New Alternate Book Selling Strategies

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Authors and publishers seek new ways to sell titles

When Rachel Weingarten wanted to sell her book Hello Gorgeous!: Beauty Products in America 40’s – 60’s, she passed local book shelves and headed to the cosmetics counter at New York fashion hub Henri Bendel.

“On a bookshelf, it doesn’t distinguish itself,” she says. “My last name is … not at the top and the book is small – it’s a tiny coffee table book.” It’s tough to get attention when in a year like 2005 there are an estimated 172,000 new books released. Some authors and publishers are looking for new ways to connect with a book-buying public.

Granted, getting books on a cosmetics counter is unusual, but Weingarten has sound reasons. Women shopping for make-up are more likely to have an interest in the topic of glamour, and having the book in front of them offers the chance of an impulse buy.

The concept of trying to find readers in places other than bookstores isn’t new. For years Sterling Publishing has published niche category books, such as crafts or woodworking, and placed them in specialty chain stores and independent shops. But the pressure is on from competitors and the company keeps pushing to find new outlets. “In a cut-throat publishing world, it represents an opportunity to break out a book that might not be successful if they were just focusing on the trade business,” says sales and marketing vice president Jason Prince. He’s seen the sales for a single title run into the hundreds of thousands of copies. “In the last five or ten years, you’ve seen a lot of publishers have an epiphany about [non-book store] markets.”

That’s a major reason you see books in gas stations, grocery stores – pretty much everywhere you turn. The book industry has even discovered the virtual world. Nancy Jo Jenkins, a Christian writer whose first novel, Coldwater Revival, recently debuted decided to take the plunge into connecting with blogs. Her agent recommended that she try a PR company with a specialty in going after influential targeted blogs. That firm wrote an interview with her and sent that and other materials to selected blog publishers. Her Amazon ranking of popularity, where a smaller number is better, dropped from 300,000 to 55,000. Eventually a television producer who saw the listing booked her for a ten minute interview on a satellite-distributed program. “You never can tell,” she says. “Something in a blog could lead you elsewhere.”

There are authors having video commercials created for their books and posting them on spots like Youtube.com. So what’s next, selling books in a virtual world? Sorry, it’s already happening. Christopher Penczak, who writes about metaphysics, paganism, and magick, is testing offering a talk on the social networked site called Second Life, a 3-D virtual world in which people interact though animated figures. “I’ve done pretty well through traditional channels, but I like to teach workshops and I like to do lectures, which are interactive,” Penczak says, though he doesn’t know what to expect. “I’ve agreed to do it for the adventure, but it’s not my area of expertise.”. Hopefully any copies that sell will be very real.

(Note: the above story was supposed to go in the March/April issue of Pages Magazine. But the title was owned by American Marketing Services, which went bankrupt. So I figured I might as well do something with it.)