Macquarie Uni report case study: Simon & Schuster Australia

Simon & Schuster Australia’s head of publishing Larissa Edwards was interviewed for the Macquarie University report ‘Disruption and innovation in the Australian book industry: Case studies of trade and education publishers’, written by researcher Jan Zwar as part of a three-year research project by Zwar, Tom Longden, Paul Crosby and project head David Throsby. This is an edited extract from her interview. View the full report here.

Changes in the retail market over the past decade

The market has changed dramatically. The most obvious was that REDgroup Retail went bankrupt in 2011 so the big megastores of Borders and Angus & Robertsons disappeared. I don’t think that their sales automatically went to other bricks-and-mortar retailers so that was a very tough time and a lot of very good people lost their jobs. Also, we got to a point that there were towns that didn’t have bookshops. Both of these were very concerning developments.

Since then, discount department stores—primarily Kmart, Target and Big W—have increased their ranges of books and these outlets are for many people the first port of call for books, and they are cheaper. That is servicing the market, which is great, but in terms of depth and range they are not going to take smaller print run specialist books so we need to find another place for retailing those.

The strength of the Australian market lies with the independent booksellers and chain booksellers, if they weather the storm. They are very strong and they are tastemakers; you can launch authors via the independents and chains. There is a finite amount of shelves or shelf space in a physical store and maybe 400 key titles come out each month. The bricks-and-mortar stores are performing an act of curation and editing because they can’t stock everything so they need to know their readers. Good booksellers know what their customers want. I have seen people working in independent bookstores when new books come in. ‘I know who will like that,’ and they will put a book aside and phone the customer, ‘I’ve got a book I think you might like. Do you want to come and have a look at it?’ That is good bookselling, that is curating.

There are now less retail linear metres of book shelving so every account needs to be addressed very particularly, and the booksellers are probably more disparate than they have ever been before because of the rise of online retail. A huge amount of our books come into Australia by Amazon and the Book Depository, which is not good for local booksellers.

We as a publisher have to be in all these markets. From a personal perspective, I have realised that I don’t mind where people buy books, I don’t mind what they are reading, and I don’t mind what form it is in, I just care that they are reading. All I want to do is get my authors’ stories to their readership in the simplest way possible.

Changing relations with readers

I feel liberated by the market as it is now because we have the opportunity to speak to readers via social media. We have had bloggers reveal book covers of our new titles to their readership. NetGalley is a hugely popular platform whereby bloggers can review books.

We are talking directly to the readership here. There is no mediation at all via the retailers. The authors are speaking directly to their readers and we are included in the conversation. NetGalley reviewers, for example, are getting excited about our books before they come out. These are people who have dedicated followings so this is an exciting time to be around. That has never happened before in terms of the book industry, and I say this as an ex-bookseller. That is great but it is also a challenge.

Case study: Ann Turner’s The Lost Swimmer

[Managing editor] Roberta [Ivers] brought the manuscript to me and said, ‘I’ve got this book,’ and I said, ‘Right, don’t show it to anyone else.’ So I read it.

I have to become the evangelist for a new book internally, that is the first point. You can’t manufacture the buzz outside of the company if you don’t have it inside, and this is again where a small company works. Rather than pitifully walking through the halls of a company that is publishing 150 new titles a year saying, ‘Please take some notice of my new title, my debut author,’ I get everyone in the room whose role is related to it. I pitch to them and I get them excited. They read the book and we talk about it. Then we fly the author up if they are not Sydney-based, and we have cake and we have fun and we have lunch. My job is to make the members of the staff feel like they are in a relationship with the author. My job is to seed the enthusiasm internally first. That is the hardest part of my job, and it is also the most fun.

In terms of discoverability, it is about creating a buzz early. You have to think very carefully about each book. We do it together as a team: marketing and publicity, sales and me right from the start. As soon as the book is acquired we have a positioning meeting. Who is the readership, how are we going to speak to them? Everyone comes with an idea about how we are going to do it and where we think we are going to place most of the stock. All of that is thought about very, very early on and the look of the book is developed according to what the book is about and what is going to garner the most interest in its various retail forms.

In the case of The Lost Swimmer, that book has been described by many people as glowing on the shelves, it has leapt out and said, ‘Hello, come and have a look at me.’ I spend a lot of time working on covers. Often in discount department stores that is the most important marketing tool because there may not be staff around and if there are, in general retailers they are not going to advise which book you should read next. The other thing with a cover is it has to thumbnail as well so it needs to work big in the physical world and little in the digital world.

I love communicating the joy of books, stories to people. Once you do that, then you have all of these representatives who then go, ‘Well, what can we do to maximise this?’ In the case of Ann it was take her to meet key independent retailers and have dinner, because she is amazing. She is educated, articulate, urbane, a great writer, a film-maker, she has stories to tell, the book is filmic in the way that it reads, so it is pretty easy to sell her. She charmed them, so then they feel they have a connection with her.

So of the 400 new books that have come in each month to bookstores, this one starts to rise further up because the booksellers know who she is. We also pitched her to writer’s festivals. That also increases an author’s readership by talking to people who are engaged with ideas and books.

We created a video of Ann talking about the book. We used it for multiple reasons. It was public for people to look at but it was particularly useful for sales representatives, they had it on their laptops. Or, when we do telesales, if a rep is doing a phone conversation with a customer they can watch that first. That is an investment in the author but you enable them to speak directly to the camera and it is lovely, they get to read a bit of the book and talk about why they wrote it.

The other thing we did for Ann was to produce bespoke advanced reading copies (ARCs) of the book. Often ARCs look very similar to the actual book. We put cover quotes on it and it was used as a marketing tool. Obviously, also, the marketing and publicity people send out review copies. It got great reviews, which can be used as well.

We also had Ann attend bookseller conferences. She was on stalls talking to booksellers—again, it is the personal connection and it worked. This book has done well, it is heart-warming in the way that it has succeeded. It is hard yakka, you can’t manufacture that success; you have to actually do the groundwork.

Category: Features