Books are made by marketers

So, as promised, a post about marketing. By the way, thanks to the people who have commented on recent posts, it's good to know the voices in my head aren't all imaginary. I've been thinking about the environment since the talk and I think I might do some more posts on that. It really bothers me that the world has to suffer so I can have my beloved books. I'm going to do some research first though. So, if you're interested in the subject, stick around.

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Now, back to the topic at hand. Marketing.

At first I thought the practical side of selling books would be incredibly boring. I like the idea of brainstorming to come up with creative ideas to make people see why they should buy my product but the actual number juggling? Ew.

Learning about PEST and SWOT analyses has not helped to tell the truth (nor reading through a MINTEL report on publishing - dry and painful). But overall, it's not so bad. I find I can enjoy it on a different level (do not quote Joey Tribiani at me!). For the record, PEST stands for "political, environmental, social, technological" and SWOT is ... I forgot. I'll get back to you on that one. Basically, you find factors that affect your company and the product you're trying to sell, both external and internal.

Oh! SWOT is "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats". Go me!

Anyway, all of this is important because marketing basically is publishing nowadays. Supposedly, this doesn't mean it is the end of creativity and literary quality in favor of cash. Books compete with a lot of other more or less necessary (or made to seem so) products and unless publishing is really effective in its marketing, books will quickly be left behind. You don't need books to survive, even if us bookworms think so.

Marketing is customer driven. You concentrate on them and their needs and try to find what aspect of your product is going to convince them to shell out their money for it. Therefore, it can sometimes seem that marketing is all about pushing people to buy things unwillingly. This is not so. You can't sell someone something they really do not want. I'll quote Alison Baverstock's book "How to Market Books":

"Marketing is about offering:
- the right people
- the right product by saying
- the right things in
- the right way
- at the right time and
- in the right place."

Most of those are fairly self-explanatory. What is meant by "the right things" is that you don't list every single benefit to owning your product. Instead, you pick the few most relevant. Does it come with extra items (CD/CD-Rom etc)? Will it make you smarter/prettier/more popular? etc. And this has to be said "the right way". This means you have to figure out what will convey your message more clearly. Is it in a poster? With what type of font? Writing or images only?

All of this takes a ridiculous amount of research. First, on your product. What is it? What does it do? etc. Then, on the market. Who's your target audience? What do they need? How much money do they have? You have to know the market really well and this means doing the legwork. Go to bookstores and see what people are buying. Do online surveys or paper surveys to ask people's opinions. Get a focus group going (although this costs money and we don't like that in the industry ;) ) and surf the websites of your competition to see what they are doing and how to beat them.

I have some homework to do now. I'll post more on the subject if anyone is interested :)