Once upon a time, not all that many years ago, it was all quite straightforward. A writer would write a draft, an editor would edit it, the publisher would publish it and a bookshop would sell it.
It is not so easy any more. Today, a speciality sales manager may well be involved at an early stage, working out with the editor and the publisher how the concept of a book and its cover may appear side by side with a chunk of meat, coffee bags or an electric chain saw. Colour coding has become a buzzword, where content used to reign supreme.
In the past few months what began as a sideline in book publishing has become a major source of income for the big American publishing houses, from HarperCollins to Random House, Simon & Schuster and beyond.
What is known as speciality marketing has from modest roots expanded into what is now the fastest-growing sector for many publishers, outstripping growth in traditional bookshop outlets and even that on websites such as Amazon.com.
An article in the New York Times this week tracked publishers peddling their wares in cheese shops, cattle markets, hardware stores, butchers and office-supply chains. With United States book sales down almost 3% year-on-year, and with profit margins becoming increasingly competitive in the main retail areas, the frontiers are being expanded rapidly.
HarperCollins is preparing a range of books for its spring catalogue that are colour coded to sit alongside other products. ”Books complement other products — they can become the ultimate accessory,” said Andrea Rosen, who handles the publisher’s special markets division.
So HarperCollins has done a brisk trade in Dare to Repair: A Do-it-Herself Guide to Fixing (Almost) Anything in the Home to hardware stores throughout the US. It has sold Beautiful Jim Key: The Lost History of the World’s Smartest Horse at several of the country’s racetracks; and The Emperor of Wine by Elin McCoy has been doing good business in wine outlets in the major cities.
The publishing house also reprinted one of its books about fondue so the colour palette of the cover was in greens and browns to match the decor of the shop it was appearing in, Urban Outfitters.
A similar story is related by Penguin’s American arm, which has the honour to be able to call itself the only US publisher currently selling books in cattle auctions. It also uses farming-supply stores as distribution outlets in rural states such as Tennessee and Colorado, with Penguin books nestled among the cattle feed and tractor tyres.
Within speciality book marketing, custom publishing has become the new holy grail, says Barbara O’Shea, who heads Penguin US’s non-trade sales operation. That means specifically creating books designed to suit a new outlet.
She gives the example of Penguin’s Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur, a well-known series of cookbooks that reveal how you can make your own versions of big-name brands popular in the US such as McDonald’s burgers or Outback Steakhouse BBQ Sauce.
The books were not selling particularly quickly in bookshops so Penguin decided to try something new. It published a new collected volume of Wilbur’s recipes as a one-off customised venture, and put it on the cable television shopping channel QVC. They billed it as a unique product that could only be bought there and then. In one day, with just five slots of airtime of six minutes each, they sold 100 000 copies of the volume.
”We’ve moved beyond trying to find new places where we can sell a book,” O’Shea explained. ”We are now spending a lot of time thinking about different ways in which we can produce a book custom-made for the way in which it will be sold and promoted.”
Surprising techniques like that are leading to surprising results. One of the success stories of this autumn’s books in the US was Wall and Piece by the British artist Banksy, who has made his name on ”guerrilla” art. The book has sold 20 000 copies in the US already, mostly in clothes shops. — Guardian Unlimited Â