Why a Book Video? Part I
I began working in publishing in the Summer of 1999 as a copywriter in the trade division of a publishing house. We were around 4th or 5th in market share for our category. Marketing budgets were small for most titles, modest for a few, and significant for only one or two titles a year. Before 2005, I can only recall three books where money was spent to produce a video to aide in the marketing of a book. Two of these titles were the biggest titles published during my tenure at this company.
Today, probably 3/4’s of titles published from this same company enjoy the benefit of a video for marketing and promotional purposes. For some publishing companies, every title has a video associated with it.
Before 2005, sales conferences at publishing houses usually consisted of the acquisition editors standing at a podium and presenting each of their upcoming new releases to the teams that would be charged with selling these titles into book stores across the nation. In the case of the company for which I worked, that meant three editors presented as many as 40 new books over the course of a day or two. What that meant for the sales guys, they had to listen to the same voices present each title, often with little as 5 minutes allotted for some. What that meant for these books and the authors of these books, there was very little opportunity for a title or author to be distinguished. If you were not already well known, a proven entity, you had little chance of making any kind of distinct impression.
For a select few authors, the publishing company may actually pay the expenses to bring the author to the sales conference. In a typical sales conference with 40 titles, maybe 3 authors would get the opportunity to represent their book themselves. Prior to 2005, I can think of only one time the publishing company went to the expense of having the author make a video to be used in their absence at sales conference, and with little foresight, this video was made directly to the sales people, meaning it had little to no usefulness after it was shown in sales conference.
That began to change after 2005. These days, I actually know of one publishing company that creates a video for every book being presented during sales conference.
What has changed? What is significant about 2005? We will answer those questions in the next post.
