Kill the Ads

While we are talking – as we have been all week – about marketing, word of mouth and how readers discover books, there’s this article that pretty much made me weep.

“Publishers can spend a fortune promoting their hottest literary discoveries. Bookshops can deploy all their marketing ingenuity to produce imaginative displays. But when the book-buying public comes to choose a new read, it is word of mouth that counts.

“One in four of those polled said the last book they read was on the basis of what a colleague or family member had told them, with almost a third of under-35s citing it as the most important factor.

“In a disappointing result for the promotional teams who spend up to £100m on book advertising every year, only 6 per cent said they chose a book because they saw it advertised, with 7 per cent citing the cover design as the deciding factor.”

No. No. No. It isn’t a disappointing result. The stats don’t mean that.

1. No one knows how the first person to read the book who then went on to talk about it heard about it. Meaning, sure, twenty people might hear about the book word of mouth from Maggie S. But how the hell do we know how Maggie S heard about the book? Maybe from an ad. Maybe from a co-op display. Maybe from a promotional effort. That’s how advertising works. You get people to try something and then those people talk about it.

2. I would contend that the industry has not explored advertising and marketing techniques of a unique and creative enough nature to determine if ads and marketing are useless or not. Just because more people still buy books via WOM doesn’t mean there aren’t methods of advertising out there that should be employed.

3. Plus, what we know in the halls of the ad agencies is that there are terrific promotional opportunities that encourage WOM. Sure you can wait for WOM to happen or like Seth Godin did with Unleashing the Idea Virus, you can give it a push.

4. Someone should tell the author of the article that a book that got over a million dollars in advertising and promotion and was the center of an hour long, prime time TV special is not the best book to use to prove his thesis. I mean, really.

(Thanks toMaud for linking to the article)

And speaking of spreading WOM, N.M. Kelby, whose novel we blogged about a few weeks ago writes:

“I noticed that after the recent Bookslut piece about THEATER OF THE STARS my Amazon sales have increased greatly and I've received a letter a day, on average, from a reader. (I published my e-mail addy on the book
jacket).

“One reader was 11 years old, one was a nuclear
physicist.

“The story of THEATER's plight also appeared in two
other blogs after the BOOKSLUT piece with links to
BOOKSLUT.

“While this isn't enough to 'COLD MOUNTAIN' THEATER, it
does bring up an interesting question about the power
of blogs.”

Now, before a certain reader of this blog writes me again to tell me that a rise in an Amazon number can only mean a copy or two, I’d like to say that while a rise in an Amazon number can only mean a copy or two that is not the point. It is an indicator. What Kelby has noticed, what those of us who watch these things have noticed, is that blogs do have impact on book sales. Big enough to make a difference.

Comments

[Jozef Imrich]

Ach, MJR

Rumour has it ;-)

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0%2C6109%2C1429364%2C00.html

[aeu]

This is very wise... we all KNOW books spread by word of mouth, but that is only part of the story, and it seems everyone focuses so much on it to the exclusion of everything else. And what is word of mouth, really? Of course we pick up books our friends have liked, but we also hear about them from reviews, see ads, see them on those displays at the front of the store--and it has the same effect, so much so that when someone asks me why I'm reading a certain book, I might say WOM when no one has ever recommended it to me.

[Jozef Imrich]

Another urge to share MJR,

Battle of the Ads ... intriqued? Then, dive in ;-)

http://battellemedia.com/archives/001304.php

[danyel]

Hey MJ ... thanks for this.

[JoAnn Chartier]

Word of Mouth vs Advertising? No. It should be a love affair between perfectly compatible mates. Think about this scenario: on a clogged expressway, freeway, road or bridge a driver heading to or from work is listening to the radio, as millions do, hears a great voice reading a riveting paragraph or two from a book that is now on sale at a mammoth bookstore that has branches everywhere plus an online presence. That kind of "word of mouth" is relatively inexpensive, can be done with or without partnership of a publisher, repeats regularly at all hours of the day but is featured in drive time, when all those people are prisoners in their cars looking for entertainment. Radio is one venue, blogs another, and print advertising another -- but advertising works; the key is to use the right message in the right medium.

How do I know this? Personal experience. 60-second radio ads that ran for three days, paid for by a local bookstore, brought a full house to my booksigning at that store. The bookseller sold our books and others they saw while waiting in line; people browsed while waiting for the program to begin and after the talk. The bookseller more than paid the cost of the ad and reached a different audience than the newspaper. Word of mouth is advertising folks, so make it work. And no, I don't sell ads on radio.

JoAnn Chartier