Christian fiction e-book sales have leveled off after several years of steady increases, with many publishers reporting digital holding steady at 30%–40% of overall inspirational fiction sales. David Lewis, Baker’s executive v-p for sales and marketing, says now that “big growth is over,” marketing e-books is a challenge.
“What worked yesterday might not work today and probably won’t work tomorrow,” says Daisy Hutton, v-p and publisher for fiction at HarperCollins Christian Publishing. What’s more, e-book sales vary widely by genre. Some categories, like romance and suspense, are “more open to digital,” while a genre like Amish fiction is “extraordinarily print-heavy.”
Karen Watson, associate publisher of fiction at Tyndale, notes that strategies that worked well just a few years ago are no longer viable. “There were times in the early days when we would give something away for more than a month, which gave us exposure to readers who went on to buy the author’s entire backlist. Back then, this was a unique strategy. But with the explosion of content, those days are over.”
What is working is to mine the backlist and promote it aggressively via curated e-book sale-alert services such as BookBub.com. “We can actually make authors a lot more money digitally than they can make on their own,” Lewis says.
Baker has hired a full-time analyst whose job includes testing about 200 titles a month, seeing how book sales respond in various seasons, at different price points, and on different days of the week. Lewis gives the example of the 2003 novel A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton, which was selling only about 1,000 copies a year in 2011. Then it became a test case in Baker’s program for raising the visibility of older backlist titles. In 2012, the book sold 15,000 copies; in 2013, it surpassed that, with 17,000.
Harlequin’s Love Inspired division has also experimented successfully with its backlist, sometimes gathering novels together in themed collections. “We released a Christmas mail-order-brides-themed box set in December 2014, which hit the New York Times e-book bestsellers list,” says Tina James, executive editor. The press has also tried initiatives such as digital-first publishing and full-length digital samplers on TryHarlequin.com.
Deep discounting remains the primary strategy for grabbing readers, particularly for new series. “If you have a six-book series and every book in the series is $9.99, that’s not going to cut it,” Watson says. “What we do is feature one book in a series for a lower price, maybe $2.99 or $5.99, but only for a very short time. The hope is that you win fans so that at some point, the regular price of $9.99 is of value to them.”
One holdout against deep discounting has been WaterBrook Multnomah, which has largely resisted the price-slashing trend until very recently. “This is my biggest frustration, that e-book pricing is training readers that a book should be less than $5 all the time,” says Shannon Marchese, senior editor. Still, in the last couple of months, WaterBrook has experimented with markdowns. “If the discoverability factors are in place like at BookBub with the extensive subscription base it has now, then an e-book on sale for a limited time can make sense.”
Exploiting digital as a medium for frontlist rather than backlist is very much a work in progress. Howard, a division of Simon & Schuster, is experimenting with e-novellas to gain a wider audience for Beth Vogt, a romance author and RITA Award finalist whose novel Somebody Like You was named a PW best book of the year in 2014.
Vogt’s “sales have been modest” so far, says Ami McConnell, v-p and editor-in-chief, so Howard has created a digital promotion plan for Vogt’s new Destination Weddings series this summer. The first book, A Crazy Little Thing Called Love, doesn’t come out until June 30, but in May the publisher will release an original e-novella called Can’t Buy Me Love. “Our hope is that the e-short will help us to reach new fans, who will then preorder the longer book,” McConnell says.
Regardless of individual marketing efforts, the key components of success industrywide seem to be staying nimble, being innovative, and learning from mistakes. “Someday we’re going to stitch ‘It might work’ on the back of our shirts,” Lewis says. “We’re happy to try and fail, try and fail, until we find something that works.”
