How Traditional Publishers Are Marketing Books in 2021

The playbook for pre-publication marketing has been dramatically upended, and publishers who excel at online and digital marketing have to be increasingly nimble and responsive

Last week, we attended a virtual half-day conference hosted by Publishers Weekly and the NYU SPS Center for Publishing. The conference primarily featured traditional publishers discussing how their marketing playbook has changed during COVID. In all honesty, we’re not sure that much has changed after attending the event, but it still identified the current marketing priorities and tactics of Big Five publishers in particular.

Big publishers often generate pre-publication buzz by sending out physical review copies—but that has become problematic now that people work from home. Kristin Fassler, who works in marketing at Penguin Random House (PRH), called this out as their biggest challenge, because they normally send out an “attractive package” to booksellers and influencers to generate interest. Now, marketers must rely on sending emails, and with inboxes more flooded than ever, they have to woo the reader by coming up with beautiful digital imagery combined with a compelling message and well-crafted headline. The repeated expression of this concern—the inability to send physical review copies—as the biggest barrier to success highlighted, perhaps to the detriment of Big Five marketing, how little they’ve innovated in the last decade. Fassler openly wondered how it would be possible to achieve the same kind of outreach or cultivate important relationships without the benefit of a physical mailing.

However, in a separate panel, a bookseller said that physical mailings don’t always help, and she pays a lot of attention to email newsletters from publishers. Hannah Oliver Depp, owner of Loyalty Bookstore in Washington, DC, said, “I don’t need swag, I don’t need stuff. Don’t send indie booksellers more crap.” She indicated that some mailings she receives are even inappropriate for her store and community. “It can make a huge impact, but it can make a negative impression if you send it to everyone without thinking about the store.”

A marketer at the smaller house Soho said his team has spent more time on email list-building. “People are hungry to feel like they’re connected to the book community,” Rudy Martinez said. While Soho had great success during the spring in growing their existing list and starting new lists, the challenge is now keeping attention and open rates high when there’s so much competition in inboxes. Big picture, however, Martinez said their most significant challenge is lack of time and resources due to a small staff. (Soho has five people on its marketing team; they publish about 45 titles per year.)

Ebony LaDelle, director of teen marketing at HarperCollins, said that collaboration has been key for her department, with events moving online and limited marketing abilities in the home versus office—e.g., it’s tougher to record a good TikTok video by yourself in a small apartment. LaDelle said they’ve focused this year on creating more landing pages and digital assets to support their titles, as well as partnering with brands that have a young, literary audience, like ModCloth and Urban Outfitters. Such brands are looking for content and starting book clubs to stay in touch with consumers.

Online events are important, but publishers have become smarter about when to run them and how frequently—and how to ensure they make good use of the consumer information obtained. Erika Seyfried, a marketer at PRH, said they went from never hosting a virtual event pre-COVID to hosting several a day. They’ve found that turnout is often driven because people are interested in PRH authors as experts, not necessarily because they are readers of that author. Fassler said publishers have trained customers to see access to authors as free, because historically this has served as a great marketing tool that builds authors’ careers and gives them visibility. But now, they’re trying to figure out when it’s appropriate to monetize such events.

Virginia Stanley, director of library marketing at HarperCollins, can’t see going back to just the occasional live event after COVID because the virtual events have proven too valuable. “Authors most especially have benefitted from this,” she said. “[Virtual events] seem so much more personal to me, so much more intimate. It feels very one on one. In some ways you almost get to know that author even better. We’re not going back.”

LaDelle said that when her department was doing Instagram Lives, they noticed the YA readers eventually began fizzling out. Then they realized their readers were in virtual schooling all day. So now they don’t do as many live events; instead, they’ll do recorded events that can be watched anytime. “We have to be more nimble than ever. We constantly have to shift our strategy,” she said. Seyfried said there’s definitely been consumer fatigue around live events, and they’ve found that lunchtime is working better right now than evenings.

As we reported last month, studies show that consumers are doing their holiday shopping earlier this year, and publishers responded by starting their gift messaging in mid-October. Seyfried said making the change was a “huge adjustment” for them. LaDelle said that social media is expected to drive more sales this holiday season and again referenced TikTok, which is driving toy sales because brands have partnered with influencers there. “We’re seeing the same trend in book sales with ease of shopping on these platforms.” In response, HarperCollins has created a gift guide on Instagram and is looking at how to make the online shopping experience more friendly and convenient.

In a world where book browsing is happening predominantly online, publishers are beginning to realize the need for and importance of a clear brand identity. For years now, people inside and outside of the publishing industry have pointed out how most publishing imprints are either unknown or indistinguishable to consumers—with the exception of a few iconic brands, like Penguin Classics and DK. This lack of branding has a certain logic to it if the publisher is attempting to brand the author—but not all authors are recognizable brands, particularly not debut authors. Fassler said during COVID (and likely after) publishers can’t rely so much on bookstore browsability to make a sale. Instead, marketers have to create a look that will trigger recognition in readers that this is a book they’ll be interested in. In addition, Seyfried said they’re working on how to create a digital browsing experience that’s compelling, including 3D book shots and videos that mimic flipping through the book’s pages.

When publishers spend money on advertising, their goals shift depending on the stage of the book’s release. Prior to launch, Fassler said their advertising focuses on driving awareness around reading the book (such ads would be targeted to booksellers, influencers, and others with access to the advance review copy). When the book goes on sale, advertising is meant to amplify media attention the book receives and to reach the “low-hanging-fruit audience” they know will be most interested. After that, they focus on “conversion advertising”: Facebook or Amazon-type ads to reach a wider audience and to make as many sales as possible. This is where the publishers become more critical of ad performance and optimize ads in real time to ensure the smartest spend.

Fassler emphasized throughout her session that she’s always relied on having a “long runway” for book marketing and now finds it a challenge to balance that long planning window with being responsive to changing market conditions. She seemed to be the most lost without that traditional pre-publication push and even doubled down on it at one point: “We need to start even earlier, because [the] window for discoverability needs to get longer and longer to get reader attention.” She said the higher a book starts off in its first week of sales, the longer it’s going to sustain sales.

This was contradicted in part by LaDelle, who said the Gen Z audience wants immediacy and likes to binge. While she acknowledged the need for some pre-pub time to get buzz going, neither does she want readers getting impatient.

In a separate discussion about the success of Mexican Gothic, a novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (published by Del Rey, a PRH imprint), one of the marketers said that the lifecycle of the book is only just beginning at the on-sale date. While there was an enormous amount of marketing done prior to release (focus groups, brand partnerships, Instagrammed paper dolls), the campaign for Mexican Gothic kept going and shifted messaging at key points after release, with different beats for Latinx Heritage Month, Halloween, the Goodreads Choice Awards, and holiday gifting. However, few novels receive a sustained, long-term marketing campaign that’s multi-faceted like the one for Mexican Gothic.

Bottom line: We might be seeing a growing divide between marketers of certain types of adult fiction—who rely tremendously on pre-publication buzz with booksellers and librarians—and marketers focused on younger or more diverse audiences, where digital forms of outreach can be critical for reader engagement. But presenting the true outsider perspective at the conference was Andy Hunter of Bookshop, who argued that publishers are acting in a short-sighted manner when they invest marketing dollars into the purely online marketplace, namely social media or Amazon. He said, “The Big Five are worried about the other Big Five, and they’re not thinking about the community dynamics and what makes a healthy ecosystem.” If publishers sell direct to consumers (via email, via social) and disintermediate bookstores, he wonders how those same publishers can break out a new author if and when grassroots marketing channels—such as bookstores and review publications—cease to exist. During COVID, we might already have a glimpse of just how, in fact, that will happen.