I keep learning about “marketing today” from Peter McCarthy. There are two first principles about descriptive copy (a part of what is referred to as “metadata”, but a tricky part because, unlike trim size or price, it isn’t always obviously “right” or “wrong”) that all publishers need to take on board and adjust their workflows to accommodate. As far as I can tell, none of any substantial size have.
1. Descriptive copy has always been written by somebody who really knows the book, which often meant an editor (sometimes a marketer) involved with it well before publication. Now the copy needs to be written with knowledge gained through research into the audience. That takes both time and capability that hasn’t previously been required.
2. Descriptive copy has overwhelmingly been intended for a B2B purpose — catalogs and title-information-sheets for accounts — and now all copy, whatever its original intent, is likely to end up being seen by the consumer and, more importantly, it will be influencing the search engines that respond to consumer queries.
This is a change that is difficult for a big company to cope with because of their size. But it is hard for everybody because of the uniqueness of each book compared to others. The research methodologies have to scale on one hand but also be right-sized and tweaked for each book, author, and brand. Books aren’t soap. Knowledge of the book itself is generally limited to the editor(s) involved until they push it out to the rest of the company. So it is natural for editors or their assistants to draft descriptive copy. But these people may not have either the time or the skills for audience research.
But if the audience research is seen as a separate activity that should “feed” the copy-drafting, then the challenges are to figure out who on the team should do it, how they acquire the skills and knowledge of the tools to execute, and — trickiest of all — how to budget for the additional time and effort required (which across a large list is substantial).
And then there’s the problem of making sure the copy is consumer- and search-engine-friendly, which is another set of skills that haven’t been resident at publishers but that must be employed today.
This morning, Pete has a post at the DBW blog which really tackles the first part of the challenge, spelling out a set of starter tools and techniques are necessary to do a quick-and-dirty assessment of a book’s audience(s). He describes a step-by-step exercise in audience research that can be done in an hour, once the array of tools he describes are mastered.
We used to say 10 and 20 years ago “the Internet changes everything”. I think that is now thoroughly grasped. Today publishers need to accept that “search and the multitude of other means of digital discovery, both observable and dark, change everything about how we create copy”.