Marketing

As the book publishing industry continues to shift and evolve, many publishers are seeking to incorporate additional revenue streams into their existing business models. One channel that more and more publishers are experimenting with is product licensing—allowing the use of a brand name, patent or other proprietary right in exchange for a fee or royalty.

While it may not evoke memories of your mom or dad tucking you into bed and reading your favorite bedtime story, Cambridge, Mass.-based Barefoot Books’ latest marketing initiative is a sign of the times in an evolving publishing industry: On March 31, the children's book publisher announced the launch of a weekly podcast series that features free story times from its collection of books. The podcasts offer adults and children the ability to listen to stories at home or on the go.

(Press Release) NEW YORK, NY—Bestsellers from favorite authors are now available in more formats than ever—and many book lovers are choosing to listen to audiobooks.

Bruce Brandfon, Scientific American: always charged for content and a few years gave it away for free on the web. Couldn’t monetize it by way of advertising. A year ago decided to publish tidbits and took the features stories off the web. Previously published features on the web for free before the magazine came out. As a result subscriptions increased. Lesson learned as publishers of content is that rates they were able to generate on the web were very small compared to the rates they could generate in print.

If you're like most book publishers, you're always interested in finding new ways to increase unit sales, revenue and profits. One way to achieve this goal is to tap into new markets for your current titles. Easier said than done? At the upcoming Publishing Business Conference & Expo, March 8-10, in New York City, Brian Jud—president of Avon, Conn.-based Book Marketing Works—will lead a session entitled, “Sell More Books in Large Quantities, With Fewer Returns,” to help publishers discover and sell to new markets.

Quite honestly, as a consumer, I rarely see a marketing campaign for a book that excites me, or gets people talking. I understand that book publishers generally don't have the marketing budgets to support big, splashy campaigns for a single title, but as a book lover, it's difficult to see the launch of so many great books often met with a collective yawn from the general public.

Andrews McMeel Publishing's promo video for "Why Dogs Are Better Than Cats."

A year ago, I wrote a column examining the problems that occur when publishing organizations place marketing departments in technology silos, without access to digital assets and tools that would otherwise make marketing programs more effective.

Many publishers have launched or are launching social media efforts. But, as time will tell, an effective social media strategy requires more than simply setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook page and waiting for followers and fans to flock. When San Francisco-based Chronicle Books launched its social media strategy in March 2009, it did so with specific goals in mind. "The overriding strategy … was to build our community, build audience, raise our brand awareness of Chronicle Books online and start … driving traffic to our site," says Guinevere de la Mare, Chronicle's community manager, who works with the marketing team to spearhead and sustain social media efforts.

I recently became a follower of Khaled Hosseini, author of “The Kite Runner,” on Twitter. I was shocked to see that he had only 920 followers. Not that 920 is necessarily a small number of followers … but it’s Khaled Hosseini, for heaven’s sake. I started looking for some of my other favorite authors. I couldn’t find Barbara Kingsolver (“The Poisonwood Bible” is one of my all-time favorites) on Twitter, but she did have a Facebook profile with 3,845 fans (now 3,846).