More Essential Digital Marketing Strategies for Independent Presses

Part two in our series of resources and best practices for book publishers

A long hallway shelf of floor-to-ceiling books, illuminated by hanging bulbs. Photo by Janko Ferlic from Pexels

Thank you to everyone who shared and responded to the strategies we gathered in Part One of “What Can Indie Presses Do?”, our working list of marketing and business strategies for independent publishers. Please keep your suggestions coming, and we’ll add them to this dynamic Google Doc (which we hope you’ll also share and bookmark!). These resources are intended to be free and available to our publishing community. All we ask is that you credit the author and ZG Communications wherever and however you share this information.

In Part One, we acknowledged that book discovery, recommendation, and purchasing has been forced to move almost exclusively online. Before the COVID-19 crisis, e-commerce and digital marketing best practices were already areas in which independent publishers sometimes struggled to adapt. Even if a reader is loyal to their local independent bookstore or library branch, they are more likely to encounter their next read in an Instagram post, an e-newsletter recommendation, a podcast, or a digital ad than they are in a brick-and-mortar space or print review.

And now, in the spring of 2020, libraries have been forced to close their physical branches, and even the independent bookstores’ web traffic has skyrocketed. Oakland, CA’s East Bay Booksellers reported a 6000% increase in web sales in April 2020 as compared April 2019. The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance saw a 130% increase in web traffic to its member store sites in March 2020, as compared against the annual average. Now, more than ever, independent publishers must become savvy e-commerce and digital marketing strategists.

So here in Part Two of “What Can Indie Presses Do?”, we’ll get specific — granular even — about these digital strategies. Again, we acknowledge that limited resources, list variances, and other factors will necessarily mean that not all of our recommendations may be applicable to every independent publisher’s business. And while we at ZG Communications deeply value the irreplaceable and essential roles that independent bookstores play in our communities, culture, and industry, we must also work within the reality that behemoth like Amazon dominate most presses’ market share. Our recommendations will always center independent bookstores (see Part One); however, we counsel presses to examine your list’s market share at Amazon, B&N, Ingram, etc, and to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. We believe it is good business to both follow your readers to where they already spend time and money online, and to make the effort to educate them on why independent bookstores and libraries matter.

Be Strategic

Design for the Internet
Industry buyers, readers, and book critics will see your book cover first (and perhaps only) as a digital image. Oftentimes, this image will be in thumbnail or viewed on a mobile device. Are you optimizing your book cover design for appeal and legibility as a digital image? How will this cover look on Edelweiss or NetGalley? On Instagram or Facebook? Will your cover design catch readers’ attention as a 2-dimensional image as they scroll on their phones? Look to art directors and designers like Nicole Caputo and Jaya Miceli for beautiful, creative, compelling cover design examples that privileges a reader’s digital first encounter with the book.

Look Closely at Your Sales Figures
This might seem like basic advice, but especially in times of crisis, it’s important to set time aside to look at weekly print and digital sales numbers (across every channel and in every format). Compare these figures against those a month ago, two months ago, a year ago. Look for patterns. Look for surprises. Ask questions about the numbers you’re seeing to your sales force and distributors and fellow publishers. While the numbers might often be depressing (even dire), they will also reveal trends and opportunities in our new market reality, and we recommend you lean into those opportunities with some of the following suggestions.

Drive Sales to Your Backlist

• In Part One, we offered publishers robust metadata strategies to facilitate discovery. These tips are particularly important for improving backlist sales, especially for presses whose older titles may have few — if any — existing keywords. Defining “backlist” as any title published before the COVID-19 crisis, we recommend publishers augment and update their backlist’s keywords, BISACs, and — most importantly — descriptive copy before undertaking the additional recommendations in this section. Ensure that all formats of every title receive the metadata update.
• **It is now free to show your products in the Google Shopping page.** From the Google announcement: “With physical stores shuttered, digital commerce has become a lifeline for retailers. And as consumers increasingly shop online, they’re searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods. While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale. In light of these challenges, we’re advancing our plans to make it free for merchants to sell on Google. Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google. With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship, but are less discoverable online.” Set up your free Google Shopping product listings here. [A note that Google Shopping integrates quite well with Shopify, and uses your descriptive copy itself for keywords.]
• If you offer direct-to-consumer sales, explore different deep discounting strategies with your customers (using email and social media marketing). Arsenal Pulp Press recently offered a “Buy Two, Get One Free” sale. You could offer free digital copies with every print purchase, allowing readers to dive in while waiting for slower-than-normal shipping times. Sales can highlight themes in your lists that are relevant to what consumers are looking for right now (homeschooling and educational resources, crafting, cookbooks, meditation and mindfulness, job readiness, etc). Consider using your direct-to-consumer sales as a fundraising opportunity for small businesses, nonprofit organizations, bookstores, partners, or industries you want to help see through this economic calamity.
• Consider moving backlist titles to short-run or POD for reprints: Ingram is, without a doubt, the single most important channel with whom to maintain inventory levels for the foreseeable future. Print-on-demand or short-run printing are two effective strategies to ensure stock levels at Ingram. If you are distributed by the Ingram group, explore their Lightning Source options, and ask for the pricing you’d need to make the program viable for your list. Price out other short-run options. Experiment with titles that typically see a perennial (however small) K-12 or higher education adoption, or with titles seeing a bump as a result of current events. Select 10–30 backlist titles that typically accrue a slow trickle of backorders, and experiment with these before making any list-wide decisions about POD.
• Update your ebook files to promote other titles by the same author, in the same series, etc. If you create your own ebook files, it is easy to include a page at the end of an ebook that promotes another title (locate this page before an Index or ToC, so as to not miss the reader’s attention). Important: use cover images, full title/subtitle, and the author’s name in these promotional pages. Encourage readers to seek out their next read while they’re still buzzing from the book they just finished.
• Create thematic backlist catalogs on Edelweiss and Goodreads: for example, do you have strong children’s nonfiction themes within your list? Build age-specific “Homeschooling” catalogs on Edelweiss and corresponding lists/shelves on Goodreads highlighting these titles. Other themes could include “Memoir,” “Climate Change and the Environment,” “LGBTQIA+ voices,” “OwnVoices YA”, etc. Be clear and concise with your catalog/shelf titles — buyers and readers should know exactly what your catalog contains in 4–8 words. Share the Edelweiss catalogs with your bookseller and librarian mailing lists, if applicable. Share your Goodreads shelves with your consumer mailing lists, if applicable.
• Work with your distributor to create additional points of discount for a thematic segment of your backlist catalog for independent booksellers. You could focus on gift titles and roll this out for the 2020 holiday season, when we will hopefully have our brick and mortar partners open again.
• Level your titles — even those not published for children. Read Scholastic’s in-depth explanation of leveling here. Most school boards will not authorize the purchase of a library resource for a school library without it being leveled. Wholesalers like Follett and Baker & Taylor use Levels as an important point of metadata.
• We recommend the leveling vendor Lexile, as it is an industry-wide recognized standard. Lexile frameworks for reading and listening help educators and parents match students to materials at the right level of difficulty. If you are a publisher of books for children, middle grade, YA, and/or resources for educators, you should level every title you publish. Your distributor may have a pricing discount with Lexile.
• If you publish adult titles, there is still a strong argument to level certain books. For example, could some of your titles be read as late YA/crossover readers? Do you have accessible books that center LGBTQIA+ themes, or themes of race, class, or identity? Librarians and educators, especially serving high school students, are always looking for adult titles that reflect their students’ lived experiences.

Consider your Ebook Pricing Strategy:
Digital sales are increasing during this absence of brick and mortar retailers, and while Amazon privileges essential item inventory. You may have also noticed Amazon has updated most books’ landing pages to default to the Kindle edition, if one is available. The retail giant is quite intentionally driving and incentivizing readers towards their ebook business. Are you making the most out of every ebook sale?

• Are you nominating your titles for Kindle Daily, Monthly and Student deals through your distributor or Kindle account manager?
• Have you experimented with putting titles in Kindle Unlimited? Genre, series, and business titles are three possible categories where you might see success, especially if you’re including titles with a promising sales history.
• Experiment with BookBub, Hoopla, and Scribd. Ask your distributor for more information on their relationships with these ebook discounting services, and how you can nominate titles for inclusion in the services’ programs and promotions.

Does your contract contain an agency or a retail pricing model with Amazon? (If you’re unsure, ask your distributor or Amazon/Kindle account manager). If you have a retail pricing agreement, you most likely set a digital list price for your ebooks informed by the lowest available print list price of your books, and then Amazon’s algorithms further discount your ebooks. If you are on a retail pricing agreement for your ebooks:

• Have you increased your backlist digital list prices to reflect your current lowest print list price? Many publishers slowly increase the price of backlist titles as they schedule reprints. Your ebook prices should also increase, pegged to your lowest print list price as it increases over the years.
• Many presses are weighing the costs of not publishing hardcovers. Be aware of what a move away from hardcovers will do to your ebook prices. For example, if you typically publish first in hardcover for the library market and peg your ebook prices accordingly, but are considering TPO (trade paper original) during the COVID-19 economic crisis, what will the lower initial print list price do to your ebook revenue? By what percentage have your ebook sales increased since the crisis began, and (with digital marketing) could this increase be enough to offset the loss in revenue from a smaller initial hardcover run, rather than opting for a TPO strategy?

Commit Resources to Amazon’s A+ and Advertising Platforms
[Tip: Consider this section an extension of those strategies that are particularly important for growing backlist sales.]

As we mentioned above, Amazon has a dominant market share, especially in digital sales. While the COVID-19 crisis has, excitingly, seen some of the print book market share move to independent bookstore websites, Bookshop.org, B&N.com, Target, Walmart, and others, Amazon remains an e-retailer we must take seriously. We recommend all publishers leverage Amazon A+ visual content, and that publishers with digital marketing budgets (however modest!) experiment with Amazon Advertising. Speak to your distributor or your Amazon account manager about both of these important opportunities.

Amazon A+ Content:

• For our purposes here, we’ll limit our definition of Amazon A+ content to the visual content on a book’s Amazon.com landing page. These can take the form of (scroll down on each link to see the examples): original blurb cards, recipe excerpts, page spreads, or fully customized content. A+ has greatly augmented (and, for some consumers, replaced) Amazon’s “Look Inside” legacy feature. Customers expect A+ visual content for books on Amazon, because readers are a) regularly seeing it from the Big 5 publishers, and b) seeing it for most of the other products they browse and purchase on Amazon.
• Ensure your Amazon A+ visual content is legible (large type, lots of space, accessible fonts) and appealing (when in doubt, look at what Riverhead is doing)
• Never quote independent booksellers in any visuals for Amazon A+
• Update your A+ content on the same, regular schedule you update your other metadata
• If you publish children’s nonfiction or educational resources, now is a very important time to showcase to “homeschooling” parents the interior of your titles using Amazon A+ content. Customize images to call-out the learning and activities readers can expect from your books.

Amazon Advertising:

• One of the most effective micro-targeting marketing tools to reach potential readers on Amazon is their own Advertising platform. It’s also a stellar place to A/B test your metadata in real time, see search volume for books or topics you publish on, and more. Ask your distributor or Amazon Vendor Central contact to set you up with an Amazon Advertising account if you do not yet have one.
• We recommend beginning your experiment with Amazon Advertising during the COVID-19 crisis with ebooks (since Amazon continues to change its availability language for physical books, and such language can negatively impact a consumer’s decision to purchase a book, lowering the efficacy of a print book ad campaign).
• We strongly recommend that anyone who will be actively creating, revising, and monitoring Amazon Advertising campaigns sign up for the webinars that Amazon offers on its learning platform. There you’ll learn how to set up a campaign, create/monitor/revise keywords, assess campaign success, and more. The introductory webinar is here (click “For Professional Selling Partners enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry and vendors”). Follow that with the Intermediate webinar.
• Remember: it is in Amazon’s best interest to take advertisers’ money — they made over $14 billion in advertising revenue alone in 2019. The Amazon Advertising platform is set up to be extremely easy for any would-be advertiser to create an ad — but that doesn’t mean one should accept the easy, automated functions the platform offers over its more time-consuming, customizable features. In fact, Amazon’s automated advertising functions (suggested bids, automatic keywords, dynamic up and down bidding, etc) will often unnecessarily cost an advertiser hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars.
• Avoid Amazon Advertising automated/AI-driven recommendations or control whenever possible. You know your books (and their comps, keywords, and potential readers) best. Take advantage of Amazon’s remarkable consumer behavior and sales data, but also take the time to set up a campaign strategically. In doing so, you’ll save money across the lifetime of the campaign.

Commit Resources to Edelweiss and NetGalley
Once a lowly, begrudged alternative to the physical ARC, the DRC (digital review copy) has watched its star rise over the last few weeks. Media outlets have closed their mailrooms and pivoted to accepting 100% DRCs. On a call with the Independent Publishers Caucus on April 24th, 2020, an Edelweiss representative shared that while the service’s average monthly DRC downloads were 9,000, they were poised to hit 19,000 downloads in a single week. That’s a truly astounding and heartening surge, and one we urge publishers to participate in.

Historically, Above the Treeline’s Edelweiss platform has been more for booksellers (indie, B&N, and Amazon), and many sales rep forces use Edelweiss with their bookstore buyers for frontlist and backlist markups. In the past, NetGalley (an admittedly costly competitor) tended to draw more media, librarians, bloggers, and social media influencers. Here at ZG, we would argue that a rigorous Edelweiss presence is essential, while NetGalley participation depends on whether you publish for the library market, and if your key contacts have pivoted to that platform during the COVID-19 crisis.

• Don’t miss Edelweiss’s extensive “COVID-19 Support for Publishers” resources.
• Take a casual poll among your key contacts and constituents to learn which DRC download platform they and their colleagues are actively using. Does the children’s book editor at The New York Times prefer Edelweiss or NetGalley? Have the Anthropologie and Target book buyers pivoted to Edelweiss or NetGalley? If you find a majority of your key contacts in the media have moved to NetGalley, it is likely worth exploring a subscription. Consider sharing a NetGalley membership with another press, or asking for subscription support from the IBPA or IPC.
• Edelweiss and NetGalley offer a stellar way to build an engaged trade audience email marketing list. Set a bi-monthly recurring task for an assistant or a paid intern to log the name, affiliation, and contact information of every individual who downloads a DRC. Segment these contacts into different email marketing lists (bookseller, librarian, media/influencer contact, etc), and even consider micro-segmenting them by interest depending on which title(s) they download.
• Whitelist key contacts on Edelweiss! There are user groups on Edelweiss (ALA member, different award committees, B&N Discover reader, etc). “Whitelisting” important Edelweiss groups and individual users to ensure they can access your titles quickly and easily.
• Upload your Summer 2020, Fall 2020, and Winter/Spring 2021 catalogs to Edelweiss. Even if your distributor has their own catalog up on Edelweiss, create one specifically for your list. Then share them via email and social media with your bookselling, librarian, and media/influencer contacts, soliciting and logging requests. Graywolf Press has always done an exceptional job of creating anticipation and buzz around their digital catalog announcement. Sign up for their newsletter and see how they work their magic!
• Upload videos and visuals to Edelweiss! If you have square blurb images from your Amazon A+ content, upload them to Edelweiss as well. If your book has images or even just a beautiful/uniquely designed text layout, include 3–4 page spread images on Edelweiss. Visuals are most useful when they are uploaded 1–2 weeks before the sales force begins to sell a particular title/season into the channels/field.
• Communicate with your sales force how you are using Edelweiss, and direct them to any additions or major changes you have made.
• Ask your distributor whether they can, as Norton is doing for publishers including Tin House Books, ship physical ARCs directly to Edelweiss users who request a physical galley through Edelweiss.
• If you use NetGalley, be sure you’re taking advantage of their widget function. Ask your sales, marketing, and publicity colleagues to always provide the NetGalley widget link when they are following up about a specific title.

Commit Resources to Social Media Advertising
Like it or not, most of us are scrolling like mad on Twitter and Instagram, refreshing our social media feeds to see if there’s a new update on when childcare will reopen or whether our governor has initiated a phased reopening. Advertise where your readers’ eyeballs are!

• Consider investing in a social media and/or Instagram-specific marketing tutorial for your staff to ensure they are well-trained in this important digital marketing arena.
• Reallocate a percentage of your frontlist events/tours and/or physical galley budgets into paid social media advertising.
• Don’t just pay to boost organic content. Instead, create customized and a/b-tested advertising campaigns for both your frontlist and backlist titles.
• Ensure your landing pages won’t confuse or frustrate those who click on your ad — you want to make purchasing as frictionless as possible. Your book’s landing page on Bookshop.org is an excellent landing page option if you do not offer direct-to-consumer and if you have inventory of the title available at Ingram.
• If you offer direct-to-consumer retail and have more than 10k followers on Instagram, you can add “swipe up” links to any grid post or Stories. Use a beautiful, design-savvy Instagram account as a digital showroom for your books, especially if you publish children’s, gift/special markets, cookbooks, or arts & crafts titles.

Invest in Your Email Marketing Strategy
Whether you use Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Emma, or another email marketing platform, highly targeted, regularly occurring, compellingly designed emails are an important way to staying connected to your communities, reaching homebound readers, and leveraging the contacts you might have gathered while attending conferences, trade shows, book festivals, and more. And investing now in a robust, thoughtful, and automated email marketing strategy will pay off as our industry continues to evolve and respond to new socio-economic realities.

• Ensure you have different audience lists for different kinds of contacts. For example, consumer/reader, bookseller, librarian, media/influencer, etc. Target these lists with different kinds of communication. Use your marketing platform’s segments or tags feature to further target these lists according to interest, region, professional affiliation, previously requested/reviewed titles, etc.
• If you offer direct-to-consumer retail on your website, be sure to connect your email marketing platform to your online POS, and explore automated communications around opportunities like abandoned carts, days-since-last-purchase, etc. Incentivize new consumer subscribers with an automated email offering a specific discount at your online store.
• Use incentives like giveaways, paid social media campaigns, and advertisements with outlets like Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, to collect additional consumer/reader email addresses.
• Always welcome new subscribers you’ve acquired in bulk through a specific campaign with an automated email reminding them how they joined your list (and, if you can, incentivizing them to purchase through your online store with a discount code).
• Create a basic editorial calendar, or email schedule, and commit to it. This strategic schedule shouldn’t overwhelm or overburden your team, nor should it bombard your audiences with too many communications. Instead, it should consistently and creatively — within the bounds of your press’s available time and human resources) communicate information and clear calls-to-action with your key contacts.
• Support your editorial calendar by creating simple, visually driven templates you can easily reuse.
• Please don’t dump thousands of words into your newsletters! Think about breaking up text with compelling visuals and cleanly designed content blocks. Less is more, so don’t try to give your readers every media hit that happened in the last month. Instead, think of ways to thematically focus your content.
• A/B test! A/B test! A/B test! Subject lines matter, just as headlines matter in the media. A/B test every campaign you send, trying different headlines to grab readers’ attention. Experiment with emojis in a subject line. And always preview what your subject line will look like in the mobile version of your own email, as mobile email view truncates much of any subject line. Your key, “clickbait-worthy” subject text should come before a mobile email view truncates the text.
• Whatever platform you use, they have likely posted content specific to communicating with your customers and audiences during the COVID-19 crisis. Read these resources! Take these webinars!

Invest in Your Academic/Library/Niche Channel Strategy
Check in with your account managers for these channels. Ask them about trends, Town Hall Zoom calls, advertising discounts, and other opportunities.

• How can you market your digital and/or audio books in the academic and library channel most effectively right now?
• Is your distributor offering discounted opportunities to participate in Booklist or Library Journal thematic webinars? Other library-facing advertising opportunities?
• Can you organize a virtual event with a university department or prominent library system (Zoom or IG Live)? Check out this Reboot discussion series for inspiration.
• How are the gift and special sales markets pivoting without the brick and mortar showrooms? How might you help small business gift or special sales retailers so they too can survive this challenging time?
• What initiatives, special incentives, discounts, or bundling can you put in place now for Holiday 2020?

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Again, thank you for reading and sharing these resources for indie book publishers. Feel free to write us (jenn@zgcommunications.com) with questions or suggestions. We are rooting for each and every one of you, and want to know what other resources you might need to navigate beyond this crisis.

In strength and solidarity,

Jenn Kovitz and the ZG Communications team
Zgcommunications.com