Lovely post. Recently some friends & I started a book club, and first on our list is actually This Is How You Lose the Time War. Seeing it explode out of nowhere in real time after that tweet was fascinating. It makes me wonder: What makes people want to read a book? What makes them care?
I don’t really have an answer for what kind of marketing strategy is “best,” since I’m a slow enough reader that my book consumption basically relies entirely on titles friends have recommended me. But I suppose there’s something there—I get my recommendations this way because I trust my friends. A lot of marketing and promotion for books never really feels meaningful or personal enough to separate it from the rest.
If you have friends who read, I think this is totally the way to do it. You trust your friends and even if your taste from your friends differs, it gives you an opportunity to talk about the book with someone. I love when a friend (or a bookseller I've gotten to know) nudges me toward something I wouldn't otherwise pick. It's so much more fulfilling than being told what to read by GoodReads or an algorithm.
I don’t really want to watch or listen to anything that has been touched by a marketing budget these days. I think I have ad fatigue and am unwilling to cede any more of my opinion-generating energy to that sector. And I read from 75 to 125 book per year so I don’t feel like I’m losing too many reading opportunities by opting out of the machine as much as I can.
I love this post. As someone who works in marketing, it's so easy to spot ads amongst content creators on Tiktok and Instagram, that it feels like a breath of fresh air to see a book rec on Instagram stories from a friend, for example. Maybe we don't need virality, we just need people with passion to willingly share their insterests (like Bigolas Dickolas)
With that said, I feel like the publishing industry tries too much to act like the movie industry when a new movie is being released: they want to sell tickets, not to generate conversation around the piece itself. For books, this makes the conversation way too shallow and the readers not engaged at all.
So I was literally thinking about the Criterion collection 'closet picks' this morning and how I would definitely watch an author (or, you know, a 'person of note'. It doesn't have to be an author) select books from a set of shelves, and here you are, writing about it. Admittedly, I was thinking it would be a great way for libraries to promote themselves, but I can see publishers getting in on the action.
Spitballing here - but wouldn't it be interesting if these series were split across different imprints - so 'Picador' and 'Collector's Library' rather than 'Pan Macmillan'. Because that's something I rarely hear readers and writers talk about. We don't seem to consider imprints in the same way that movie nuts might talk about Studio Ghibli or A24. (Maybe this is because the imprints are all owned within the big 5.)
Lovely post. Recently some friends & I started a book club, and first on our list is actually This Is How You Lose the Time War. Seeing it explode out of nowhere in real time after that tweet was fascinating. It makes me wonder: What makes people want to read a book? What makes them care?
I don’t really have an answer for what kind of marketing strategy is “best,” since I’m a slow enough reader that my book consumption basically relies entirely on titles friends have recommended me. But I suppose there’s something there—I get my recommendations this way because I trust my friends. A lot of marketing and promotion for books never really feels meaningful or personal enough to separate it from the rest.
If you have friends who read, I think this is totally the way to do it. You trust your friends and even if your taste from your friends differs, it gives you an opportunity to talk about the book with someone. I love when a friend (or a bookseller I've gotten to know) nudges me toward something I wouldn't otherwise pick. It's so much more fulfilling than being told what to read by GoodReads or an algorithm.
I don’t really want to watch or listen to anything that has been touched by a marketing budget these days. I think I have ad fatigue and am unwilling to cede any more of my opinion-generating energy to that sector. And I read from 75 to 125 book per year so I don’t feel like I’m losing too many reading opportunities by opting out of the machine as much as I can.
I love this post. As someone who works in marketing, it's so easy to spot ads amongst content creators on Tiktok and Instagram, that it feels like a breath of fresh air to see a book rec on Instagram stories from a friend, for example. Maybe we don't need virality, we just need people with passion to willingly share their insterests (like Bigolas Dickolas)
With that said, I feel like the publishing industry tries too much to act like the movie industry when a new movie is being released: they want to sell tickets, not to generate conversation around the piece itself. For books, this makes the conversation way too shallow and the readers not engaged at all.
So I was literally thinking about the Criterion collection 'closet picks' this morning and how I would definitely watch an author (or, you know, a 'person of note'. It doesn't have to be an author) select books from a set of shelves, and here you are, writing about it. Admittedly, I was thinking it would be a great way for libraries to promote themselves, but I can see publishers getting in on the action.
Spitballing here - but wouldn't it be interesting if these series were split across different imprints - so 'Picador' and 'Collector's Library' rather than 'Pan Macmillan'. Because that's something I rarely hear readers and writers talk about. We don't seem to consider imprints in the same way that movie nuts might talk about Studio Ghibli or A24. (Maybe this is because the imprints are all owned within the big 5.)