Bestsellers vs. Backlists: Old Is New

“Publishing does not know how to market e-books yet,” said Evan Schnittman (Bloomsbury) reportedly said at The Future of E-books Publishing Executive Panel at BEA in New York this week (via Edward Champion’s blog report).

“[And] let’s be honest with ourselves,” continued Schnittman. “We’ve never marketed backlist before.”

It’s true:  traditional publishers seem pretty good at marketing what’s new, what’s selling today—and much less adept at marketing what is good, but not necessarily new. Marketing the new Tina Fey or Stephen King e-book is probably pretty straight-forward—it’s just another channel, just another extension of the campaign, even priced pretty much the same because…well, it’s new, and readers will just buy it anyway, right? Riiiight.

Publishing and promoting backlist or out-of-print e-books, on the other hand, is a whole (ironically) new ballgame. Pricing models are different, promotional considerations and channels are different and there isn’t a concurrent traditional marketing campaign to just…well, lean on.

Nope, for this to work, authors and publishers need to collaborate on a solid e-book publishing strategy that stands on it’s own—and that can be flexible, nimble and quickly extended.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that traditional publishers don’t know how to market e-books yet—much like traditional advertising agencies didn’t understand how to really use the Internet a few years ago.