From Publishers Weekly:
“You should be going to every Girl Scout Jamboree in the country!” urged a troop leader to author-illustrator Sarah Dillard. Sarah, whose Mouse Scouts chapter book series is beloved by Daisies, Brownies, and Girl Scouts the nation over, had been invited to the Girl Expo in Vermont on our state fairgrounds, and her publisher, Random House, arranged for a booth where we could set up and sell the books. What struck me was how many Daisy and Brownie leaders hadn’t known about the books and were intensely interested in them. It was as though Sarah had filled a need in the Girl Scout universe heretofore unrecognized.
The last time we did this event was two years ago, when there were just two books in the Mouse Scouts series. Now there are four, and you would not believe the response Sarah had from young readers and troop leaders alike. She was greeted like a rock star.
. . . .
This series is heavily illustrated with charming spot art throughout, and my favorite thing to do was to see a little person shyly eyeing the books, encourage them to open them up and look at the drawings inside, and then point to Sarah. “She wrote the words AND drew all of the pictures,” I would say. Their eyes would widen in surprise, and they would look anew at Sarah. One little girl pointed to the cover. “Even this?” she said. “Even that,” I said. “Even the wood frame around the mice!” They were uniformly astonished. Some of these kids are young enough that the word “author” carries little significance, but everyone is wowed by someone who can draw terrific pictures.
. . . .
A few years ago, I had the honor of attending a diversity conference for book industry people. I was lucky enough to be in a focus group with the amazing Just Us Books publishers, Cheryl and Wade Hudson, who have worked for diversity in children’s books for decades. They talked about their efforts to get their books into bookstores, but found that those efforts weren’t enough to reach all of the people who wanted and needed them. There just weren’t bookstores in all of the neighborhoods where the very children Cheryl and Wade were publishing for lived, and some of the bookstores that were there didn’t feature a diverse collection of titles. So they took books to church festivals and neighborhood parties and school events, where people would gather around the tables, delighted. Cheryl and Wade would hear comments like, “I had no idea there were kids like us in books!” They sold grocery bags full of books to an audience eager to embrace them, because they had gotten creative and met their audience where they lived.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
Joking aside, let’s explore this concept for an ordinary book.
I have a 4-book adult fantasy series whose hero is a foxhunter. I can tell you from local experience that a significant percentage of foxhunters, and also ordinary riders, are a good target audience.
I know the 15000-member foxhunting community and have maxed it out. The riding community, much larger, is harder to penetrate, and its magazines rarely carry book ads. What I really want is a list of tack shops that also carry fiction books (a respectable minority), to carry my print editions for sale. Problem is, this is an industry that doesn’t seem to have a central body or ordering wholesaler that I can network with, doesn’t even exist as a concept in the UK (also a target market), and most of whose retail vendors are one-off stores, not chains.
It’s not always possible to easily connect with an “industry group target”, and anything smaller is tough for a one-man publisher to focus on.
From the PW full post:
Two thoughts: (1) Am I in a time warp? (2) This can’t really be “news” to publishers, can it? I mean, marketing to your readers… what a concept!
True story: Back in the age of the 00s, I suggested to my nonfiction publisher that they attend the largest tradeshow in the U.S. for Photography (Javits Center, NYC) to set up a booth and, you know, sell my new book and others in their line to the actual target audience: photo enthusiasts. There was a 100% match to potential readers of their (and my) books. And it was like pulling teeth with the marketing team. “You want us to schlep down to NYC (from Boston) and sell books?” Uh, yeah.
So I finally convinced them. They schlepped, we printed up a “Meet the Author” sign for an in-booth signing once a day, and I got it listed on the official program. And guess what? They sold out of EVERY book they brought. Not just mine, but every other single photo-related book in their line. Hundreds of books. And they created relationships with customers who would buy more of their books for years to come (they told me later).
So why did I have to tell these publishing professionals how to do this? And why is this News?
Because their market isn’t really readers. It’s a bunch of middlemen who schlep their books to bookstores, where books are “supposed” to be sold.
Books –> bookstores. Get it? It’s brilliant, isn’t it? = Every major Tradpub company’s thoughts on the whole bookselling endeavor.
P.S. I forgot… this was not me as an author meeting a line of 15 people hoping to sell 10 books. This was 25,000 members of the target audience in one place at one event, which I was already attending anyway. It was a no-brainer, at least to me. And I was right. And they continued to do this for years after (maybe still are). But I had to shake them into it.
While it’s good your publisher continued attending that event for years afterward, I suspect they didn’t do it for any other type of book they sold. You proved that one type of book was maketable at one particular annual event. It’s seriously doubtful any other marketing gears were kicked into motion by that one success. The Tradpub world is very good at convincing itself that such successes can’t be reproduced for anything else it publishes
[Sorry, notices of these responses went into my Spam folder]
You may be right, I dunno. “Photography” was one of their main lines (“types”). Another was “Computers”. Did they go to CES or something similar? Have no idea. But this sort of marketing blindness is part of why I’ve moved to Indie. *I* control the marketing decisions, and I pursue whatever makes sense.
I think it’s the book sniffing.
That distinctive smell is the outgassing of ketones and aldehydes, none of which are good for the brain. Sniff enough of that and the braincells start to die off. Typical sympthoms include memory loss, bad judgment, and childish tantrums when they don’t get their way.
🙂
“You should be going to every Girl Scout Jamboree in the country!”
On your own time and nickle of course …
Very very few show an actual profit doing such things …
Right!