On Friday the Frankfurt Academy will run a seminar addressing whether publishers can make a big marketing impact on a limited budget. Felicity Wood talks to Penguin UK communications director Amelia Fairney to get her top tips
What is the secret to a successful marketing campaign? Tat’s almost impossible to answer, because every book and every campaign is different. You have look at everything individually and work out what that particular book’s selling points are. What can the author do? What does the book offer? Who are the readers? How can you reach them? What channels are open to you? Every campaign however needs to be integrated across different channels, as you need to make it as easy as possible for people to discover the book. Which is where digital comes into its own and it’s also where it provides a challenge, as there is a wealth of information online, so getting focus can be tricky.
If integration is key, does that mean there are books that you can no longer run a niche campaign for? I think the internet makes it very easy to identify niche communities. Whatever the subject of your book there will be online communities about that subject and for smaller publishers working with smaller budgets that can be key. We do a lot of work with brand partners which is a great way of making your budget go further because you’re partnering up with another brand which is interested in your author content, interviews or extracts. And they are able to use some of that for their social media channels and in return they can help you get the word out on your book. We have done that with Clare
Balding’s My Animals and Other Family, which is obviously a book for the general reader but there are also niche areas that we could engage with. We knew that people who have pets are
going to be interested in the book, so we hooked up with [pet insurance company] Pet Plan to run some activities, and also we’re running activity with Jules, the outdoor clothing store, because her brand aligns with theirs. Now, Penguin is a big name and Claire Balding is a big name, but we also apply that thought process to lots of smaller cases as well. Tat’s where the blog community can be great, with something like cookery or women’s fiction there are very engaged blog communities that you can reach out to.
What advice would you give to a smaller publisher that does not have the same brand heritage as Penguin? It’s easy to think as a small publisher where you don’t have the big names that you also don’t have the pulling power, and I guess that’s true, but you’ve got to be pushy. It’s really noisy out there and you’ve got to have the chutzpah to ring someone
up and say: “In 20 minutes over coffee I can show you three books you will really, really love.” Of course you need to be building up your Twitter following and finding out who the key influencers are in your area, those authors, people in the media or booksellers that are going to be able to help you sell your book, and building networks with them.
As marketing budgets decrease how deep has the shift to digital marketing become? Our marketing budget hasn’t gone down, but we do look carefully at how we allocate money. We might not do as much traditional marketing, or we’ll make our budget work harder and perhaps question whether running an outdoor marketing campaign is worth it compared to hiring a freelance publicist that can carry on working with an author to get different pieces into the press. For literary fiction is it worth paying for those
Fairney
thumbnail reviews in a newspaper, or is it better to have a few Facebook ads geared towards fans or a specific audience? Tese are the question you have to ask. Wherever you put your money,
outdoor advertising or digital, the whole thing has to be integrated and that integration has to have a digital element. For example, Michael Joseph is running an outdoor campaign for Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s 15-minute Meals, it’s digital display advertising but it is also completely interactive because there is a competition being run on Facebook, where readers of the book can submit their own recipes, which are then used in the advertising campaign. People expect an interactive digital element, you need to have a bit of everything in the mix.
Amelia Fairney is speaking at the Frankfurt Academy’s Marketing for Publishers training session, which starts at 9.30 a.m., 12th October, Hall 4C Room Entente.
10 OCTOBER 2012 | THE BOOKSELLER DAILY AT FRANKFURT 19