With a full year’s lead and direct promotion to librarians, booksellers, and the Goodreads community, a brand-new imprint at Macmillan made the most of a novelist’s debut
Every year at BookExpo, Goodreads’ communications chief Suzanne Skyvara offers a case study of how a publisher has used the platform to ramp up sales of a title. This year, Skyvara’s focus was on Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient. Its publisher, Celadon Books—a new division of Macmillan—was represented by associate editor Rachel Chou, formerly with Open Road Media.
Michaelides’s thriller is both the author’s and Celadon’s debut. It entered the New York Times bestseller list when published in February and now has spent 17 weeks on the Amazon Charts Most Sold list. Chou says that she and her colleagues at Celadon had expected it to go beyond a thriller’s normal appeal because it’s a psychological thriller, and that was confirmed by heavy pre-orders and strong comments on Goodreads. Skyvara said that 500 to 600 users were adding the book to their lists on Goodreads as last month ended, “making it the number-six most-read book on Goodreads” in May.
The publishing house started work a year before publication and went to bestselling thriller writers for blurbs first, since Michaelides wasn’t yet known. When blurbs came in, they got the first hint of just how big the book could be, with raves from Lee Child, David Baldacci, Douglas Preston, and others. They put those compliments on the front cover of the advanced reading copy. They tested that ARC with librarians and booksellers, with favorable response—the book’s page on Goodreads (where many librarians and booksellers are active) also drew raves. Skyvara said the result was early traction on Goodreads by the end of June 2018 (seven months before publication and with no direct marketing to consumers), with 229 Want to Read shelvings and 48 reviews with an average rating of 4.13. She said that very few books have Want to Read shelvings pre-publication.
When offering ARCs through NetGalley and Edelweiss, Celadon used a staged approval pattern rather than issuing a lot of ARCs at once. “We wanted to encourage a steady stream of reviews appearing over time,” Chou said. “The unexpected side effect [was] pent-up interest as people waited for their request to be approved while seeing others reviewing it.”
One difference in how Goodreads staff saw this book’s progress, Skyvara said, is that no one review blew the roof off. The marketing plan is also a case of how Instagram can come into play in the social-media mix for a book. Chou said, “Our ARCs were bellybanded with those amazing blurbs, and then tucked inside that was a mini newspaper with fictional stories about the murder in the book as well as some stories promoting our other books.” The Insta-ready package paid off: to date, there have been 5,000 posts on Instagram using #thesilentpatient.
By the end of December 2018, Skyvara said, The Silent Patient had 12,065 Want to Read shelvings and 989 reviews, with an average rating of 4.17. This made it the number-two book on the list of February 2019 new releases. Goodreads’s staff positioned the book as one of the 43 most anticipated books of 2019, which gave it exposure in the platform’s general newsletter to 37 million subscribers. (Goodreads’ overall active population is now 90 million.)
The early library and bookshop attention paid off when the book became a key pick from both LibraryReads and Indie Next (the independent bookstores’ choice listing). Needless to say, Amazon’s book editors amplified the book’s visibility again when they chose the book as a February Best of the Month selection.
Celadon also used Goodreads’ Author Recommended email blasts twice around the release date. The first one went out from Blake Crouch on January 28. Then an Author Recommended email blast from Lee Child followed the book’s February 5 release. By the day before publication The Silent Patient had 54,022 Want to Read shelvings and 2,281 reviews with an average rating of 4.13, according to Skyvara. And that meant that 54,022 Goodreads users got emails announcing that the book was out, the customary notification that goes to users listing a book as Want to Read.
Bottom line: The Silent Patient is the number-one most popular book published in 2019 on Goodreads. (You can always check this on the platform’s Most Popular page.) Skyvara stresses that the success factors for the book were starting early; sending out ARCs over a protracted period; being creative, as Celadon’s designers were with the Instagram postings; and following Goodreads users’ responses to improve and inform marketing. For a full case study from Goodreads on The Silent Patient, visit their blog.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
