Finding Readers in 2023 (is Fun)

The book industry—one that is simultaneously traditional and constantly changing—takes stock when a year ends, and by any accounts 2022 was a strange one for book coverage.

Bookforum?ceased publication?after twenty-eight years,?Astra?shuttered?after only two issues, and?USA Today?paused its bestseller list. In the strangest episode of all,?The Believer?was?briefly sold?to a media company that immediately clogged the site with ads for adult toys before the uproar from a scandalized literati prompted a sale back to its original owner.?The New Yorker?called it a "bleak year for literary magazines."

And yet! While the future of traditional book coverage is unclear, the future of literary discourse is not. 2022 was the second-best sales year on record for print books,?but readers are finding books in much more individualized ways.?Book review sections are still influential, but so are newsletters, podcasts, message boards, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and word of mouth.

Harvard Fellow Casper ter Kuile calls this process "unbundling."

Think of a local newspaper. Whereas fifty years ago it provided classifieds, personal ads, letters to the editor, a puzzle for your commute, and, of course, the actual news, today its competitors have surpassed it in each of these, making the daily paper all but obsolete. Craigslist, Tinder, Facebook, CandyCrush, and cable news offer more personalization, deeper engagement, and perfect immediacy. The newspaper has been?unbundled, and end users mix together their own preferred set of services.*

Personally, I find the unbundling of the reading experience exciting. Yes, it would be easier if every book's marketing campaign was cookie-cutter, but creating a custom marketing plan for each of our books allows me to dive into the niches of our authors' expertise and the media habits of their ideal reader. When planning how to reach these readers, I ask myself two questions:

• Where are they??What social media platforms do they prefer? What magazines and newsletters do they subscribe to? What podcasts do they listen to? What conferences do they go to? And once we know those things, how do we join that conversation?
• What else do they read??Not much of what we do online is a secret. Whether or not that's good for society, it's good for selling books. We use data-driven tools through our vendor partners to promote our books to readers who have bought or thought about buying similar books, and can respond in real time to what's working and what's not. This is another granular task I find highly enjoyable.

As our friends at Smith Publicity, Inc. say: "the riches are in the niches." While book media is ever changing, readers' love of discovering a good book stays the same. Our job is to get the right book in front of the right people, and we're excited to kick off another year of doing just that.

-Janet

*This quote comes from ter Kuile's?interview?in Anne Helen Petersen 's?newsletter, which I subscribe to and has prompted me to purchase several books, including ter Kuile's. See what I mean?

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