Remember when you used to go to Blockbuster and rent movies? Or you bought the VHS or DVD of your favorite movie? The studio behind the movie would know that someone rented or bought the movie. But they had no idea if that person actually watched the movie, what day of the week and what time they watched the movie, if they finished the whole thing, and if not, when they stopped watching. Netflix saw an opportunity by recognizing how much smarter the industry could be if it started streaming directly to viewers because they’d get all of the information about the people watching content and then use this information to acquire and produce better content. We all know how that worked out.
Publishing, however, still operates in the era of Blockbuster. Simon & Schuster knows that someone bought a book from a Barnes & Noble. But they don’t know if the buyer was the reader or if it was a gift, if the recipient actually read the book, how long it took them to read the book, if they finished the book. Amazon and Audible have that information but they won’t share it with publishers. So publishers have no idea who’s reading their books.
Aside from creating a lot of challenges for publishers, this also creates a problem for authors because it means that the publishers don’t know how to find your readers and market to them. I was on the phone with a best-selling author who had been on the TODAY Show twice, on Oprah, GMA, the whole national press circuit that most people only dream of, and I asked her what during the publishing process surprised her the most. (She published with Penguin Random House.) She said, “You know, the editorial process was seamless and so helpful, the design process was also pretty cool, but I was pretty surprised by the marketing and publicity teams. They put the entire PRH team behind me and my book since it was so highly anticipated, but when I got to the meeting with the full marketing team they just looked at me and said: so where are your readers? How are you planning to reach them to sell the book?” She went on to say, “They had an Amazon ad campaign and a Goodreads ad campaign scheduled, and they were willing to put plenty of money behind the ads, but they were relying entirely on me to build community around my book.”
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