How can you make your books stand out from the crowd?

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Lindsay Powles has worked at Nielsen Book for 2 years as an Account Manager within their Discovery & Commerce team, predominately working with publishers who use the look inside marketing tool, Book2Look. Before Nielsen, she worked for 7 years for a technology company creating apps and tools for companies to interact with their delegates at corporate events and conferences.

194,886,847 million books sold in the UK in 2017 and there were approximately 200,000 new physical books published according to Nielsen Book, that’s about 547 a day! So, how do you get your book to stand out from the crowd amongst the noise of all those other books?

We live in a world where people are mad about content. They love it, they can’t get enough of it! They want to know all about the author behind the words, why they wrote what they wrote, their inspirations… is there a story behind the story?!

We are used to media being sold to us by reeling us in with engaging video and interactive content. We view film trailers, listen to a snippet of a song before release, this creates online discussions and anticipation, so why should it be different to how we sell books?

Discoverability is key: getting your books out there for people to find is really important, especially with a new release, and now with all this new interactive content available they want more than just a pretty front cover and a short description. Many publishers, inspired by the media industry, have started to embrace the digital world and are looking to new ways to sell their books and get them noticed.

One billion hours of video are watched every day via YouTube, and this popularity shows no signs of waning: YouTube is already seeing the number of hours spent watching video increase by 60% year on year, yet it is a media site that is overlooked by many publishers and authors as a way to sell books. However, one thing I am seeing more of since selling Book2look (Nielsen’s digital marketing tool) is video book trailers, and not just from the larger publishers – smaller independents and self-published authors are having a go and doing it well! These videos can be created on a low budget yet create a high impact.

Katherine Holmes from Project Publish said: “The book trailer is now the new blurb. Kids are more tech savvy and likely to view content in this way – On that score and with the ability to pull in targeted audiences from social media platforms I am in the process of planning a series of different book trailers to match those potential buyers/readers. I can rewrite the blurb for different age groups or genders without having to do a reprint of the jacket cover.”

View the below Book2Look widgets, to see the book trailers included.

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For the last 3 years, Nielsen Book has been selling a “look inside” service called Book2Look to help publishers show off all that extra content in one place in an easy interactive format. They can share this content across their social media sites, on their own website and send to book bloggers to embed alongside their review – you can email it, text it, pin it, tweet it, and much more, and once the consumer has digested all that extra content, they can then go ahead and buy the book directly from the retailer via the embedded links.

Could you be doing more digitally to promote your books? If you are interested in finding out more about Book2Look, email me at [email protected], and follow me on twitter to view other widget examples @LindsayJPowles

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