Branding is a topic that has come up repeatedly in MPub seminars, and Kevin Smokler addressed it directly in his opening address at the recent BEC Writers to Readers day. The key issue, for publishers, is that the most important branding opportunity is usually the author (esp. for fiction) or the book itself (esp. for nonfiction) and rarely, if ever, the house itself. A case in point is http://randomhouse.ca, which aggregrates the titles from RH's numerous, sometimes even famous imprints under one large publicity umbrella. The rationale is simple enough: the average reader does not know, and cares even less, about who the publisher of a given book is.

There are some ironies here. The first is that for purposes of editorial management and especially acquisitions, imprint and/or publisher are all-important. The self-identity of a house or an imprint is the very soul of an editorial line, a booklist, a voice. That this should be so crucial at the beginning of a book's life, and then so unimportant later on, raises a second irony, which I think is more disturbing.

Who cares about the publisher's own brand? Booksellers do, that's who. Consider the case of literary fiction: in the absence of obvious branding opportunities like an established star author or clear connection to a current issue, what makes a new novel believable as a property is who is publishing it. If McClelland? & Stewart bring out a first novel from an unknown writer, the book will almost certainly hit the bookstores and probably be well received—based on M&S' considerable record with bringing forth high-quality Canadian fiction. It barely needs to be expressed. But if that same author were self-published, or released by a tiny press that no one has heard of—even if it has a marketing and publicity budget—who in the trade would take it seriously enough to buy, stock, and promote it? So here, clearly, the established brand of a house or imprint is certainly important to the marketing of a title.

Big deal, nothing new here, right? Well, a little reflection on this situation reveals that the publishers' own brand value is concealed behind the distribution and retail layers of the trade. Once it hits the bookstore, the publisher's brand matters little to readers, but that is only because the essential filtering function of the publisher has already happened, so it can be assumed, taken-for-granted, black-boxed, abstracted away.

But what happens if we experience a major shift in how retail works, away from the tidy and stable realtionships between publishers' sales agents and bookstore buyers? A shift like, say, the one we're seeing right now with the steady growth in Internet book publicity, marketing, and indeed sales. If the long tail is the future—and at BEC Google's Tom Turvey reported that 57% of Amazon's sales were coming from outside of Barnes&Noble's top 113,000 bestsellers—that is, if your bookstore sells 1,000,000 titles—then that tidy, traditional filtering function is history. And must be replaced by some other mechanism in order to allow people to actually decide what books to buy! Perhaps this comes from emergent social-networking intelligence—tags and recommendations and whatnot. Maybe. More likely, it comes from publicity campaigns and marketing budgets, though the dynamics of this game are surely changing radically.

Which brings us back to the original question: where is the brand located? The author, fine, if you have something to work with. The book or the topic, again fine if there's something there. But I think we are going to have to start seeing brand establishment on the part of the filtering agency, whether this is on the part of the editorial acquisitions role of the publisher, or some yet-to-completely-emerge third party (reviewers? bloggers? Oprahs?). Seems to me that the stakes here are pretty high, and that publishers might want to take this seriously.

Thoughts?

Comments:

publishers as brands --mbrand, Sat, 10 Jun 2006 19:36:31 -0700 reply

If the distribution and retail layers that performed the traditional filtering function are history, I agree that both social networking and marketing will influence buyer decisions in the long tail. But that publishers will be ultimately responsible for the branding of their product. Reviewers, bloggers, and Oprahs have nothing to gain from establishing a house as a brand and any brand recognition created by these sources would just be additional icing on a publisher's PR cake. A few larger publishers have promoted themselves or their lines as brands long before the long tail (Penguin and its contiual reissuing of the Classics series comes to mind). But you're right, won't smaller publishers be fighting an uphill battle if the ability to establish themselves as brands just comes down to PR dollars and marketing budgets?