7 7 SHRINKING WINDOWS
Walk into any Barnes & Noble or Waterstone’s and, as you stand there in the entrance and cast your eyes over the racks of books displayed face-out and the tables stacked high with new hardbacks in their glossy covers or three-for-two paperbacks, you are surveying one of the key battlefields where the struggle for visibility in the book business is carried out. The front-of-store area that is in your field of vision is a thoroughly commodified space: most of the books you see will be there by virtue of the fact that the publisher has paid for placement, either directly by means of a placement fee (that is, co-op advertising) or indirectly by means of extra discount. Roughly speaking, it costs around a dollar a book to put a new hardback on the front-of-store table in a major chain, and around $10,000 to put a new title on front-of-store tables in all the chain’s stores for two weeks (typically the minimum period). When you take account of the fact that a new hardback might be selling at $25 with a 50 per cent discount to the retailer, thus netting $12.50 to the publisher, a cost of $1 a book means that the publisher is spending 8 per cent of the revenue from this book just to put it on the table at the front of the store – and that’s assuming that the book is actually sold. Visibility does not come cheap.
So why are publishers willing to spend so much to display their books? And what are the consequences of the fact that it is so expensive to do so? More generally, how do publishers try to make potential readers aware of the books they are publishing? Are their methods different from those that were used by publishers 20 or 30 years ago – and if so, why? In many ways it is the struggle to get your books seen, heard about, talked about – in short, made visible in an increasingly crowded and noisy marketplace – that is where the real battle in publishing is taking place today. As one publisher succinctly put it, ‘It’s become easier to publish and harder to sell – that’s the paradox. Any old sod can publish a book now, but actually getting it out to the public has become much trickier.’
The struggle for visibility
Consider some simple statistics. Although the methods used to calculate title output were different in the past1 and there are reasonable grounds for debate about what title output data are actually measuring, it is nevertheless clear that the number of new books published each year has increased dramatically over the last decade in both the US and the UK. The number of new books published in the US each year prior to 1980 was probably under 50,000. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of new books published greatly increased, reaching nearly 200,000 by 1998. By 2004 the number had risen to over 275,000 (see table 9).2 After falling off in 2005, the total climbed to over 284,000 in 2007 and continued to rise in the following years, reaching an estimated 316,000 by 2010.
However, the full picture is more complicated than these figures would suggest, as there has also been an enormous increase in the publication of reprints and titles printed on demand – what Bowker classifies as ‘non-traditional’ outputs. The data from Bowker suggest that the number of non-traditional outputs rose from 21,936 in 2006 to a staggering 2,776,260 in 2010, which, if added to the traditional books published in 2010, would give a total output of more than 3 million titles. The non-traditional outputs include books released by companies specializing in self-publishing, like Lulu and Xlibris, but the vast majority of these non-traditional outputs are scanned versions of public domain works that are being marketed on the web and made available through print-on-demand vendors. Indeed, one of these publishers, Bibliobazaar, an imprint of the historical reprints publisher BiblioLife, accounted for 1,461,918 ISBNs in 2010 – more than half of the total of the non-traditional output; and three publishers – Bibliobazaar, General Books and Kessinger Publishing, all specializing in reprints of public domain works – accounted for 2,668,774 ISBNs, or 96 per cent of the total.3 These titles are not being ‘published’ in a traditional sense: the publishers are simply generating cover and text files, obtaining ISBNs and creating metadata to enable the titles to be sold and printed on demand. But the activity of the reprints publishers is increasing the volume of available ISBNs by several orders of magnitude and muddying the picture of what it means to measure new title output today.
Table 9 US book title output, 1998–2010
| 1998 | 198,961 |
| 1999 | 212,953 |
| 2000 | 265,541 |
| 2001 | 224,853 |
| 2002 | 215,138 |
| 2003 | 240,098 |
| 2004 | 275,793 |
| 2005 | 251,903 |
| 2006 | 274,416 |
| 2007 | 284,370 |
| 2008 | 289,729 |
| 2009 | 302,410 |
| 2010 (projected) | 316,480 |
This table is based on the total number of ISBNs for any kind of printed book (including reissues but excluding audiobooks and ebooks) made available through publication or distribution in the US in a given year. A book is ‘new’ if that ISBN has not previously been available in the US; the publisher or distributor can be located anywhere and the date is the date reported to Bowker as to when this ISBN will be available in the US. In 2006 Bowker introduced a new methodology to obtain a more accurate picture of annual title output; this enabled them to include ISBNs that have not been assigned a subject (‘unclassified items’), ISBNs without prices and ISBNs with unusual bindings, such as stapled and laminated. To provide comparable data, the numbers for 2002–5 were recalculated using the new methodology. Numbers before 2002 are based on the old methodology and are therefore not strictly comparable.
Source: R. R. Bowker.
The pattern for the UK is very similar. Prior to 1980 there were probably fewer than 50,000 new books published each year in the UK. By 1995 this number had doubled to more than 100,000, and by 2003 it had increased to nearly 130,000. The total number fell off slightly after that, though by 2009 the number of new books that were published in the UK had risen to more than 157,000 (see table 10), spurred on by the growth of print-on-demand, digital and self-publishing.4
Of course, gross figures like these don’t tell you anything about what kinds of books are being published and where the main increases are occurring. Undoubtedly a large share of the new titles being published each year are accounted for by academic monographs and other books of a specialized kind; only a proportion, perhaps even a relatively small proportion, are accounted for by new trade titles that are aimed at a general readership and sold through the retail trade. Nevertheless, the huge increase in the number of new titles being published each year – an increase in the US of more than fivefold in less than three decades – has helped to create a marketplace that is saturated with new product. More than 50,000 new fiction titles were published in the US in 2007, double what it was in 2003. That’s roughly 1,000 new titles a week, and that’s just fiction.
And that’s not all: books are just one media product among others, and over the last three decades the world of media and entertainment has witnessed a veritable explosion of media products, from videos, CDs, cellphones and iPods to the plethora of products and time-consuming activities that are available in a rapidly changing online environment. In 2004 the National Endowment for the Arts in the US published a report called Reading at Risk that sent tremors, if not shock waves, through the publishing world: based on a survey of 17,000 individuals carried out in 2002, it appeared to show that reading is declining among adults and the rate of decline is accelerating, especially among the 18–24 age group.5 The percentage of the US adult population who had read any work of literature in the previous 12 months fell from 54 per cent in 1992 to 46.7 per cent in 2002, and the percentage who had read any book in the previous 12 months fell from 60.9 per cent in 1992 to 56.6 per cent in 2002. In 1982 young adults (the 18–24 age group) were the most likely to read literature (59.8 per cent, compared to an average for all ages of 56.9 per cent); by 2002 young adults were among the least likely to read literature (42.8 per cent, compared to an average of 46.7 per cent). At the same time, spending on audio, video, computers and software increased from 6 per cent of total recreational spending in 1990 to 24 per cent in 2002, whereas spending on books fell slightly from 5.7 to 5.6 per cent over the same period. A subsequent report by the NEA confirmed these broad trends and appeared to show not only that Americans are reading less, but also that they are reading less well: among high-school seniors, the average reading level declined between 1992 and 2005 for all but the very best readers, so that by 2005 little more than one-third of high school seniors were reading proficiently.6 Even among college graduates, the percentage of those with a Bachelor’s degree who were proficient in reading prose fell from 40 per cent in 1992 to 31 per cent in 2003.
Table 10 UK book title output, 1994–2010
| 1994 | 93,475 |
| 1995 | 104,118 |
| 1996 | 112,627 |
| 1997 | 111,348 |
| 1998 | 122,922 |
| 1999 | 128,115 |
| 2000 | 124,423 |
| 2001 | 120,895 |
| 2002 | 124,940 |
| 2003 | 129,762 |
| 2004 | 121,556 |
| 2005 | 108,086 |
| 2006 | 112,865 |
| 2007 | 115,816 |
| 2008 | 120,947 |
| 2009 | 157,039 |
| 2010 (projected) | 151,969 |
This table shows the total number of titles recorded as being published by a UK-registered publisher or made available from a UK distributor for the first time within the year. The definition of ‘book’ is based on the issuing of an ISBN and therefore includes some book-related products where an ISBN can be used as a legitimate identifier.
Source: Nielsen BookScan.
With an avalanche of new titles being published every week, the reader is confronted with a plethora of books to choose from – just walk into any bookstore to test this proposition. With the proliferation of new media products and the rise of the internet, the consumer is faced with many new demands on their time and their disposable income. Books are just one type of media product, jostling for attention with many other flashier, noisier, brasher products of the electronic age. And the data on the decline of reading suggest that this is a competition that the traditional print-on-paper book is not particularly well positioned to win.
For the publisher, the challenge is how to get your books noticed among the mêlée, picked out by readers as sufficiently worthy of their time and attention to be bought by them. ‘There’s more competition out there; it’s more of a buyer’s market than a seller’s market,’ commented one marketing director. ‘It’s great that you can walk into a Barnes & Noble and have 30,000 titles to choose from. If I want a book on, say, Vietnamese cooking, I can go find 20 books about it. If I want a book on how to make a salad, I can go find 50 books on that. What a great thing for the consumer, but what a challenge for the publisher.’
So how do trade publishers deal with this challenge? How do they make their books stand out and get noticed despite all the competition and noise in the marketplace? This is the traditional domain of marketing and publicity, but over the past 30 years the parameters of the marketing and publicity effort have changed in some fundamental ways. The task remains the same as it always was – namely, to create an awareness of a book and an author among potential readers and buyers. But, as one publicity director put it, ‘The channels that are available to us, and the channels that enable that process to happen, have changed. There have been seismic changes on that front.’
From mass media to micro media
One of the most significant changes has been the decline of traditional ‘mass’ media, especially television and the print media like newspapers and magazines, and the growing importance of more specialized ‘micro media’ as key channels for the marketing and promotion of books. The traditional mass media have not become irrelevant – far from it. Television appearances, TV tie-ins, glowing reviews in major newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post can make a big difference to sales and can be the spark that lights a fire. But publishers can rely less and less on these traditional channels, both because it is harder to get books into them and because they are less effective than they used to be. ‘It used to be, get one big hit on the Today Show and you’re off to the races; take out some advertising in the New York Times, you’re off to the races,’ observed the marketing manager at one large house. ‘Nowadays, rather than find out one big thing, our jobs are much more about finding 50 smart things to do. I often think about it like this: between us and our readership there’s a brick wall and we have little hammers, and if we keep hitting that wall eventually we’ll punch through it.’ So the aim of the marketing manager – to stick with this analogy – is to figure out what hammers they can use, big and small, to try to punch through the wall and get multiple hits for a book. And ‘depending on who you talk to in the marketing world, it takes anywhere from 6 to 12 touches in somebody’s mind to make a decision to buy.’
Publishers can rely less on traditional media partly because there is less of it available to them. It is getting harder and harder to get books reviewed in the mainstream press because the amount of space devoted to book reviews has declined in many newspapers. In 2001 the Boston Globe merged its book review and commentary pages; in 2007 the San Diego Union-Tribune closed down its book review section; and in 2008 the Los Angeles Times killed its stand-alone Sunday Book Review section and merged it into another section in the Saturday edition of the paper, reducing the amount of space devoted to books. Even the New York Times, which is one of the few metropolitan newspapers in the US to have retained a stand-alone Book Review section, has shrunk the size by nearly half, from the 44 pages it averaged in the mid-1980s to the 24–28 pages it typically has today.7 With the weekly news magazines like Time and Newsweek it is even worse. ‘As recently as seven or eight years ago, they would do full previews of television, movies and books,’ explained one publicity manager. ‘Their coverage of books would be three to four pages in the magazine and they would write at length about several key titles. By 2006–2007, you have one page or half a page for books, postage stamp of a jacket, one sentence. Nothing memorable that sticks in the mind of the consumer/reader – it’s gone. That column space, those column inches, have eroded. Newspapers and magazines, many of them allies, asset bases for our business, have become pale versions of their former selves. And we’re just starting to come to terms with that.’
It is much the same with mainstream television. The Today Show, Good Morning America and the Early Show all used to have book producers and give a lot of space to books, but books have become less of a priority for them. ‘I’ve had conversations with producers who say to me, “Oh, the author talking head? We’re so over that. Novelists? Nobody’s interested in novelists.”’ This publicity manager didn’t give up easily. He pointed out that the NYTimes.com website lists the articles most frequently emailed by NYTimes.com readers and that, when they tallied these up at the end of the year, the most emailed story of 2006 was the ten best books of the year. ‘I use this when I sit down with the morning shows and say, “You can’t tell me that people aren’t interested in books because clearly they are. You need to be responsive to your viewing public and if you’re not going to do the author talking head, why don’t you deal with summer reading?” And so they do that now – they do summer reading and they do gift books. But I gotta tell you, it’s like pushing boulders uphill.’
While traditional mass media like newspapers, magazines and television have become what this publicity manager describes as ‘a declining asset base’ for the publishing industry, there are exceptions. One is radio, especially National Public Radio or NPR. ‘NPR is a key component of outreach. Shows like Morning Edition and All Things Considered: their week-to-week listenership has gone up in a significant way over the last 18 months. So we devote a lot of our time and energy to try and work with those shows. And it’s not just the shows themselves, but NPR has a presence online. But I’m not sure the growth they’ve experienced at NPR offsets the loss we’ve experienced in the print community.’ Another important exception is Oprah, and, in the British context, Richard and Judy, to which we’ll return below.
With the declining significance of traditional media as channels for marketing and promoting books, publishers have increasingly focused their marketing efforts on other things. In most publishing houses there will be a meeting about a year before a book is published when marketing managers will set the marketing budget for the book and draw up a marketing campaign. The budget is typically set as a percentage of the expected revenue based on the book’s P&L – for example, 6.5 per cent of total revenue. ‘So at the lower end, maybe that budget is $5,000, maybe it’s $3,500. At the upper end, maybe that budget is $500,000. Most books fall in the middle, if not closer to $5,000,’ explained the marketing manager at one of the imprints in a large corporate house. ‘And what we do is we say, “OK, we have this much money to spend, $5,000 or $500,000. What is it we need to do to reach the reader? Who are the readers? Where are they? How are we going to reach them?” That’s a conversation that includes, in our company, the publisher, the editor, the publicist, a sales representative and the marketing team.’ The challenge is to figure out what you can do with a given amount of money to try to reach what you think is the main audience for the book.
One element of the traditional book marketing campaign which has become less important in recent years is the multi-city author tour. It is still there and still important for certain kinds of books and certain authors, especially those who can draw a big audience, but it doesn’t have the significance it once did. ‘They were huge in the 1980s and 1990s,’ explained the marketing manager, ‘but look at it this way: every single author you put on the road, unless they’re sleeping on their brother-in-law’s couch, you’re looking at 1,000 to 1,500 bucks per market. That’s a lot of books you’ve got to sell in order to pull that back.’ Moreover, there’s a lot going on in cities these days and people don’t come in the way they used to. ‘We had an author – a well-known author, a huge author – and he went to an event: two people showed up. Maybe it was because the local basketball team was playing that night, we don’t know.’ So in general, publishers are now much more selective and strategic about putting authors on the road.
They are also much more cautious about print advertising. ‘Advertising does not sell books,’ stated one marketing manager bluntly. ‘Our advertising budgets are about the amount of money that a major corporation would spend on the doughnuts at their photo shoot.’ The proportion of the marketing budgets devoted to print advertising has declined over time at most of the large trade houses. This is a matter of some consternation for authors and agents, many of whom believe – unlike most publishers – that print advertising does sell books. It’s also a source of dismay for newspapers and other print media who have lost the advertising revenue (and who sometimes cite this as a reason for axing or curtailing their book review sections).
So if marketing managers are relying less on author tours and print advertising, what are they doing to bring their books to the attention of readers? Most marketing managers will tell you that they are focusing their efforts more and more on trying to identify specific, fine-grained ways of reaching the people who comprise what they see as the readership, using an array of different channels which, in addition to traditional print media, now include a variety of new media, from email lists to websites and blogs. One marketing manager put it like this:
Suppose we’re publishing a novel about vampires – good genre fiction. Well, we’re not going to get a review in the Times daily, we’re not going to get advertising in the Times daily, but let’s identify 200 vampire enthusiast groups – there are probably 2,000 of them – and let’s find out who they are, where they live and let’s market to them. Let’s send them an email, one person in every group gets a free book to talk about. Let’s find out what conventions they go to, they congregate once a year at this convention of vampire fans, and let’s make sure that we have something at that convention to get the word out. So those types of activities are really what can help move a book along in that circle, well below the radar of the mainstream media, because the mainstream won’t touch it. Or suppose we’re publishing a legal thriller: let’s go out and find the law professors that might respond to this and where they go on vacation; let’s send them a copy of the book and have them start talking about it. Word of mouth – we try to build up word of mouth.
Building word of mouth is the key here: how can you get people talking about a book, telling their friends or colleagues or customers that the book they’ve just read is terrific? Word of mouth tends to have a cumulative character, in the sense that the more you can get people talking about a book, the more likely it is that they will tell others about it, who will in turn tell others and so on, leading to a kind of rising tide of positive chatter. Despite the preoccupation with the media among media scholars and commentators, good old-fashioned word of mouth remains the cornerstone of the marketing effort. But of course it’s more complicated than this might suggest, because media are among the tools you use to try to build word of mouth and, indeed, some of this word of mouth takes place in the media or online – it is, to some extent, mediated word of mouth. Publishers will often target what they call, rather ungraciously, ‘big mouths’ – anyone they can think of who has some position of influence, whether they are review editors or feature writers or agents or opinion leaders of some kind, ‘just people who talk a lot’, as one publisher put it. They may send them advance reading copies well ahead of the actual publication date in order to get people reading the book, talking about it and recommending it to others – in short, generating buzz. In the case of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, for example, the publisher sent out a large number of advance reading copies in order to stimulate interest and excitement before the book was published. ‘One of the many strategies we concocted was that what’s going to sell this book best is the reading experience,’ explained one of the publishers who was directly involved in planning this particular campaign.
So instead of doing 3,000 advanced reading copies we actually did 10,000 reading copies, and we did them in various waves. So we sent advance reading copies to booksellers, we sent advance reading copies to what they call ‘big mouths’, we sent advance reading copies to competitive reps, we sent advance reading copies to reviewers, we sent advance reading copies to feature writers. And then we repeated it. We wanted to get people reading the book, because I knew that if they read the book they would talk about it. What I didn’t know is how right I was. Because ultimately when this book first came out it entered the ethos, so that you couldn’t go to a dinner party without having this book discussed. That’s why the book became such a phenomenon: word of mouth just took it to heights that no one ever dreamed of. Dan Brown sold more copies of The Da Vinci Code in its first week on sale than he had sold for all his other books combined.
Generating excitement about a new book is also about timing. You have to try to find a publication window when there’s not a lot happening, especially if you’re trying to launch a new or less well-known author. ‘If you can hit a window where there’s not a lot of new known quantities out so people come into the bookstore saying “I don’t see anything here that’s exciting; I’m going to try this new author,” then you stand a chance,’ explained one sales director. ‘But if all of a sudden there are five or six big-time authors that they’ve read before, then that new author kind of loses out. And that’s a key part of the business, to find that window.’ Publishers can check the competition lists that are produced by Barnes & Noble and other retailers so they know what everyone else is publishing and when they’re planning to publish it, and then they can position their books in relation to that. Of course, if they are publishing a new book by a big brand-name author like John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell, they don’t have to pay much attention to the competition list – ‘We just pick a date that works for him and everybody else stays away from it.’ But if they are trying to make a book by a new or less well-known author, they will check the competition list and aim to publish it when there is not much else of any consequence coming out. If a publication date they had originally envisaged turns out to fall within a crowded period when the book would run the risk of being eclipsed by others, they will move the date by up to several weeks. They can get the competition lists early enough to enable them to lock in on a date well in advance.
Having locked in on a publication date does not mean that all of the marketing and publicity effort is geared exclusively to this date – on the contrary, and this is one of the key respects in which marketing has changed in recent years. In the traditional book marketing model, the marketing and publicity effort was all engineered with a view to break at the time of publication, like a great wave crashing on the shore, the theory being that this would maximize the public’s awareness at the very moment when the book appears physically in the bookstores. But in the new media environment of today, marketing managers and publicists will often try to build the marketing campaign over time, getting people talking about a book and generating interest and excitement well in advance of publication. There are several reasons for this.
In the first place, by building anticipation among potential readers they can generate demand at the grassroots level, thereby helping to ensure that the book gets off to a strong start when it is actually published. In the best-case scenario they might even be able to put a book by an unknown author straight on to the bestseller list, which immediately gives it a high level of visibility in the market place. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon was Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian: a first novel that sold in an auction for $2.1 million and that, when it was published in 2005, went straight to number one on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week on sale. How on earth did the publisher achieve this remarkable feat? ‘It happened because of the growth of the chains and the growth of the internet,’ explained one of the publishers who witnessed it at close hand. ‘What the chains have learned is that with the growth of non-bookstore outlets they can make a bestseller out of an unknown writer. The non-bookstore outlets can sell James Patterson or Michael Connelly but they’re much more careful about unknown writers. So if the chains find something they’re excited about they’ll take a big position and work on promoting it aggressively to their customers and try to make a success for themselves.’ And thanks to the internet, the marketing the publisher did to its primary customers and to various intermediaries – to booksellers, librarians, critics, website bloggers and others – trickled down to readers and book buyers. In other words, buzz is more likely than it ever was to spill beyond the industry as such:
The kind of buzz that we build within the industry now actually gets out to consumers at such a level that when a book by an unknown writer comes into bookstores it can enter the bestseller list at number one. Booksellers get behind it, feature it aggressively on their websites before publication and in the email blasts they do to their customers, saying ‘coming on such and such a date’. And beyond that, the world of blogs, websites, reading groups, bookclubs – people who are hungry for information about what’s cool, what’s exciting – has grown and that information is now available to them. They’re searching the publishers’ websites, they’re talking to each other, and so the excitement that we spread within the industry is spreading outside the industry as well. It used to be that a book would start at the bottom and climb as word spread across the country slowly through monthly magazines, weekly magazines, newspapers – these slow communications. Then it began happening that the bestselling authors would come out right at number one. But now it’s happening for unknown writers and that’s incredibly exciting. The ability for a publisher to communicate with consumers about an unknown writer at that scale is exhilarating. It’s a huge change in the industry.
There is another reason why publishers have moved away from the traditional marketing model, with its emphasis on the great wave of publicity breaking on publication date, towards a greater emphasis on pre-publication publicity hits: namely, ‘to drive pole position on Amazon’. As one publicity manager explained, ‘What you have now is the ability to capture a sale prior to the book’s availability in the physical environment that you didn’t have 20 years ago.’ This pre-publication publicity and pre-order phenomenon can be hugely significant for publishers, partly because it can help to put a book on to the bestseller lists as soon as it is published, since all the pre-ordered books will count as the first-day sale when the book is actually released. And hitting the bestseller lists early is important because it results in front-of-store placements in the big retail chains, if the book is not already there. ‘Once you become a bestseller you tend to be more visible in other environments. There isn’t one list that is important, it’s the aggregate that is important, and it’s important because of visibility, because of the awareness they foster on the part of the consumer – “Oh yeah, I saw that book, I heard about that book.”’
Pre-orders are also important because they can help the publisher overcome initial resistance they might face from buyers in the big retail chains, who might take the view that a book presented to them by a sales rep is not as big as the publisher thinks. ‘We were having trouble with Borders and Barnes & Noble with [a recent book],’ the publicity manager continued. ‘They didn’t see it as a big book. And then when we started to work it prior to publication, getting people talking about it online, the book was a top 15 on Amazon a couple of weeks prior to publication. And Barnes & Noble and Borders both came back and upped their orders by two or three thousand copies.’
The way this publicity manager saw it is that every book is published on a linear continuum, and their job as marketers and publicists is to create a ‘wave of awareness’. In the past, the aim was to make this wave break on the day of publication and wash over the public in the days and weeks immediately after publication. But now it’s a slower build and there are more things happening on the way. ‘Every book is different and you can’t apply the same rules to every title. But as a general rule, the strategy that is being adopted now is pre-publication. It’s pre-publication PR, pre-publication awareness, to help drive pole position on Amazon.’
The growth of online marketing
The shift of marketing focus from traditional mainstream media to online channels is reflected in the reallocation of marketing resources within many publishing houses. The extent of reallocation varies from house to house, depending on the nature of the list and the importance they attribute to online channels at a management level. At one of the large publishing corporations in the US, the proportion of the total marketing spend (including co-op) devoted to online marketing doubled from 3.5 per cent in 2006 to 7 per cent in 2007, and was set to grow again by a similar amount in 2008. At one of the imprints within this corporation, the shift to online was even more dramatic. Phil, the online marketing manager at this imprint, had joined the company in 2006. His background was not in book publishing; he had managed web properties for an illustrated magazine before he joined this company 18 months previously. He was valued not so much for his experience in publishing as for his knowledge of the fast-moving world of the web and his ability to use this knowledge to find new and creative ways to market books – ‘It allows me to bring a different spin to traditional book publishing,’ observed Phil. When he arrived in 2006, only 10 per cent of the imprint’s marketing budget (excluding co-op) was devoted to online marketing, compared to 60 per cent devoted to print; 18 months later, online marketing was accounting for 65 per cent of the budget, compared to 15 per cent devoted to print (see figure 6). This is a huge shift over a very short period of time.
So how is the online marketing budget being spent? Phil broke down his main activities into three areas: online advertising, online outreach and the management of web properties. Most of the budget is taken up by online advertising, since, as Phil explained, ‘We’re moving more of our advertising dollars online as opposed to print.’ Even with big-name authors, they will commonly advertise in the New York Times Online rather than doing it in print. They also use Google’s advertising programme a lot, since it enables them to target specific sites and demographics. ‘The nice thing about the web is that we can hit the niche audience. Next week we’re taking a book that’s about music and we’re only showing ads to people whose computers are in Austin, Texas, because it’s a big music town and there’s a music festival that starts there next week. So it only serves the ads if the computer is coming from a certain zip code.’ Another advantage of Google advertising is that it is easily controlled, so if the ad isn’t working you can turn it off and if it is working well you can turn it up. As with all advertising, part of the aim is to drive sales by getting consumers to click through to Amazon or to their own e-commerce site, but part of the aim is also to produce impressions – that is, to get the book and the author seen. ‘We want the impressions just like we would with print advertising,’ said Phil. ‘We want people to see the book jacket; we want to brand the author. Since 15 per cent of all book sales happen online, there’s a part of me that wants to drive the clicks and get people to our e-commerce site or to Amazon. But I also want the other 85 per cent to be in the bookstore and recognize the book either because they saw an ad or they saw something else that we did online.’
Figure 6 Breakdown of one US imprint’s marketing budget, 2006 and 2008
While advertising takes the lion’s share of the online marketing budget, much of Phil’s effort is focused on what he calls ‘online outreach’. ‘We outreach to bloggers, and that’s a big part of what we do because it just gets the conversation going.’ They build up and maintain lists of hard mailing addresses for bloggers in different areas – political bloggers, for example – and then they mail them finished copies of the book about three weeks before publication. ‘And the way that we pitch bloggers is a lot different from the way publicity would pitch an editor,’ explained Phil. ‘In publicity they’ll send the book with a press release, they’ll follow up, they’ll make phone calls. We drop the book in an envelope with nothing else and mail it to them and don’t follow up. I have personal relationships with a lot of these bloggers, so they’ll know they can email me if they have a question or if they want bonus content with the author, whether it’s a Q&A or a podcast or an excerpt. But the goal is to get these books out to as many bloggers as possible.’ They’ll send out anywhere from 100 to 400 books to bloggers – just pop it into a bag and send it off, no cover letter, no press release or follow-up, nothing. And they won’t do any of these traditional things because Phil knows that bloggers aren’t, and don’t want to be, traditional review editors. ‘I’ve done the research and met with bloggers, whether it’s the conventions or just when they’re around, and they really want to distance themselves from traditional media. They don’t want to be straight reviewers; they want to almost sort of come to it on their own, you know. So we make it available but then they can decide how they want to write about it. And from my point of view, it doesn’t matter if they’re going to write a review or if they’re just going to mention the book – that’s fine with me, because it all helps to get the conversation going. And once this stuff is online it all gets indexed, so the more times that somebody’s talked about the better.’
Phil gives an example of a book they recently published about the Bush administration. The author was well known in the blogosphere, which gave him a platform online and helped when it came to identifying bloggers to whom books could be sent. Although the book was critical of the Bush administration, they sent it to conservative bloggers as well, because even if they wrote about it negatively it would help to create interest and intrigue. ‘The more people who are talking about the book, the better, and the nice thing about the web is that people are constantly talking. You know, somebody might be sitting at work and they continue to go to these places and they sign up for feeds. So they’re just constantly engaged.’ With this particular book they sent out about 350 copies in total – ‘to right-wing bloggers, left-wing bloggers, anything’. After he sent out the books, Phil used Google Alert to find places where a lot of chatter was going on, ‘and that’s when I’ll approach the blogger myself and offer them up a Q&A or an excerpt or a book jacket or a podcast, just because then they re-post it and it goes back to the top and it just starts the conversation all over again. That’s when we then hope that people are going to Amazon, going to Barnes & Noble, going into the bookstores. So it’s like kind of continuing to hit with different and unique content to the point where somebody’s saying “Now I have to buy this book.”’ In the case of this particular book, the campaign was a resounding success. ‘We did a strong pre-order campaign. There was no print advertising; there was no real publicity; it was all web driven. And we drove the numbers up and it was on the top ten at Amazon before it went on sale. Then it hit the bestseller list right after it went on sale.’ Having got the book onto the bestseller list the week it went on sale, the book took on a life of its own, since the bestseller list gives a book a great deal of visibility ‘and that’s when the conventional media starts paying attention to it’.
This kind of online campaign works particularly well for political books, since the political blogosphere has a great deal of traffic and many lively and engaged communities of bloggers and readers, but it can work well for other kinds of non-fiction and for fiction too. One of the things that Phil spends a great deal of time doing is helping authors create their own websites and blogs so that they can help to generate interest in their books – and this doesn’t just apply to political books. This is part of what is involved in the management of web properties.
The basic difference between managing web properties, on the one hand, and online advertising and blog outreach, on the other, is that ‘with advertising and blog outreach, it’s us going out into the world and trying to be effective. When it comes to managing our web properties, that’s in terms of pulling people in to us.’ A big part of managing web properties is maintaining an up-to-date website, and that means creating as much new and original content as possible and changing it frequently – in Phil’s case, two or three times a week, ‘just because the last thing I want is somebody coming to a website, even if it’s been two or three days, and thinking, “Well, this is old news.” People don’t want to see static content.’
In fact the issues are more complicated than this, because it’s also about search engine optimization – that is, about creating a site architecture and content that is friendly for the Google crawler. Being visible in the online world is, to a large extent, a matter of being visible to the search engines, and above all to Google. But just as importantly, it’s about tailoring your site and content in such a way that it’s ranked high in search results – if it isn’t, then your content is, for all practical purposes, invisible. The Google algorithm is a closely guarded secret, ‘a whole black art/science unto itself’, as one online marketing manager put it, but those who work in online marketing make it their business to understand at least some of the ways in which it works. They know, for example, that if you have a Flash object – a multimedia platform commonly used for adding animation and interactivity to web pages – you need to attach some text to it, because Google doesn’t crawl into a Flash object and won’t pick it up. Many YouTube videos are done in Flash but it is the text around them that makes them ‘hyper-relevant’ and visible to the crawlers. The Google algorithm also values the freshness of the content, so the more frequently the content is changed, the higher it will tend to rank in a Google search. Wikipedia is perfect for a search engine because the crawler sees the content and the content is constantly changing, so Wikipedia often comes out ranked at or near the top in Google searches.
Managing web properties is also about creating or encouraging communities of readers by doing newsletters, sending information out to reading groups and either starting blogs or helping authors to start blogs. Why is it so important for authors to start blogs? ‘Just because it gives the author a platform to be out there and to start talking,’ says Phil. In order to get their authors to start blogging, Phil and his team do all of the technical legwork. ‘We set up the templates, set everything up on the back end so people can find the blog, and then let them unleash and do their thing.’ Phil gives the example of an author who was writing a book for them about living with Asperger’s syndrome. They set up a blog for him and got him blogging before the book was published. The author was very engaged, constantly posting new material, ‘not always about the book, he’s just talking in general. He would get 50 comments right away and he’d respond to them. It was a really engaging process. And it was something that picked up a lot of steam. The media was talking about it, and every time you went to a book signing people would say, “Oh, we read your blog.”’ They provided the author with lots of book-related content to add to his site – the book jacket, an excerpt from the book, a podcast of the author reading from the book, a short video of the author, a diary of author appearances, links to a dozen places where readers could buy the book, etc. The podcasts and videos that Phil produced or edited were also posted on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, YouTube and other sites to maximize exposure on the web. When this particular book was published it went straight on to the bestseller list and remained there for a long time – ‘It kind of got a life of its own.’ Even now, as they prepare to release a paperback edition, the author is constantly posting new material and engaging with others, including potential readers, through his blog – ‘he continues to blog and just kind of keeps the momentum going.’
A striking illustration of how the innovative use of online media can increase visibility and drive sales is provided by Kelly Corrigan’s The Middle Place, an uplifting memoir by a happily married mother of two who discovered one day that she had breast cancer. Initially published in January 2008 in hardcover, it was a modest success, selling 35,000 copies. The author is an articulate, charismatic woman and, after the publication of the book in hardcover, she began speaking to groups of women in various settings. She filmed herself on one of these occasions and sent the video to her publisher – a trade house owned by a large multimedia corporation – to see if they could use it. The publisher had just created a small digital marketing group, staffed by two women who had no background in book publishing (‘I did that purposely,’ explained a senior manager, ‘because I think it’s really important at this particular time in publishing to bring in people who don’t carry all the baggage with them, who look at things objectively and try to figure out new and different approaches’). The digital marketers decided to edit the video so you could see the author reading and see the audience reaction, enabling viewers to get a sense of the emotional connection between them. They didn’t release the video immediately but held on to it until mid-December 2008, just a few weeks before the paperback was due to be released. Then they posted the video on YouTube and sent it to a small group of women in the company with an email saying, ‘Here’s the final video. Would each of you please send it to a group of your women friends and encourage them, if they like it, to pass it on.’ At the end of the video there was a picture of the book with a notice that it was available in paperback. ‘I sent it out to a group of about 30 or 40 of my friends, basically saying, “I never send out this kind of thing but it’s so effective, I really encourage you to watch it and, if you like it, share it,”’ said one senior manager in the company. ‘One week after we posted the video on YouTube and a few of us sent it around to our various friends, there were 250,000 views on this video. Two weeks later there were over 500,000 views and I had people sending me the video not knowing I had anything to do with it.’ The video had gone viral.
The paperback of The Middle Place was released in January 2009 and by March it had sold 350,000 copies. As soon as the book began to take off, the traditional retail chains saw a sales opportunity and started to get behind the book. Borders decided that they would try to get this book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and they put out a special instruction to all their store managers, giving it prominent in-store placement. ‘So the book, which was around ten or twelve on the list for several weeks, all of a sudden shot up to four, then to three, knocked off President Obama’s The Audacity of Hope at two and now we’ve got one more to go. Three Cups of Tea is still number one.’ The Middle Place never managed to knock Three Cups of Tea off the number one slot, but it did spend 25 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Of course, online marketing strategies don’t work for every author and every book. There is no easy formula that can be applied – much depends on the type of book, the topic and the author, and the challenge for the digital marketer is to craft a strategy that works for the particular book he or she is seeking to promote, given the subject matter and the particular strengths and limitations of the author. Some kinds of books – like new fiction – are less amenable and some authors are just not interested or able to work in these environments. But increasingly one of the questions publishers are asking when they are considering a new book at proposal stage is whether the author has the ability to engage in some form of online marketing, whether it’s blogging or maintaining a website or creating a video that can be posted online or marketed virally. For in the internet age, these new forms of online marketing are becoming more and more decisive in shaping the visibility of books and their fate.
The battle for eyeballs
The marketing and publicity campaign is one side of the struggle for visibility; the other side is the battle for eyeballs in the bookstores and other retail outlets. ‘I will say this: fundamentally,’ remarked one marketing manager at a large New York house, ‘if you can win the battle in the first 50 feet of the bookstore, if you can get on that front table, if you can get on that end cap, if you can get in front of somebody’s eyeballs, you have a much better chance of success than if you went back into the section, spine out, alongside every other cookbook that’s ever been published.’
Part of the thinking here is that if you’ve mounted a good marketing and publicity campaign you will drive consumers into the bookstores, and then you want your book to be there at the front of the store so they can find it easily, pick it up and buy it. Or just as importantly, if they walk into a bookstore to browse, or perhaps to look for a specific book but not yours, they will see your book, remember that they heard something about it somewhere and add it to whatever else they might happen to be buying on that occasion – in other words, it becomes an impulse purchase. If your book is not in the front of the bookstore, displayed cover up or cover out, but merely stocked spine out in a specialist section somewhere in the store, you’ll lose that impulse purchase. ‘If you walk into a major retail outlet, there may be 30,000 square feet in that store, and within that 30,000 square feet there are maybe 50,000 titles, maybe more, maybe 100,000 titles,’ the marketing manager continued. ‘If there’s something that’s right in front of you as you walk in, you’re much more likely to stop and look at it. A lot of consumers say, “I need a book on this specific topic; I am going into that section,” and then maybe they’ll find your book. But you might walk into Barnes & Noble saying, “I want to buy a great novel” and on your way go, “Oh, look at that cookbook, I would love that, or my wife would love that cookbook.” You lose that if you’re in section – you’ll never get that impulse buy.’
So how important are impulse purchases in trade publishing? Are publishers right to be so concerned about where their books are placed and how they’re displayed in the bookstores and other retail outlets? Table 11 summarizes data from Bowker’s PubTrack on impulse purchases of books by outlet for 2007. PubTrack surveyed over a million consumers in the US who bought books in different outlets, from Amazon and the large retail book chains to the mass merchandisers and warehouse clubs. Consumers were asked whether they planned to buy this specific book at that specific time, planned to buy this specific book but not at that specific time, planned to buy a book but not this specific book, or didn’t plan to buy a book at all. The final group – those who didn’t plan to buy a book at all – are clear impulse purchases. The data show that 29 per cent of all book purchases are impulse purchases of this kind. But they also show that the proportion of impulse purchases varies greatly from outlet to outlet – it’s lowest on Amazon (15 per cent) and other e-commerce sites (16 per cent) and highest at the warehouse clubs, where impulse purchases account for nearly half (45 per cent) of all book sales. Barnes & Noble, Borders and the large bookstore chains are in between (17–20 per cent).
However, what is even more striking about these data is what they show in terms of the intention to purchase a specific book. A substantial proportion of individuals who bought a book were planning to buy a book when they went into a store (or went online) but were not planning to buy this specific book: the fact that they ended up buying this specific book was itself unplanned. If we look at these two groups of individuals together – those who didn’t plan to buy a book at all (the strict impulse purchasers) and those who, while planning to buy a book, were not planning to buy this specific book – then the proportions are startling (the final column of the table). A total of 57 per cent of all book buyers in the survey bought either on impulse or without having planned to buy this specific book. And once again, the proportion varies greatly from outlet to outlet, ranging from 31 per cent at Amazon and 51 per cent at Barnes & Noble to a staggering 73 per cent at the warehouse clubs. In other words, just over half of Barnes & Noble’s customers and nearly three-quarters of those who bought books in a warehouse club did so either on impulse or without having planned to buy this specific book.
This data undoubtedly provides some support for the view that the battle for eyeballs in the front of the bookstore – and even more so the battle for space in the warehouse clubs for those kinds of books that are stocked by them – is crucial for the commercial success of a book, and it is therefore not surprising that publishers are prepared to devote so many resources to securing front-of-store placement. ‘If you don’t get your books promoted [through in-store placement] it’s so, so rare that you can make a book work,’ said one sales director who had been in the business for many years. ‘I mean you can do it, there are other things you can do, like have a great publicity campaign to get people to come in and say, “I want to buy… Do you have it? Where is it?” But especially on a track-record author who publishes a book every year or every two years and there’s really a following for them, you’ve got to have that up front because if you don’t and people can’t spot it you’re going to already be behind the eight ball.’
In the US, in-store placement is typically funded through what is called ‘co-op’ (or cooperative advertising). Essentially, co-op is a cost-sharing arrangement between the publisher and the retailer in which the publisher pays for part of the retailer’s promotion costs. Each publisher will have its own co-op policy. Most trade publishers calculate what they are prepared to make available to a particular account as a percentage of that account’s net sales in the previous year. The amount can vary from 2 to 4 per cent, depending on the publisher. So if a publisher’s terms are 4 per cent of the prior year’s sales, then a retailer who sold $100,000 of this publisher’s books in the previous year would have $4,000 of co-op to spend in the current year. This money goes into a pool which can be used by that account to promote the publisher’s books in their bookstore or on their website, in ways that are agreed on a book-by-book basis between the sales rep or account manager and the buyer. Sometimes incremental supplements are made to the pool in order to include specific titles in special bookstore promotions, like a ‘buy one get one free’ or ‘buy one get one-half off’ promotion on paperbacks.
For the large trade houses, the total amount spent on co-op has grown enormously in recent years and now represents a substantial proportion of the overall marketing spend. At one large US publishing corporation, offline co-op represented 38 per cent of the total marketing budget in 2007 – the largest single item. And online co-op, spent with Amazon and other e-tailers, was in addition to this. At another major US publishing house, co-op represented a little more than 50 per cent of their marketing spend. And this has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. ‘In the 1980s it was probably more like 30–35 per cent,’ said one sales director, ‘and now it’s become more than 50, close to 60 per cent.’
To get a book in a front-of-store display in a major retail chain like Barnes & Noble is not entirely within the control of the publisher. What typically happens is that the sales managers for the national accounts present the new titles to the central buyers at the retail chains and let them know what their expectations are for the book – how big a book it is for them, how many copies they’d like the retailer to buy, etc. The buyers decide which titles they want to buy in what quantities based on their own assessment of the book, the sales histories of the author’s previous books, the cover and various other factors, and they often tie co-op money into the buy. ‘They’re going to say, “Great, I love the book, what are you going to do for it?” And then you say, “Well, I don’t really have that much money. I can only spend $10,000.” They’ll go, “OK, well I can’t buy 25,000.” They play like that,’ explained the sales director at a large US house. There’s a to-and-fro between the sales rep and the buyer to determine how many copies they’re going to take and how much the publisher is going to spend to support it. The sales managers and buyers then negotiate what kind of in-store promotion would be appropriate – placement on a front-of-store table, a middle-of-store section, an endcap (a book display at the end of an aisle) or a ‘stepladder’ (literally a stepladder that is stacked with books and placed near the front of the store – ‘The damn thing sells books like you can’t believe,’ said one sales director), how many stores for how many weeks, etc. The rates vary depending on the type of placement, the type of book (cloth, trade paperback, mass market), the buy size, the number of stores, the number of weeks and the time of year (it is much higher in the run-up to Christmas, for example). The most expensive table is right at the front, and the further back you go the less expensive it becomes. Typically, placement on a central front-of-store table in a major US retail chain for two weeks would cost the publisher $10,000 for all stores, perhaps half that for stores in the major markets (about a third of the number of stores), and less again for so-called A-Stores (perhaps 10–15 per cent of the number of stores). For a table in a back section you might pay $3,500. And a stepladder could cost $25,000 for a week. These placements will be linked to the quantity of the buy. As a rough rule of thumb, in-store placement works out at around a dollar a book for a new hardcover.
Given the cost of putting a book in a front-of-store display in a major retail chain, it’s crucial that the book performs – crucial not just for the publisher, who is paying a premium to put the book there, but also for the retailer, who is tying up valuable real estate. It is therefore not surprising that publishers tend to monitor the sales of new books very closely in the first few days and weeks after publication. The major trade publishers get daily sales feeds from the big retail chains which enable them to see on a day-by-day basis just how quickly their top-selling books, including those with in-store promotions, are moving. Within the large publishing houses a great deal of attention is focused on the performance of new books during the first few days and weeks after publication because the sales and marketing directors know that, for many books, this is the make-or-break time.
Backing success (and letting dead fish float downstream)
At one major US house they have what they call the ‘breakfast meeting’ every Thursday morning. Other houses have something similar, though the specific arrangements vary from house to house. Bill, the sales director at this house, is an old hand on the retail side of the business, having started out as a sales trainee at what was then an independent house in the 1970s and worked his way up, moving houses as they were bought and merged before becoming sales director of this group. ‘The purpose of the breakfast meeting’, explained Bill, ‘is to go through all of our big books that have just landed or are ready to land – maybe just landed in the last two weeks or ready to land in the next two weeks, in that period. We have all our sales numbers, and we compare it to the author’s last book. So we’ve got a really great snapshot of how we’re doing week to week compared to that author’s last book.’ Each of the imprints in the corporation is assigned a time slot for the breakfast meeting, and the imprint’s publisher, together with the key editorial, marketing and publicity people, come in for their 40-minute slot to meet with the sales director and his team. They go through the imprint’s new big books one by one and talk about what they can do to support them.
Some books start off well. The account managers have managed to ship out a lot of books, publicity has lined up some television appearances and the early signs are good. ‘Everybody is a little nervous about having so much up front,’ explains Bill; ‘They wait and see and then all of a sudden the book starts moving and they jump.’ He takes as an example a book they just published the previous day – let’s call it Crisis:
We put out 102,000 copies, which is a very nice number. First book he’s written. He was on Meet the Press in Washington on Sunday. It goes on sale yesterday and all of a sudden the book takes off – it’s number one on Amazon right now as we speak. We got really strong daily sales at Barnes & Noble yesterday – like I think they sold 14,000 yesterday, which suggests that’s going to turn out to be a great sale. And that’s going to catapult it to probably number two or three on their non-fiction list. And I’m thinking if it’s number one on Amazon, two or three on Barnes & Noble, two or three on Borders and the clubs took it but not that big, it will probably be number three or four on the New York Times list a week from today. So we start calling the accounts and say, ‘Hey, I’m calling to tell you Crisis is starting off Gangbusters.’ You know, we’ll call Barnes & Noble, and they’ll look it up and say, ‘Oh, man, yeah, I saw it too.’ Or sometimes the buyer calls us. In this case we were on top of it, and so now we’ve just pushed the button for more. We had 13,000 on hand at the on sale date in our warehouse. That all went, and we printed 20,000 more. That all went. We pushed the button again yesterday for another 50,000.
The ability of the large publishing houses to monitor sales through the cash registers of the major retail chains on a daily basis is crucial here, as is their ability to lean on their printers to turn around reprints in a matter of days – ‘It usually takes about four to five days as long as we have jackets,’ explained Bill, ‘and we had jackets.’
At the same time as they’re reprinting and resupplying the retail chains, they are also putting more resources into marketing and publicity. ‘There’s a lot more money coming in, his tour schedule is unbelievably packed and he’s got a 60 Minutes that’s not even happening until late September [we were talking in July]. So for the next two months he’s got something going on with this book. And so we’re going to support him and add more money to the advertising budget.’ ‘So you divert resources to back success when you see it?’ I ask. ‘Absolutely, that’s how we do it,’ replied Bill. ‘They have a budget set but that budget was probably based on about 125,000 copies. And now that we’re going to be probably closer to 200,000 in a week, that budget will increase.’ As soon as a book shows signs that it’s going to take off, the sales, marketing and publicity operations mobilize behind it and look for ways to support it with extra advertising, trying to get more radio and TV appearances, extending the author’s tour or putting together a new tour to cities where the book is doing particularly well, and so on.
The large publishing organizations are remarkably quick at responding to the first signs of success. They are not blundering dinosaurs – far from it. They may not know in advance which books are going to take off – they have their hunches but there is always a large element of uncertainty. However, the daily sales feeds from the major retail chains – together with the real-time Amazon rankings – give them a sensitive set of tools for monitoring sell-through on a daily basis during the first few critical days and weeks after publication. And the sales, marketing and publicity operations are geared and resourced in such a way that, when they see that a fire is starting to ignite, they are able to pour generous quantities of fuel on the flames. In a hits-driven business like trade publishing where there is a high level of uncertainty about when and where the hits will occur, the key is to structure the organization in a way that enables you to respond quickly and effectively to the first signs of success. As one publicity manager put it, ‘When a book begins to move you throw as many resources behind it as you possibly can, because once a book breaks through the noise of our culture, once you’ve got that awareness of the consumer, bingo. You really have to do everything you can to keep it going, to maximize it. Ultimately it’s the amplification effect: you want to keep the momentum going.’
Of course, not all new books take off like Crisis – in fact, most don’t. So what do you do at the Thursday morning breakfast meeting when you see that a book isn’t moving as you expected or hoped? ‘We look at the marketing director and the publicity director and we say, “What’s going on?”’ explained Bill. He continued:
It’s usually more the publicity at that point. The marketing takes longer to do – we don’t need any more brochures; they’re not going to spend any more money running an ad in the Times usually, because that’s a waste of money in most cases, especially if the books are dead. So we need a TV hit, we need a radio hit, we need something, you know. So that’s what we find out. We need a great review or something. But in my experience, if we’re having troubles in the store and they’re not flocking into the store, they’re going to have troubles on the publicity side. And so we get to a point where we just cut bait and say, ‘You know what, let’s move on.’
The publicity director is urged to do what she can at this stage to help breathe life into a book that is defeating their expectations. She will call review editors to see if reviews are in the works, call producers to see if radio or TV appearances can be fixed up and generally do whatever she can to stimulate media interest. But if further appeals fall on deaf ears and sales fail to pick up, then the marketing and publicity effort will be wound up pretty quickly – ‘In two to three weeks we might pull the plug,’ says Bill. ‘But in all honesty most of our planned expenditures are in the very beginning anyway, so if the author is on tour we’re not going to tell them, “Come back home, we’re not paying for your hotel.” They’re usually on the road for a week and a half, two weeks, something like that; we let them run that out in case for some reason something clicks. And we’ve already committed co-op, so that’s going to stay in place. So we basically don’t print any more – we definitely don’t print any more. And if there are any more expenditures, like if there was maybe a small ad being planned in the Times that was going to cost, you know, five or ten grand, they would probably cut that.’
The publicity manager at one of the imprints in another large publishing corporation put it like this: ‘If a book’s not working there’s not a lot you can do. And if the fish is dead you let it float downstream. I’m sorry, but just let her go, baby. Some publishers keep throwing resources at dead fish. They say, “Oh, we’ll try this, we’ll try that” – it’s crazy, it’s the craziest business I’ve ever seen. I mean, if it’s not moving and you’ve done everything you can in the road leading up to publication, if you’ve made all the right choices, what are you going to do?’
The six-week rule
So how long does a book have out there in the marketplace to show signs of life? How many weeks before it becomes a dead fish that will be left to float downstream? ‘That’s the other thing that’s changing tremendously in our business,’ says Bill; ‘the window is just becoming like a blink of an eye. A book in the past would take longer and it would sustain itself longer. Now it jumps out of the gate and then it takes off and then all of a sudden, two weeks later – I don’t want to say it’s dead because it doesn’t take off and then go like this [he draws a steeply declining line with his finger], it takes off and then it goes like this [his finger draws a line that declines more gently] – pretty gradual but steeper than you would think. I would say the life of a book today is about six weeks. And quite frankly it’s even shorter than that, but you probably have six weeks and that’s it.’
In this respect, trade publishing is becoming more and more like the movie business, with its heavy emphasis on box office sales on the opening weekend. In trade publishing the window of opportunity is measured in weeks rather than weekends, but the window is definitely shrinking. Today a book has just a few weeks – typically no more than six, and in practice often less – to show whether it’s going to move, and if it’s not moving then it will be pulled out of promotions and the marketing spend will be wound down or cut off. It’s simply too expensive to keep a book on a front-of-store table if it’s not selling pretty briskly. And if the book has been sold into the price clubs, then it will need to turn over at a certain rate in order to keep its place – if it falls below this rate it will be pulled and returned to the publisher. All these pressures stemming from an increasingly chain-dominated retail marketplace have compressed the time frame during which new books are given an opportunity to succeed. If it’s clear from the sales figures that the book is beginning to work then the publisher will mobilize behind it, pour more fuel on the flames, invest more time and energy and resources into making it a success or keeping its success going. But if five or six weeks go by and, despite renewed efforts by the publisher, nothing much is happening in terms of sales, then it’s pretty much over. It has six weeks to take off or die.
While the six-week rule applies as a general principle, in practice sales patterns vary a good deal from one type of book to another and, indeed, from one book to another. Publishers are finely attuned to the differences. New fiction tends to match closely the six-week rule, even for successful books – the spike will be much higher for the successful books but the shape of the curve will be broadly similar. Bill runs his eyes down a printout of sales figures: ‘Take this book by [PB]; he’s one of our really big authors. We’ve sold about 280,000 copies gross of that book – we’ve done great with this book. But if you look at this you’ll see here’s week one. OK, B&N sold 9,200 copies. Then – this is typical – it drops almost in half in week two. And then it starts to gradually go down. So in the sixth week, which is right here, it sold 2,000. So from nine to two in six weeks. By week nine it’s at 700 copies, and then it’s down to 443 by week eleven.’ And that was a very successful book – 280,000 gross is a very strong sale for a hardcover fiction title. This was a new book by a known author who has an established readership, so the sales pattern is both strong and predictable, but still short-lived.
New fiction by an unknown or little-known author will typically display the same pattern of rapid decline but the figures will be much lower overall. ‘General fiction right now is one of the hardest categories to break out in,’ explained one marketing manager at a large house. ‘We’re selling a lot fewer books,’ he continued, and it’s getting harder and harder to build the book and get them to break out beyond a small circle of readers. Whereas 10–20 years ago a large publisher might ship out 10,000–15,000 copies of a new novel by an unknown writer and sell 6,000–10,000 net, now they’re more likely to ship 5,000–6,000 and sell perhaps 3,000–4,000 – in any case well below 10,000. And at that level of sales, questions will be asked in a large house about whether it’s worth their while to continue publishing books of this kind, given the amount of time and energy they take up and given the need to meet budget targets without significantly increasing the number of titles going through the system.
So why has it become harder to break out new fiction? No doubt there are many factors that underlie this trend, but there are two that are probably of paramount importance. One is that the publishing industry – the big corporate publishing houses together with the retail chains – have become very good at building brand-name authors and increasing the sales of each new book by the big-name commercial fiction writers, and this is crowding out the market. ‘It used to be you could find space for new fiction; now it’s hard,’ explained a sales analyst at one large New York house. ‘More big authors, commercial fiction writers – James Patterson used to do two books a year; now he’s doing six, plus a children’s book. He’s crowding out the space.’ Another factor is the decline of the independent bookstores. The independents were traditionally very good at building books – books that would start small and build slowly, thanks in part to the support they would get from independent booksellers who, if they liked a book, would get behind it, make it a ‘staff pick’, hand-sell it and continue to display it in a window or on a table despite the fact that the book might only be ticking over modestly. ‘Independents were the bastion for building books,’ the sales analyst continued. ‘But as independents keep getting smaller and smaller as a base, that is not really happening any more. Barnes & Noble and Borders have their discovery programmes, things like that, but they’re not working at the level that independents used to do in terms of loving and building an author or building a book.’
With non-fiction the decline is generally less dramatic than it is with fiction – the sales are still strongest in the first three to four weeks, ‘but then,’ explained Bill, ‘even after week 12, it could still be selling a third of what it sold initially, not 10 per cent.’ Bill scans the spreadsheet until his eyes settle on a non-fiction title – ‘OK, here’s a good example of a non-fiction book that starts off slow and then starts gaining momentum. B&N sell only 355 in their first week. Then it jumped three times that. Then it jumped again. So by week four it’s up to 1,250. So it’s climbing and then it gets to a point and starts to slow down a little bit. So that’s non-fiction. On fiction you wouldn’t get that. Fiction is more predictable.’
The bunching of sales in the first few weeks has become more accentuated over time. If you were to take a general non-fiction book without front-of-store promotion and look at its sales pattern ten years ago, you would find – explained a sales analyst who makes it his business to model these things – that around 30 per cent of the sales would take place in the first four weeks. ‘Now it’s 42 per cent in the first four weeks,’ he explained, showing me the graph on his computer screen, ‘and that’s without promotion.’ If you add in promotion, the percentage will be higher because the first week sales will be higher. Ten years ago, the first week would not be the biggest week. Now it is, whether the book has front-of-store promotion or not. ‘The reality is that because of all the pent-up demand for the pre-sale, your first week is your biggest week in most cases. And if the book is being promoted by front-of-store promotion in the store, it’s by far your biggest week.’
Prior to publication, the sales analyst does a sales forecast for each of their big books – ‘what we call the A titles’ – which represent about 10 per cent of the books published by his company in any one year. For each A title he maps out how many copies they’re expecting to ship into each channel and to each key retailer in each channel, and how many copies they’re expecting them to sell, and then they compare this forecast to what actually happens. Each title will have its own distinctive profile, depending on what kind of book it is, who the author is and how they expect it to perform in the different retail sectors. They have generic models – literary fiction will typically display one pattern, romance fiction another, serious current affairs another, and so on. But regardless of the type of book, one overall trend is clear: ‘What’s happening over time every year is that it’s getting steeper and steeper,’ says the analyst, referring to the curve of the graph which shows sales by week following the date of publication. ‘What this means is that we’re getting more sales concentrated in the first couple of weeks. And that is especially true for any of what you could call commercial books.’
Of course, there are always the exceptions. Most books will follow the typical patterns and match the curves of the analyst’s graphs pretty closely, though the volume of sales will vary greatly from title to title. But there will always be some titles that fail to conform. For example, there are some titles that this analyst calls ‘the tipping books’, meaning ‘books that trend up’. These you can’t really model in advance, because part of what makes them a tipping book is that something happens out there – it could be a publicity break or some other trigger – that gives them a boost so they ‘really sort of ignite and unexpectedly take off’. Many of the books that turn out to be bestsellers fall into this category: the publisher, the editor, the sales and marketing directors, all may have thought that the book would do pretty well, but no one really thought it would become the runaway success it turned out to be. ‘[Y] is a good example,’ says the analyst, picking one well-known non-fiction bestseller from their list. ‘It shouldn’t have been that big. You know, we started out with 70 [thousand] and everyone says, “This book is going to be pretty good.” But no one was sitting there saying, “We’ll be at a million.” We’re now well over a million, closer to two.’
So what is it that makes a book take off, break out of the normal patterns and turn into an unexpected success? Of course, there is no single, simple answer to this question – if there were, some publishers would be a lot richer and more successful than they are. There are many different drivers that can transform the fate of particular books. In some cases they kick in early and propel a book straight on to the bestseller lists, which immediately gives the book high visibility in a crowded marketplace, as happened with books like The Da Vinci Code and The Historian. In other cases a book may not take off in the initial hardcover edition but may build more slowly in trade paperback, getting taken up by book clubs across the country and eventually snowballing into something big. A good example would be Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a book that did moderately well in the original hardback edition for a first novel but really took off as a trade paperback, selling more than 2.5 million copies in the US alone. Similarly, while Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner did well in the original hardback edition for a first novel, it was really the trade paperback edition that took off, selling more than 4 million in the US. A book that might be deemed a modest success or even a failure in the original cloth edition can break out in a subsequent trade paperback edition, thanks in part to the book clubs and an interest that may be spread largely by word of mouth.
While there are many different drivers that can ‘tip’ a book and help turn it into a runaway success, there is one driver that has been perhaps more significant than any other single factor today: it can be picked by Oprah, or, in the case of the UK, by Richard and Judy.
There is nothing quite like Oprah or Richard and Judy when it comes to triggering an upsurge in sales. A book that might be trundling along in relative obscurity will suddenly acquire a kind of prominence and visibility that publicists could imagine only in their wildest dreams. ‘It’s almost too terrifying to contemplate what our industry would look like in her absence,’ said one publicity manager at a major US house, reflecting on the significance of Oprah. ‘If you actually went back and looked at the numbers over the past three years and just took out the Oprah selections and all the books that were featured in Oprah, our business would probably decline by 15 per cent. She’s had that much impact.’
The Oprah Book Club began in 1996 as a regular feature of The Oprah Winfrey Show.8 In the first few years Oprah selected roughly a book a month to discuss on her show, usually with the author present, though the number declined from 2001 on. In 2003 she began to include some classic books in her selections, picking Steinbeck’s East of Eden in 2003 and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in 2004. The books picked by Oprah invariably experienced a huge surge in sales. Steinbeck’s novel, 51 years old when it was picked by Oprah, immediately shot to the top of the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list and remained there for seven weeks. Similarly, when it was announced at the end of March 2007 that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road would be the next book in the Oprah Book Club, it went straight onto the paperback fiction bestseller list and remained there for 19 weeks.
We can see the Oprah effect very clearly if we track the sales of a book like Elie Wiesel’s Night – a harrowing account of the Holocaust based on Weisel’s own experiences as a young Jewish boy who was sent with his family to Auschwitz and Buchenwald following the German invasion of Hungary in 1944. Originally published in Paris by a small French publisher in 1958, the book was translated into English and published by Hill & Wang in 1960 – Arthur Wang paid an advance of $100 and the book sold just over 1,000 copies in the first 18 months. The book went on to establish itself as an important text on the Holocaust and was read in classrooms alongside Anne Frank’s diary. Sales were boosted by the release of a mass-market paperback edition by Bantam in 1982 and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Wiesel in 1986. By the early 2000s, Night was selling 2,000–3,000 copies a week in the US and was a solid backlist title. However, when Oprah announced on 16 January 2006 that she had chosen Night for her Book Club, sales soared. Table 12 and figure 7 chart the sales in the run-up to and the aftermath of the Oprah pick. Sales of the mass-market paperback in late 2005 and the first two weeks of 2006 fluctuated between 1,500 and 4,000 copies per week. In January 2006 Hill & Wang issued a new trade paperback edition with a new translation and a new preface by the author and with the Oprah Book Club logo on the cover. Sales in the week ending 22 January 2006 – the week Oprah announced that she had picked the book – were around 140,000 (11,845 copies of the mass-market paperback together with 127,325 copies of the new trade paperback edition, though bear in mind that the BookScan data will underrepresent the mass-market sales, since BookScan doesn’t have access to sales data from Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and some other outlets where mass-market books are sold); this was a 36-fold increase on the sales in the previous week. Night jumped immediately to number one on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction, pushing James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces – another Oprah pick – into the number two slot. Wiesel’s book remained number one for 24 weeks, and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for a further 56 weeks until September 2007, by which time Hill & Wang had sold more than 1.250 million copies of the trade paperback. Oprah’s choice catapulted a stable backlist title into a runaway bestseller.
So what explains Oprah’s unique role in the publishing industry? Why do her book selections have so much more impact than other forms of media coverage? Four reasons stand out. First and foremost, she has established a bond of trust with her viewers. They have come to trust her selections as a reliable guide, a trustworthy source of advice about which books are worth their money and, above all, their time. Faced with the bewildering array of books to choose from, a limited amount of money to spend and many competing demands on their time, many readers are looking for guidance: they are happy to turn to what they see as a trusted and disinterested source of advice to help them choose. Oprah is a trusted cultural intermediary whose selections reduce complexity in a saturated marketplace.
Table 12 The Oprah effect: US weekly paperback sales for Elie Wiesel’s Night, October 2005–April 2006
Given the importance of the relationship of trust between Oprah and her viewers, it is not surprising that Oprah should have reacted so negatively to the disclosure that James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces – which was selected by Oprah in September 2005 and quickly soared to number one on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction – contained numerous fabrications. Oprah invited Frey back on her show in January 2006 to confront the allegations and grilled him angrily. ‘It’s difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped,’ she told him. ‘But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.’ Oprah was riled because she knew very well that readers could feel disappointed and even betrayed not only by Frey but by her too, since her standing as a reliable and trustworthy guide was called into question by her selection of a book that was presented as a memoir and turned out to be laced with falsehoods. In relationships based on trust (even when these are mediated relationships), there is nothing more threatening than actions that could be perceived as betrayals.
Figure 7 The Oprah effect: US weekly paperback sales for Elie Wiesel’s Night, October 2005–April 2006
Source: Nielsen BookScan.
The second feature of Oprah that makes her selections so influential is that she gets behind books, expresses strong opinions about them and emphasizes their transformative power. ‘Oprah is all about opinions,’ said one publicity director. ‘Oprah is all about “this book changed my life, it’s going to change your life too.” She’s always been very public about the impact that books have had on her life, how they changed her life, how they made her a better person, how they opened up worlds for her. And you’ll hear booksellers say that what she did for our industry is she brought a whole new customer into the store. People who hadn’t read before, people who’d never been in a bookstore before, came in looking for the way to Oprah’s Book Club selection.’ The way Oprah discusses books – expressing strong opinions about them and emphasizing their capacity to make you think about and even change your life – is very different from the way that other TV shows, like the Today Show and Good Morning America, tend to present books. ‘They’re part of news divisions,’ explained the publicity director. ‘They’re not allowed to come in and say, “Hey, you know, I love this book.”’
The third feature that makes Oprah so influential is that her selections are tied in to the growth of reading groups. Reading groups are not new but they have grown substantially in number over the last decade or so.9 According to one estimate there are now 20 million members of book clubs in the US, a number that has doubled over the last eight years. Many of these book clubs are loose associations of individuals who get together from time to time to socialize and discuss books they have all read. Some are linked to bookstores that provide places for readers to gather, recommending books, hosting readings and other author events and even functioning as a kind of community centre in some small towns and rural communities. The books selected by Oprah are often adopted by reading groups, and Oprah actively encourages the formation of book clubs with guidelines on ‘How to start a book club’ posted on her website. Books that become popular among reading groups can take on a life of their own, growing in popularity as they become talked about in the loosely networked worlds of the reading groups.
A fourth feature of Oprah that gives her selections such power in the marketplace is that the brand operates as a mark of distinction that singles out a small handful of books and classifies them as members of an exclusive club. This mark of distinction is then recycled continuously in the marketplace. The books are reprinted with the official insignia of Oprah’s Book Club on the cover and they benefit from special promotions in bookstores and retail chains. The more crowded the marketplace becomes and the more perplexing the range of choices faced by the consumer, the more significance this mark of distinction acquires as a means of increasing visibility and reducing complexity.
In the UK, the Richard and Judy Book Club shared many features in common with Oprah’s Book Club. In some ways modelled on Oprah, the Richard and Judy Book Club began in 2004 and, over an eight-week period leading up to the British book awards in March, they would discuss one book each week, bringing in a celebrity or two to chat about the book and usually including a clip of some ordinary people talking about what they felt about the book. Unlike Oprah’s Book Club, Richard and Judy actively solicited suggestions from publishers, who were invited to submit up to five books per imprint. Although Richard and Judy never explicitly stated the selection criteria, it was implicitly understood by publishers that they were looking for books that were neither highbrow literary works nor mass-market commercial fiction but rather – as one manager centrally involved in the Richard and Judy Book Club put it – ‘that middle ground of really good, challenging books’. The Book Club was very much oriented to the kinds of books that would be of interest to reading groups, ‘i.e. with lots of discussion points, lots of topics for elaborating upon within a programme and digging out and taking up the issues within the books’. Following the success of the Book Club, Richard and Judy introduced a second series of Summer Reads which ran from July until the end of August.
As with Oprah, the books selected by Richard and Judy typically experienced a huge surge in sales. One British publisher who had a book on the first Richard and Judy list recalled how astonished he was by the speed and size of the impact:
We had a book on the first list – it had just been published in paperback, and the expectation was that it would sell about 25,000 altogether, which is not bad, not great. It had sold 14,000 at the time it was picked. You know, they have celebrities talking about the book on the programme, and that was the moment you suddenly saw something very extraordinary happening: the book went straight to number one on Amazon. I think Amazon bought every copy we had left. That was the paperback. The hardback had been published a year before and there were around 300 copies left in the warehouse, and that went to number two on Amazon within the next ten minutes. And we couldn’t keep it in print, we simply couldn’t keep it in print, because nobody knew what this phenomenon was, so we reprinted 10,000. By the time the programme where they choose the winner went out, which is about a month and a half, two months later, it had sold 620,000. So the effect on the balance sheet was huge.
By 2008 the Richard and Judy Book Club was accounting for 26 per cent of the sales of the top 100 books in the UK.10
Oprah and Richard and Judy are prime examples of what I shall call ‘recognition triggers’. I use the term ‘recognition trigger’ to refer to those drivers of sales that have three characteristics. First, they are triggers based on a form of recognition that endows the work with an accredited visibility. Thanks to this recognition, the work is now both visible, picked out from an ocean of competing titles and brought into the consciousness of consumers, and deemed to be worthy of being read, that is, worth not only the money that the consumer would have to pay to buy it but, just as importantly, the time they would have to spend to read it. Visible and worthy: a form of recognition that kills two birds with one stone.
The second characteristic is that the recognition is bestowed by individuals or organizations other than the agents and organizations that are directly involved in creating, producing and selling the work. Literary agents, publishers and booksellers cannot produce the kind of recognition upon which recognition triggers depend. They can produce other things, like the buzz and excitement that surround an author or a book, and these forms of laudatory talk can have real consequences, as we have seen. But recognition triggers presuppose that those individuals or organizations who bestow the recognition are, and are seen to be, independent in some way and to some extent from the parties that have a direct economic interest in the book’s success. It is this independence and perception of independence that enables recognition triggers to grant worthiness and explains in part why they can have such dramatic effects.
The third characteristic is that, precisely because recognition is bestowed by individuals and organizations that are independent and seen to be so, it follows that publishers themselves have only a limited ability to influence the decisions that result in the bestowal of recognition, and hence a limited ability to control their effects. They certainly try to influence these decisions where they can, or to second-guess the decision-makers where they can’t directly or indirectly influence them, but at the end of the day the decisions are not theirs. So recognition triggers introduce yet another element of unpredictability into a field that is already heavily laden with serendipity.
While Oprah and Richard and Judy are one kind of recognition trigger that has become increasingly important in the field of trade publishing (and probably the most important today in terms of the scale of its effects), they are not the only kind. There are others, stemming from different forms of recognition – each has its own specific characteristics, its own array of agents and organizations, its own hierarchies and its own typical patterns of sales effects. Book prizes are another form of recognition that plays an important role in the field of trade publishing, especially for certain kinds of books, such as literary fiction and serious non-fiction.11 Of course, winning prizes is important in and for itself: it adds symbolic value to every individual and organization associated with the book – to the author above all, but also to the agent and the publishing house. But winning a major prize, even appearing on the short list for a prize, can also have a direct impact on the sales of the book, as publishers and editors know only too well. ‘The Booker shortlist was the one thing that could turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse,’ recalled one British publisher. ‘Get on the Booker shortlist and you could sell another 25,000 copies just by being on the shortlist. And if you won it you could sell possibly another 200,000 copies.’
Another kind of recognition trigger is the movie adaptation. ‘There’s one thing that is almost as good as Oprah for a book,’ said a sales analyst at a large US publishing house, ‘and that is when it becomes a movie. People want to be told what to buy and a movie is an imprimatur. A book that becomes a movie has been selected by someone as worthy of being made into a movie. Even if the movie has been trashed and didn’t do well, sales of the book go through the roof.’ The figures bear out his view. Angels and Demons was the second of Dan Brown’s books to be turned into a movie, although the book had actually been published three years before The Da Vinci Code. First published in hardcover in 2000, Angels and Demons had been available in a mass-market paperback edition since 2001 and as a trade paperback since 2006. It enjoyed a long spell on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback fiction between 2003 and 2006, remaining there for 148 weeks. By early 2008, however, sales of both the mass-market and trade paperback editions had fallen off considerably and the book had become a solid but unexceptional backlist title, selling between 1,000 and 2,000 copies a week in the mass-market edition and less than 1,000 copies a week as a trade paperback. The release of the movie in May 2009 gave the book a second wind. A typical Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Hanks, the movie got mixed reviews but did reasonably well at the box office, taking the top slot on the first weekend in the US, 15–17 May 2009, and grossing over $120 million domestically in its first month. Table 13 and figure 8 track the sales of the paperback editions of Angels and Demons in the period before and after the movie was released. Sales began to rise in February 2009, with interest stimulated by the advance publicity for the movie, and by the end of February Angels and Demons was back on the New York Times bestseller list for mass-market paperback fiction (again, the BookScan data will underrepresent the mass-market sales). In March 2009, Simon & Schuster brought out new movie tie-in editions of the book in both trade paperback and mass-market formats. By April sales had jumped to around 30,000 copies a week, and by the end of April Angels and Demons was now also on the New York Times bestseller list for trade paperback fiction. When the movie was released on 15 May, sales jumped to around 50,000 copies a week, and by 31 May the book was back in the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list for mass-market paperback fiction. It remained on the mass-market paperback bestseller list for 20 weeks, and on the trade paperback bestseller list for nine weeks. In the six-month period leading up to and following the release of the film, Angels and Demons sold well over 500,000 copies in paperback – more than five times the number of copies it sold in the whole of the previous year.
Table 13 The movie effect I: US weekly paperback sales for Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, January–July 2009
Figure 8 The movie effect I: US weekly paperback sales for Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, January–July 2009
Source: Nielsen BookScan.
The movie effect is not restricted to thrillers and commercial fiction: even literary fiction displays a dramatic movie effect. Table 14 and figure 9 chart the sales of the paperback editions of Ian McEwan’s Atonement in the period before and after the movie was released in the US in December 2007. Atonement has been available in paperback since 2003, when Anchor released a trade paperback edition. By early 2007 the book had settled into the pattern of a stable but modest backlist title, regularly selling between 1,000 and 2,000 copies a week. Once again, the movie changed all that. In November 2007 Anchor released a new trade paperback edition and in December they released a new mass-market paperback – both were movie tie-ins with pictures of the leading actor and actress, James McAvoy and Keira Knightley, on the covers. Sales began to climb in November, ahead of the movie’s US release on 7 December. By Christmas the book was selling over 77,000 a week, including nearly 50,000 in the new trade edition and over 13,000 in the mass-market edition (again, these data will underrepresent the mass-market sales). By 20 January 2008 Atonement was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for trade paperback fiction, and ninth on the list for mass-market paperback fiction. It remained on the trade paperback fiction bestseller list for 26 weeks and on the mass-market bestseller list for 14 weeks. The movie was not a Hollywood blockbuster in the style of Angels and Demons but the sales uplift was just as marked, if not more so: more than 640,000 copies of Atonement were sold in the six months just before and following the release of the movie, nearly ten times more than the number of copies sold in the whole of 2006.
Although not as large and long-lasting as the uplift typically produced by an Oprah pick, the movie effect is impressive nonetheless. The Oprah effect tends to produce a huge and very sudden surge in sales that follows the announcement of the pick. Sales fall off quickly but they remain buoyant well into the future, as the book becomes integrated into the reading groups that rely on Oprah for their selection of reading material. The movie effect displays a somewhat different pattern: sales of the book begin to increase several weeks or even months before the movie is released, as publicity for the movie kicks in and booksellers increase their stock-holding of the book and begin to re-promote it. Sales increase again when the publisher releases the movie tie-in editions, typically in both trade paperback and mass-market formats. Sales then surge when the movie comes out, typically peaking a week or so after the movie’s release, and then gradually fall off. Like the Oprah Book Club, the movie raises the book and the author to an altogether different plane of public visibility, catapulting a book from relative obscurity, or from a quiet life on the backlist, onto the paperback bestseller lists and turning the author into a name with recognition value, if he or she doesn’t have it already.
Table 14 The movie effect II: US weekly paperback sales for Ian McEwan’s Atonement, September 2007–March 2008
Figure 9 The movie effect II: US weekly paperback sales for Ian McEwan’s Atonement, September 2007–March 2008
Source: Nielsen BookScan.
While the sales uplifts produced by these various recognition triggers are hugely significant in terms of driving sales and tipping books into bestsellers, they are also quite unpredictable from the viewpoint of the publisher. Publishers can and do try to second-guess the decision-makers and tailor some of their publishing in the hope that it will be selected for the kind of book club or prize that can make a real difference to sales – this was probably easier to do with Richard and Judy than with Oprah. ‘The folks in Chicago [where the Oprah Book Club is based] are very guarded about how the book club operates,’ said a publicity manager in a New York house; ‘You can’t pitch the book – they’re not receptive.’ On the other hand, with Richard and Judy publishers were invited to submit books and a great deal of behind the scenes activity went into trying to influence the selection process. ‘There is so much kind of lobbying and pressurizing and clever tactics used to get on Richard and Judy that actually the idea that a book has been plucked out of obscurity and ended up on Richard and Judy is a great kind of media story but actually it’s not really the truth,’ explained one British publisher. ‘We all know people, we’ve all made it our business to know people. We all make sure that we are singing from the same hymn sheet, that we’re all saying the same things. We agree beforehand which books we’re going to enter into Richard and Judy, and these are the ones that we do the lunching and the schmoozing and all the rest of it for. You hand-pick those.’ Nevertheless, while publishers, marketing managers and publicists could try to influence the Richard and Judy picks by carefully selecting the books they submitted and making sure they were all singing from the same hymn sheet when they pitched them to the club, there was still a large element of unpredictability, since the final selections were made without input from publishers. You could choose books that seemed to match closely the aims of the show and make a good pitch but, at the end of the day, the selection committee could simply pass over your books and pick someone else’s, for reasons entirely outside your control.
Given the importance of the Richard and Judy Book Club for stimulating book sales in the UK, it’s not surprising that many in the publishing industry watched the demise of the televised show with apprehension and dismay. In August 2008 the contract with Channel 4 – a major terrestrial broadcaster – came to an end and Richard and Judy moved to UKTV’s new digital network Watch. Viewing figures on the new channel were much lower: on Channel 4 they had up to 2.5 million viewers, but on Watch they had 200,000 for the first show and 53,000 for the second; the figures fell to as low as 11,000 for subsequent shows. In May UKTV announced that the Richard and Judy show would end in July 2009, six months before the end of the contract, because of poor ratings. Just as British publishers had to cope with the demise of the Richard and Judy show, so too American publishers are now having to come to terms with life after Oprah’s Book Club, which ended its 15-year run on 25 May 2011. The kind of visibility that these shows were able to give to books and authors by featuring them on mainstream television will be greatly missed by publishers, though they may find some consolation in the fact that new shows with smaller audiences either have appeared or are likely to appear on more specialized networks: Amanda Ross, the independent producer responsible for the original Richard and Judy Book Club, launched The TV Book Club on More 4 in January 2010, and Oprah has said that she plans to develop a show for books and authors on OWN, the new Oprah Winfrey Network.
Rising returns
One consequence of a marketplace dominated by large retail chains where the window of opportunity for most books is small (and getting smaller) is the escalating level of returns. ‘Today no one wants to own inventory,’ observed one sales manager who has been in the business for 30 years, starting off as a bookseller in New York. ‘When I was a bookseller you had an assortment on the shelves and your turn rates were important but it was important that you had certain sections of the store and that you were maintaining a selection for the odd browser or passer-by. Now no one wants to own inventory for more than 12 weeks; back then it was six months. So the industry has speeded up. This is a slow industry in a fast world and that’s a wrenching change.’
For most large trade publishers, return rates today average around 30 per cent; that’s probably around 5 per cent more than it was a decade ago. But this average figure doesn’t tell you much because it conceals huge variations between different kinds of books and between different retailers. Backlist books generally have much lower return rates, generally in the low teens. So a publisher with a strong backlist will tend to have a lower average return rate. Children’s books also tend to have a lower return rate. But for frontlist adult hardcovers the return rate probably averages around 45 per cent. ‘And probably that would be a plus or minus 15 per cent – you know, 30 to 65 per cent is probably standard,’ explained one sales analyst. ‘The books that don’t work get 60 per cent returns; the books that work tend to get 30. The market basically wants to ship to about 35 to 40 per cent.’ That means that for every 100 new hardcovers shipped out, somewhere between 30 and 60 will come back to the publisher as returns. The publisher will build into the P&L for each new book a write-down figure for returns – typically set at 30 or 35 per cent of gross sales.
The main retail channels deal with returns in different ways. Bill talks me through some of the typical practices. Although most new books will have six weeks to prove themselves, Barnes & Noble and Borders are pretty good about holding on to books beyond the six-week window. ‘Barnes & Noble and Borders will really hang on to books, in most cases for probably three to four months, unless they bought way too many. If they bought, say, 25,000 copies of this book and it turned out after a month they sold 5,000, they’ll call us and say, “Listen, I can’t be sitting on 20,000 of this, it’s tying up a lot money. We’re paying 15 bucks for this. So I’m going to send you back 12,000, OK?” That gives them 5 plus 12… 17… that means they have about 8,000 in the stores. That’s what they’ll do. So they wouldn’t wipe it out completely. But if it’s a novel and it’s really bombed, after three, four months – clean. They’ll send it all back.’
The wholesale clubs like Costco work in different ways. ‘They sell a shit load of books for the right book but they have the shortest window and they have strict guidelines for dollars.’ Bill elaborates:
So if they bought this book and put in, say, 20,000 copies, and Costco’s got 500 stores give or take, they put it in among their 500 stores, not evenly but depending on the store. And now they’re selling this book for 40 per cent off 30 bucks, OK, so they sell it for $18. They have to sell $20,000 worth of the product per week, for the whole chain. So what happens if they don’t sell $20,000 is they put it in sell-down. They’ll usually keep it for about three weeks and if it doesn’t sell they’ll send it back. So when you make a decision to put a book into a club it’s a very risky decision. I mean the decision’s not risky for Patsy Cornwell or John Grisham because you know exactly what they can sell on that. But if you want to put a new author in there, or a new cookbook that they’d never had before, it’s risky as hell, because if it doesn’t work you get a ton of it back. You get 85 per cent of it, 90 per cent of it back. And that always takes time to go through. They have to send it back to the wholesaler, the wholesaler has to pack it and send it to you. That could take two months. And so if for some reason you need stock on that for other places, you can never get it in time. By the time it comes back you don’t need it and you’ve got all these returns. So you’ve got to be careful. When you get the gross sale into a club you’re excited as hell and then two months later you’re really unhappy if it didn’t work.
The rise of the mass merchandisers and warehouse clubs and their growing involvement in the book trade have made it possible for publishers to sell books in much higher quantities – together with the rise of the retail book chains, they have brought about the hardback revolution described in chapter 1. There are now many more outlets for books – Wal-Mart alone has 3,500 locations in the US, and with Target and the price clubs the number of mass-merchandise outlets for books has grown tremendously. ‘But on the other hand,’ says Bill, ‘the people who are running those departments aren’t book people; they tend to be retail people, the lowest-paid workers who don’t really care about books. And so they bring in a whole bunch of books, they do the best they can showing them and then it’s over. And so you’re exposed with many more returns than you were 15 to 20 years ago. So it’s good and bad – you’re getting many more gross sales and you’re getting many more net sales, but the return rate is going up because of that.’
Unless they are damaged, returned books will generally be put back in the publisher’s warehouse. Some may be used to fulfil orders from another retailer but many – in some cases all – will eventually be remaindered. A typical sequence is this: first hardcover edition released in, say, April of one year; trade or mass-market paperback released in the following April; then six months after the paperback was released the hardcover returns will be remaindered and sold for $4.95 or $5.95 on the remainder tables in Barnes & Noble and elsewhere. ‘You don’t want to screw up your paperback so you’ll hold off,’ explains Bill. But if you can remainder the book it’s better than pulping everything because at least you’ll get something back – ‘You might get a buck and a half for that, so it helps at least to print the thing.’ If the returns are high it may make sense to pulp half or more before they remainder it – ‘We’ll just eat it,’ says Bill, because the remainder buy you get is based on how many you have. The more copies you have, the less your buy. ‘So you can get a better price per unit if you don’t have quite as many. And plus you don’t want to have so many out there. So we’ll do that on some of the biggies.’
High returns are costly for publishers. Not only is a great deal of time and money wasted in packing up and shipping books that are never sold, and then packing up and returning them to the publisher’s warehouse, but printing books that are eventually pulped is wasteful and expensive, and the cost of writing off unsold stock goes directly to the publisher’s bottom line, depressing still further a profit margin already under pressure. So what can publishers do about it? Short of a fundamental reform of the supply chain and of the terms on which books are sold to the trade, there are two things that publishers can do – and most of the large trade publishers are doing these things to some extent.
First, they can try to improve supply chain capabilities so that they minimize the impact of the inherent uncertainty of the market. ‘Taken to the logical extreme,’ explained the COO (chief operating officer) of one large trade house, ‘if there were zero replenishment time when a book is sold in a retail shop, if you could print it and have it back on the shelf right away, then most of this problem would go away. Well, we can’t. That being said, we’ve made efforts to speed up the process and reduce the time it takes to order and receive a reprint. So it used to be that, you know, five to seven days would be considered a fast reprint, and we’ve gotten that down to three or four days depending on certain conditions. So that buys people a couple of days and lets the publishers put off making certain decisions until they have more information. We’re trying to make the distribution process faster to again shave off a couple of days.’ The faster the publisher is able to reprint, the less need there is to print large quantities in the first place; they can afford to print more cautiously, hedging their bets and tying up less working capital in stock, in the knowledge that they can order and receive a reprint in a few days if necessary. And the faster the publisher is able to resupply the retailer, the less need there is for the retailer to order large quantities to begin with, since they know that if the book begins to take off and sell briskly they can resupply in time to meet ongoing demand. It is partly the fear of being out of stock and unable to resupply when demand is high that encourages retailers to overstock, and since all stock is returnable there is no penalty for doing so.
The second thing publishers can do is try to improve their information and forecasting capabilities, and use these capabilities to adjust their supply practices. The traditional practice in trade publishing is for sales and accounts managers to sell in new books, wait for the buyers to place their orders and then supply stock in the quantities ordered by the retailers. ‘It’s very much a push system,’ said the COO, ‘so we push all the inventory out there, we hope that someone will buy it, if they don’t it all comes back, as opposed to much more of a pull system where we only put out what people want.’ Of course, it’s very difficult to figure out what people will want when you’re dealing with a product like books – the uncertainty of demand is an inherent feature of trade publishing. But rather than relying largely or exclusively on retailers, whose orders are, in effect, their provisional assessments of potential demand, publishers can try to develop their own tools for assessing potential demand and use these to modify their supply practices.
Some trade publishers have created special units or departments to do just that. ‘We invented a supply chain department a good three years ago,’ explained Don, a sales analyst at one of the large publishing groups in New York. ‘The purpose of that is to measure and understand our customer base and print wisely. The primary goal was to become more efficient, to reduce returns, and not to be left with lots of excess inventory at the end of the day.’ They collect data from their customers, both retailers and wholesalers, load it into their data warehouse and use it to spin off various kinds of reports. ‘So these days, compared to, say, five, ten years ago, we have a much, much better understanding of what’s actually happening in the marketplace. And that in turn drives our decisions.’
What Don’s team tries to do is to drill down below the level of what their primary customer, the retailer or wholesaler, thinks the demand is likely to be, so that they can form their own view of potential consumer demand and use this as a basis to evaluate the orders from retailers and wholesalers – to assess their assessments, as it were. ‘In a big concept sense, it’s seeing what’s happening at the consumer level as opposed to our customer demand level. Because we’ve clearly seen that our customers are making their own decisions and those decisions are sometimes good, sometimes bad.’ The traditional way that publishers have done business is to supply whatever their customers ask for – if the retailer or wholesaler wants it, the publisher supplies them. ‘What we’re doing differently now is we’re saying, “Look guys, you don’t need this,” where our data supports this behavior.’
Don and his team have developed a variety of models for different kinds of books, for particular authors and for different retailers and retail channels – romance, mystery, celebrity biography, B&N, Borders, Amazon, mass merchandisers, institutional, etc. – and they use these to try to forecast the sales patterns of specific new books in different retail outlets. He takes the example of a biography of a well-known movie star they published recently. It was a big book, one of their lead titles. They put out 125,000 copies and it went straight on to the bestseller lists in week one. Their customers immediately came back and reordered, but the assessment of Don and his team was that the shelf-life of this book would be short and demand had peaked, so they decided not to reprint. They had some extra inventory which they allocated in what they felt was a fair and sensible way. ‘So even though some of our customers were crying for more, we turned it off. As it turned out, the sell-through was pretty good because it followed the forecasted curve for a celebrity biography.’ They knew that the window for this kind of book is typically very short and that they would be getting returns early on, so they could plan to use returns to fulfil some reorders, thereby reducing the risks that would be involved in doing a quick reprint.
Of course, this isn’t going to work for all books – ‘It depends on the book, on the genre and on the market obviously; you have to look at each book and you can’t paint any broad generalizations.’ Don accepts that there are going to be some cases where it makes good sense to use the traditional distribution model. ‘There are times when you’ll accept a higher return rate on a book because you’re rolling the dice. You want to give it a chance. So on some books you’re going to say, “OK, we’ll accept it, we might have a huge success with it, it’s hard to tell right now,” and so you’re going in with your eyes open. You have to take risks in business.’ But there are other books where the distributions are small and most of the sales are going through Amazon and other online retailers or through specialist bookshops and yet some customers are ordering 200 or 300 copies and distributing them to a few stores, where they sit on shelves, spine out, and then come back with 85 per cent return rates. ‘And so looking at that we might say, “OK guys, don’t buy these 200 books, we’ll supply them to you if you’re dot.com sales,” because dot.com are our niche customers and we don’t want to turn that off.’
While developing models to try to predict consumer demand and second-guess the retailers can provide publishers with an effective set of tools to try to reduce returns and combat the inefficiencies of the supply chain, it also has risks of its own. You might well lose some sales by dint of the fact that books are not available in key outlets when demand is high, and might even prevent a book from taking off by precipitously shutting down the supply chain. ‘The complexity here’, said one COO who spends a lot of his time working on this problem, ‘is that no one knows exactly how many books you have to have on hand at retail in order to sell more books. So in other words, if you put one in a store it probably gets lost and you don’t sell any, unless someone happens to be looking for that specific book. If you put 30 up in the front it kind of says, you know, “Hey look at me,” and there’s marketing value in that. And no one knows exactly – you know, if you put in 30 you sell 20, if you put in 20 you sell 2. No one knows exactly how that math works.’ Given this uncertainty, there are many voices in the publishing houses that will argue in favour of shipping out more rather than less, on the grounds that the more visible and plentiful the book is in the retail spaces, the more it is likely to sell. Moreover, all the large trade publishers are under tremendous pressure to meet ambitious sales targets, which creates an additional incentive to ship out as many books as you can – an incentive that grows stronger as the end of the financial year draws near. The demand for year on year revenue growth tends to encourage the large trade publishers to maximize shipment and fulfil their customers’ orders as quickly as they can, but high returns which put downward pressure on margins is the price paid for adhering to this traditional distribution model.
Improving supply chain capabilities and the ability to forecast consumer demand are important steps forward in the struggle to deal with the problem of returns, but they are really tinkering at the edges. ‘The physical side of the business is as broken and inefficient today as it was 15 years ago,’ commented one COO who joined a large house in the mid-1990s and has spent much of his time since then trying to deal with this problem. ‘So in spite of the fact that there’s much better technology and much better information, at the end of the day we still print millions of books that never leave the warehouse because there’s not demand for them and ship out millions of books that come back and get pulped, so that whole cycle just doesn’t work very well.’ Given the current structures and established practices of the trade publishing business, there is no easy solution to this problem. This may be a problem that calls for a more radical reform, such as moving to a policy of firm sales for higher discount, at least for a certain range of titles. There have been some attempts to experiment with reforms of this kind, though how successful and widespread they will become, in an industry that has become deeply wedded to a distribution model based on the possibility of returns, remains to be seen.
1 In the US, the principal source of data on new title output used in the publishing industry has for many years been the data gathered by the R. R. Bowker Company and published in the American Book Publishing Record (ABPR); this data is also the basis of the listings which appear in the trade journal Publishers Weekly. The ABPR is essentially a record of the titles and editions passing through the Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication (CIP) programme. From the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, Bowker regarded this as a reasonably accurate basis on which to produce its statistics on title output, but in the 1980s it became increasingly clear that the totals were not reflecting what was actually happening in the American book industry. The ABPR numbers were more accurate as a picture of the CIP’s workload (which levelled out at around 50,000–60,000 titles a year) than as an account of overall industry activity. American book title production was being undercounted, particularly in relation to trade paperbacks and the output of small presses. In an attempt to produce a more accurate portrayal of industry activity, Bowker began in 1998 to compile data on new title output from its more comprehensive Books in Print database. These data are based on new ISBNs issued in each calendar year, and therefore include paperbacks and modified re-editions as separate titles. They also include books published by publishers outside the US provided the ISBN is being made available to the public in the US.
2 The data for the period 2002–10 are taken from ‘New Book Titles and Editions, 2002–2010’, at www.bowkerinfo.com/pubtrack/AnnualBookProduction2010/ISBN_Output_2002-2010.pdf
3 ‘Print Isn’t Dead, Says Bowker’s Annual Book Production Report’, at www.bowker.com/index.php/press-releases/633-print-isnt-dead-says-bowkers-annual-book-production-report.
4 ‘More Books Published in 2008’, at www.nielsenbookdata.co.uk/uploads/press/1NielsenBook_ProductionFigures_Feb09.pdf; ‘Nielsen Book Releases 2010 Book Production Figures’, at www.nielsenbookdata.co.uk/uploads/press/1NielsenBook_2010ProductionFigures_Feb11.pdf.
5 Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004).
6 To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2007), pp. 12ff.
7 Steve Wasserman, ‘Goodbye to All That’, Columbia Journalism Review (Sept.–Oct. 2007).
8 See Cecilia Konchar Farr, Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2005); Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, 2nd edn (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 2008).
9 See Jenny Hartley, The Reading Groups Book, 2002–3 edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
10 Sunday Times, 15 June 2008.
11 For an excellent account of the rise of prizes in literature and the arts, see James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
