We often talk about books as your best marketing tool and that physical sales aren’t something to focus on, but as marketers, there are insights we can take from real world sales and use to our advantage.
How people respond to a book is one of the main reasons to deliver your message in this way and large book companies spend tens of thousands of dollars researching just this topic.
Not all of their researches is relevant to us, but every so often there’s an insight that’s helpful to understand as we craft ways of getting our message in front of the right people.
I was listening to a recent episode of the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast with guest, Jamie Smart. Jamie is a 90-Minute Book author, but also has a book deal with a larger, traditional publisher. He just launched his 2nd book ‘Results’ and the podcast was a follow up, talking about the marketing campaigns Jamie and his team executed to promote the book.
This line from a publishing and distribution company stood out:
“We studied how people buy these books. They basically see the book, and if the cover appeals to them, they pick it up, look at the front cover for less than a second, they turn it over, look at the back cover. Maybe riffle the pages, and then they go buy it. It’s very fast…”
Cover, back cover and maybe rifle through the pages…
It’s worth taking a moment to consider this if our job is to make invisible leads, visible. The cover and title are the most important elements. The back cover copy is the page that is read the most and the content is almost incidental to the decision to become visible (to buy the book in Jamie’s case, or to opt-in in an online context).
The content needs to be valuable and ‘good enough’, but in terms of your effort, don’t forget to focus on the parts that really moves the needle.
It’s a great episode with many other results including geotagging Facebook campaigns to the physical locations of the stores selling the book…
Go listen to it now at MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com/041 and don’t forget to check out our Book Titles Workshop recording.
