As technology continues to offer a kaleidoscope of new promotional methods, faith fiction marketers scramble to find the magic formulas to plug their potential bestsellers. They gauge the format preferences and price tolerance of a notoriously fickle reading public and ponder the potential of social networking sites. The question remains: where best to spend limited marketing dollars?
Show-and-tell
One marketing vehicle that’s getting a second look these days is the movie-style trailer. Although video promotion is not new, the online options for video placement have never been better. “In years past there were far less opportunities to use video trailers effectively, and we moved away from doing them,” says Jennifer Deshler, director of marketing for fiction at Thomas Nelson. “But with retailer Web sites, YouTube, Google and Yahoo, we have great opportunities to generate awareness for new titles.”
B&H publicist Julie Gwinn says they’ll use those sites—as well as author sites and others like GodTube and Bliptv.com—for their trailers, including those for two upcoming fall titles, Shade by John B. Olson (Oct. 1) and Forsaken by James David Jordan (Oct. 1). They’re also looking at paid sites for posting trailers, including a $30-a-week run on RomanceNoveltv.com, or $75 a month for bookvideostv.com. They’ll promote B&H fiction trailers to bloggers, with the hope they’ll embed a link in their copy. “Videos help evoke a mood and can describe what can sometimes be a difficult plot line in 30 seconds or less,” Gwinn says.
Revell publicity manager Deonne Beron says they tried trailers for the first time with Steven James’s suspense thriller The Pawn (2007) and will use trailers for James’s The Rook (Aug.) and another forthcoming title, Hometown Favorite by Bill Barton and Henry O. Arnold (Sept.). In addition to running them on Web sites, Revell will offer the trailers on CDs for giveaways, mailings to retail accounts and author distribution. This fall, Beron says they’ll also place trailers on Library Journal’s video site.
Not everyone is convinced that trailers are a good idea. Steve Oates, v-p of marketing for Bethany House, says they are not an efficient way for his company to spend money. “We target an older consumer, 45—65, for most of our bestselling fiction, and they are not congregating around the Web yet.” He believes he can reach a larger number of consumers in formats other than trailers for the same cost. Bucking the trend away from print ads, Oates says he likes them: “Instead of making four trailers, I can advertise four books in a Christian publication, and a couple of ads will reach two to three million consumers.”
In a Virtual World
Zondervan trade publisher Dudley Delffs says their marketing strategy is moving more toward social networking sites, such as Facebook, and using “e-blasts” to reach fans and potential readers. Author interviews and other creative videos that connect readers with authors “work better for us,” he says. “Movie trailers are very expensive, and it is difficult to measure their effectiveness.” At Moody Publishers—which first dipped into trailers with Madman (2006)—marketing manager Randall Payleitner says trailers work best paired with author interviews. “We’ve found it beneficial for readers to get a taste of the book’s content along with some author q&a.”
Other online strategies include giving the fictional protagonist a virtual personality. WaterBrook’s Let Them Eat Cake by Sandra Byrd (2007) features baker Lexi Stuart, who posts recipes and maintains a profile on the popular foodie Web site www.allrecipes.com. Hachette has hired writers to blog as the characters in its new All About Us series by Shelley Adina at www.allaboutusbooks.net. At sister imprint Multnomah, fans will find a Web site for Melanie Wells’s creepy character Peter Terry (www.peterterry.com), who appears in her psychological thriller My Soul to Keep (Feb.). Readers can report “Peter Terry sightings,” says marketing director Tiffany Lauer.
Blogging has its cheerleaders, including Glass Road Public Relations president Rebecca Seitz, who says “blog tours” aid brand establishment. After partnering with Tyndale House to launch Angela Hunt’s Fairlawn Series with a fall blog tour for Doesn’t She Look Natural? (2007), Glass Road will follow up with another for the sequel, She Always Wore Red (June). (A blog tour pitches a book to alliances and large individual blog sites, with a set future date on which a blogger will write about a book.) Tyndale’s senior fiction marketing manager Cheryl Kerwin notes that blog tours “can generate a lot of buzz.” Avon Inspire has sponsored blog tours with the Christian Blog Alliance, including one for Angela Benson’s Up Pops the Devil (Aug. 8). And in an increasingly complicated virtual world, Avon Inspire has developed guides for authors who want to maintain a presence in the online Christian world on sites such as ShoutLife (www.shoutlife.com/inspire) and MyChurch (www.mychurch.org/avoninspire), publicist Lauren Manzella says.
Taking It Offline, Getting It Covered
Not all of the marketing mojo happens online. To promote B&H’s Elvis Takes a Back Seat by Leanna Ellis (Jan.)—in which a three-foot bust of Elvis accompanies three women on a journey from Texas to Memphis—Gwinn superimposed a bust of Elvis onto photos of world-famous tourist destinations. Viewers could visit the B&H Web site, then cut and paste the bust into their own vacation photos and submit their creative photos to win a guitar. A Google campaign drove more than 500 people to the site.
Other publishers are putting new spins on tried-and-true marketing methods. The traditional book launch party got a sports tweak when Karen Kingsbury’s football-themed novel, Between Sundays (2007), kicked off at Menlo Park, Calif., last fall with San Francisco 49ers football player Alex Smith on hand to speak and Zondervan giving away 49ers helmets and jerseys. In another twist on the usual author junket, Glass Road booked John Olson on an upcoming six-city tour of Christian music festivals (with attendance of 20,000—50,000 each), where he will sign copies of Fossil Hunter (May), log stage time and host late-night chats, Seitz says.
Is Cloth the New Paper?
Successful sales aren’t just about promotion. If the book starts in the wrong format, it can be the death knell for sales. Although publishing faith fiction in hardcover was rare a decade ago, it’s not unusual to see it today. But is cloth the new paper?
Depends on whom you ask. Allen Arnold, senior v-p and publisher at Thomas Nelson, estimates 30%—40% of their titles release first in hardcover—a consistent figure over the past several years—but adds, “the current economic realities for both consumers and retailers do make clear the need for a healthy mix of trade paper and mass formats.”
At Tyndale House, approximately one in six novels this year is in hardcover—similar, Kerwin says, to previous years. The reasons for format choice vary. “We do not publish a hardcover just to publish a hardcover or to satisfy an author’s or agent’s desires,” Kerwin says. Rather, Tyndale looks at author sales history, sales potential or publicity potential. Kerwin says they consider hardcover if a book has general media appeal, and acknowledges the hardcover format can help with getting reviews. Another consideration is that “if an author is writing in a certain genre that commands a hardcover edition [legal thrillers and suspense], an exception would be made even if the author sales history says otherwise.” However, Kerwin says, “Publishing in hardcover because you think you’ll get better placement in ABA stores is not a good enough reason to do it.”
Bethany House has experimented with more hardcovers but backed off due to market resistance, says Oates, adding that retailers told Bethany House they would order twice as many copies or more of a book in paper as they would in cloth. As a general rule, if Bethany has a novel targeted to women that would sell more than 50,000 copies, the number would drop to half or less what would sell in trade paper. “Very few of our novels are in hardcover, maybe less than 5% of sales,” Oates says.
At Zondervan, stand-alone fiction is more likely to get the nod for cloth than a series, where price point may be more of an issue, Delffs says. (He notes that typical CBA hardcovers range from $16.99 to $22.99). New novelists traditionally publish in paper. Other faith fiction publishers, such as Moody, publish only in paper. “We want to keep our novels reasonably priced,” Payleitner says. At Hachette, associate publisher Lori Quinn adds that “this market still responds best to trade paper,” and with the unsettled economy, “price point will remain an important strategy for fiction.”
At B&H, associate publisher Ricky King was skeptical about hardcovers. Currently, B&H publishes less than 5%of its novels in hardcover, a decrease from the past. “It is more difficult to place hardcover fiction in CBA stores, presumably due to the higher per-unit cost,” King says. “Trade paper is where it’s at right now for Christian fiction.”
But all the correct formats, right Web site placements, and marketing schemes can only do so much. “Regardless of the technology advances, which increase daily, the story remains king,” says Nelson’s Arnold. “And the better the story, the fewer gimmicks required. What ultimately drives a bestseller onto a list are satisfied readers who can’t stop talking about it.”
