible to measure the effect of marketing and publicity
at a retail level. Compounding this issue was the reluctance of those people within publishing companies who sell
to Amazon to talk about their processes. Furthermore, I found that looking at sales data on UK Bookscan (which
doesn’t take into account e-book sales) also did not give an accurate picture of the performance of a particular title,
and again publishers were especially careful around what information they would divulge with regards to e-book
sales of particular titles.
Due to these limitations, the report focuses mainly on the promotional strategies and activities of trade publishers –
their value and also the ways in which they are changing. It should be noted that this report is primarily concerned
with what I have called traditional marketing and publicity activities. Whilst some of my research did lead me to the
new and very interesting areas of pricing and meta-data these activities still tend to fall outside the brief of trade
marketing and publicity departments.
With this in mind, I’ve identified what I hope are key areas of interest to Australian publishers (particularly marketers
and publicists): comparing retail and media spaces between the two territories; looking at department structures;
analysing the evolution of marketing and publicity strategy and activities within trade publishing houses; and
attempting to answer the question of what it means for a publisher to connect directly with a consumer.
Author: Kelly Fagan
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