The core principles and workflows around marketing books really require change in the digital age, and perhaps more radical change than many people thought. The time-honored process was to somehow communicate knowledge of what was inside a book to book reviewers and bookstore buyers so they could decide whether it was suitable for their audience or their customers. In other words, intimate knowledge of what the book said was presented by the publisher to professional intermediaries who would get word of the book, and copies of the books themselves, to the purchasing public.
The copy was B2B, and the critical requirement to create it was knowledge of the book’s content.
In the digital world we live in now, none of this is true any longer. A core purpose of the marketing effort for books today is to get them “discovered”. That largely means having them show up high on the list of returns for relevant searches. If that’s the objective, then the key knowledge required is not so much what’s in the book as what search terms the most likely customers will use to ask the question or express the desire for which the book is the right answer or fit. And in the world of digital information, Google is the primary intermediary, not the reviewer or bookstore buyer. The copy the publisher creates and puts into digital play will almost certainly be seen more often by potential customers for the book than by industry professionals.
So the copy today must be B2C, intended for consumers, and the core requirement to create it is knowledge of the book’s audiences, where they are found online, and the language they use to discuss the book’s topic. And gaining that knowledge almost always requires research. (As it happens, stronger consumer-directed copy usually ends up being stronger and more effective influencer-directed copy as well.)
One of the longstanding tools of the trade for book marketers has been the Title Information Sheet. Everybody who has worked in trade publishing over the past several decades is familiar with them; every publisher creates and uses them. The TIS contains the beginning and then eventually the ultimate core metadata for the book as well as copy that describes its content, its author, and some ideas about its market.
Two months ago, the Logical Marketing brain trust — Peter McCarthy and Jess Johns — came up with a new tool we think could — we really believe should — become the new standard. We call it the Audience Information Sheet. We have now gotten two pretty substantial publishers to start using them. One — not Big Five, but big — took some seminars with us, had us write them a manual, and is now implementing AIS into their workflow.
Then we beta-tested the AIS with Logical Marketing’s most active Big Five client, a company constantly innovating in digital marketing. They came back to us last week with the word that they’re going to start incorporating our new AIS, which we will provide them, into their workflow. It is worth noting that the ones we create will be somewhat deeper and more sophisticated than the ones created by the previously mentioned client doing it themselves. The do-it-yourself effort was “right-sized” to fit the publisher’s capabilities and resources. What they do without us covers the semantics very well; we do a lot more with audience segmentation and analysis in the ones we deliver.
Both these publishers see what we see. The TIS was the core information needed by book marketers before Google. The AIS has the core information book marketers — as well as people responsible for sales and publicity — need now.
Here are the components of an Audience Information Sheet.
1. A high-level audience profile describing the book’s audience in very general terms. “Married moms who range in age from their twenties to their early fifties.” “His audience associates him with his work around obesity, healthy eating, and nutrition.” This description might also include other authors the audience might consider to be “comps”.
2. Demographic insights into the audiences, such as we find them in social and search, for which we employ tools to analyze the characteristics of the people it finds and learn their age, marital status, gender, income level.
3. Behavior and lifestyle insights include the personal interests of the audience and their occupations/professions, and spending/purchasing habits.
4. Geographic insights are gained both from “search trends” and “social trends”. We look for geographical areas that “over-index” for interest in the book’s subject, genre, settings, or for audiences with the right characteristics.
5. Audience segmentation and targeting examines each of the major audience segments (“Moms”, “Natural/whole/organic food community”, “Popular science”) that logically follow from the research and tells you where you find them (geographically or institutionally), what brands they like, what topics they talk about, and what platforms (Facebook, Instagram) they frequent. The number of audience segments broken out this way varies with the book, of course, but anywhere from three-to-six such segments is typical.
6. Keywords, Topics, Phrases, and Influencers are lists that are the key pieces of information to employ for all marketing efforts that follow. We present the search terms that are important to surface the book’s audience, including how many times each term is searched each month, in the U.S. (Or in other countries, as appropriate. We can do this work from the perspective of just about any country that uses our alphabet.) Then hashtagged subjects are listed with the number of Tweets in the past month and the number of Instagram posts that have occurred (measuring the amount of “chatter” around a book and the form it takes). Then the key influencers, the Twitter accounts (and, from there, the sites, blogs, and other accounts they use) that would be most productive to engage on behalf of the book, are enumerated as well.
Every component of the AIS gives marketers useable data. Beyond consumer marketing online, the data informs old-fashioned publicity efforts and can direct sales activity as well. As marketing opportunities present themselves during the course of a book’s life, those responsible for pitching the book will find useful guidance in the AIS over and over again. Only time will tell, but it sure feels to us like we’ve created a tool that, once used, will be very hard to do without.
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