The book business has changed dramatically over the last few years. Stores that specialize in selling books and actually have intimate knowledge of the books they sell — and can order — are a dying breed. The big box stores have redefined how people buy books. More significantly, they have changed the way books are sold. This presents an interesting challenge to publishing companies and publicists.
In a recent conversation with Jason Wells, Director of Marketing and Publicity for Harry N. Abrams Inc., a book publishing company, I learned about some of the major challenges that have come up. The challenges are rooted in the limited amount of ‘face time’ a book gets. Face time is when a book is featured prominently on a display table or book shelf with its cover facing out so the prospective buyer can see the book.
In the old model of book selling, books got face time in a store in order to help promote and sell good books, and face time was rotated for the benefit of the customer. In the new model of book selling, most books get face time because a publisher is paying a premium to the book store for the book to be displayed face out. This means that the books are being displayed for the benefit of the book store and a publisher that is fortunate enough to have the budget to pay for the ‘face out’ privilege.
Most books are never even seen, or they are seen ‘spine out’. Publishers and publicits are now forced to ‘market the spine’. Yes. That extremely narrow, sometimes tall, part of the book. If selling a book by its cover was hard, it seems that selling a book by its spine would be near impossible.
How much can be done with a book spine to attract attention among a sea of other book spines? Consider that there is no rhyme or reason to the colours, fonts and font attributes on a bookshelf of dozens of books. That is to say, using bright, rich or even dull colours for one particular book doesn’t necessarily help it stand out more than any other book using bright, rich or dull colours and a similar (or even different) font and font attribute combination.
This new challenge extends into many industries: technology, entertainment, services, etc… The window of opportunity to present a product or service as a Purple Cow among other products and services is getting smaller.
What makes this challenge more interesting is that there is no obvious solution. There is no way to truly model an idea and test it without taking a chance on a book and putting it on a bookstore shelf, spine out, and hoping for it to gain the attention of the right people — those that are going to spread the word about the book and even buy several copies as gifts.
Have do you market your spine?
