Today Peter McCarthy and I are formally announcing a new business which is a partnership between us: The Logical Marketing Agency. What we're doing is applying the most modern and sophisticated digital marketing techniques and capabilities to the challenges faced by book publishers and authors — and therefore agents — and, because the same techniques apply — also by brands.
This business has been in gestation for about 18 months, since Pete and I first started working together on other projects. We are building on what he learned during nearly two decades in publishing, first working for The Reader's Catalog and then The New York Review of Books, followed by six years at Penguin very early in the digital transition, and then six years at Random House. At Random House Pete's job was, explicitly, to figure out how books would be sold in the future. So for several years he was tasked with experimentation, using the books from publishing's most extensive and diverse commercial list and the resources of the world's biggest trade publisher.
As my Idea Logical colleague Jess Johns and I came to realize how much Pete knew about the digital marketing challenge all publishers are aware is important but woefully under-equipped to tackle, we saw the great opportunity in "scaling" him. The Logical Marketing Agency is our vehicle to make Pete's knowledge available and useful to every publisher or author who wants to make use of it.
Over the past six months or so, we have done initial, relatively small small digital marketing jobs for more than a dozen clients. They have included both major and smaller publishers in the US and the UK, authors, literary agents, and brands that aren't publishers. By working with this initial group of beta clients, we have learned how to shape our offerings to directly apply what we know to publishers' and authors' and agents' perceived needs and pain points.
First we thought about the two key elements that need optimizing: titles and authors. Titles need easy discoverability; they need to be found in the right places, at the right time, by the people who are likely to be interested in them. This often involves a nuanced understanding of search as it exists in environments like Google, Amazon, Apple, and others but can also encompass other means of enhancing a book's reach into its likely audience(s). Authors need optimized web presences, so that their credibility and personal networks are grown and enhanced regularly and so that their reputation as authorities on the subjects that matter is confirmed on the Internet.
Of course, the key for titles is the metadata: the long and short descriptions of the book that are accessed by all the retailers and search engines and the BISAC (or, in the UK, BIC) codes that identify the book's subject matter (and, therefore, its audiences).
Pete's key insight about title metadata — one that is very hard for most publishers to accept, frankly — is that it can't be done properly without research. You start by positing what the audiences for a book are or, in the absence of hypotheses, how to figure out what they are. Then you look for them online and find out more about the makeup of those audiences: who those people are, where they hang out online, what they're interested in and what they believe, and what words and phrases they use when talking about the author or the subject(s) in the book. Then you have to research the search terms that matter, to find out which ones are used most frequently and by whom. It is probably not surprising to learn that the "right" search terms might not be identical in Google and Amazon. And from there, one can keep going, analyzing what Pete calls the "meaningful back end data" that results from good outbound social media marketing. You can learn who it is that is engaging with and what their beliefs are, where they live, and other attributes that can be used to properly position each piece of marketing collateral. And, that's a process that can keep going for a long time if the vein is rich.
How long does this research take? If you know what you're doing, it can be done in an hour or two. How many publishers have the know-how and the staff to spend a couple of hours researching before writing descriptions of all their new titles? According to what we've found over the past few months, the answer is "not many". Or "almost none".
Getting the descriptions and metadata right is what Pete (and the Logical Marketing Agency) calls "foundational". You must do it or everything else you do afterwards sits on a shaky base.
But there's another level of knowledge that can be helpful beyond the foundation. What can you do to further promote a title beyond getting its core discoverability right? Well, there are potential paid media opportunities (keywords you might buy or audiences you might target through well-placed banners or other ads). There are other books or other things that have audiences to whom the book would appeal that give keys to other potential promotions. Each of these can lead to further SEO efforts around an author or title web site, new social media tactics to employ and more. You can take what is gleaned in the original research to find new ways to target the audience and that chain, in some cases, can be extended productively many times. The research that turns up those opportunities is something Logical Marketing will also offer, through "comprehensive" title analysis, a deeper drive than "foundational".
We are doing the same for authors, offering a "foundational" author audit and a "comprehensive" one. But for authors we have found demand for even more research and analysis. Major publishers have bought customized author audits from us for authors they wanted to poach from other houses and for authors of their own they wanted to do a better job for and, often, compare with other authors' efforts. These are really in-depth reports, 50 to 100 pages in length and filled with data, interpretation, and actionable insights. They often require an execution team to handle implementing the suggestions, though, increasingly we will be offering those services as well. The more complex an author's online footprint — whether from many books or from many other things in their career — the more work this takes, but the more value there is. A long career and a long list of prior books can bury the messaging to surface and focus on the current book. It is ironic that authors with the biggest online presence can be the most complex to maximize for a particular project.
Recently, we have had two of New York's biggest literary agencies try us out. One of them was looking for a picture of how one of their biggest authors was doing. The other had specific objectives in mind for their authors and asked us to look at the online footprints of three of them — two very big, one a little less so — to recommend how to achieve those objectives.
There are two additional elements we have only dabbled with so far, but which could become a big part of our business and service suite in the future: backlist and running campaigns.
Getting the most sales out of the backlist requires two things working in tandem. First of all, the backlist metadata has to be optimized. That requires research too, although a bit different research than for a forthcoming title because people have read it and people have talked about it. That gives clues to audience and nomenclature that are much more reliable than what one can discern for a yet-to-appear book. If publishers don't have the staff time to do by-title research for their new books, imagine how hard it would be for most of them to do it for their whole backlist. It is safe to say that no house is staffed to do this.
The other necessary piece to optimize backlist sales is a tool that will chart the news and social graph — trend analysis — that then can bounce each day's developments off the backlist metadata to find titles that can benefit from current attention. Of course, that opens up the question of "what attention?" Sometimes a change in metadata will produce a big result, tying the title to current interest. But sometimes more effort will make sense, like a digital media campaign. This has, of course, been tried by certain houses and has sometimes been successful. But it is our belief that this kind of work has not been executed optimally. Paradoxically, often the problem is that it is done too broadly. But it is important work we have some new ideas about how to do it well and at a cost-effective scale and pricing.
And that brings us to the final component of our suite of services, for now. We will run digital marketing campaigns for publishers. We did one of these last Fall for a live event, rather than a book. Since our conversations with publishers and self-publishing authors repeatedly confirm that running campaigns is a real pain point — they know they don't have the staff for it and they sometimes know they don't have the skills or experience either — we see that as a big part of our business going forward.
Brands are like authors. They have online presences; they have reputations; they have audiences that have characteristics that, once understood, enable you to reach them better and to find them in other venues. In fact, authors are brands. Publishers know that and we believe that what we do for authors would work for many other brands.
So it is with high expectations and great confidence that we can be helpful that we launch this new business.
One thing we're going to add shortly is a self-service offering for independent authors. The service organizations we know who do the tech and distribution work for self-publishing authors all say they need marketing. That looks like an opportunity to us. If you want to get ahold of us, you can email us at [email protected] A web site with more about our services has gone up at that address as well.