Abstract
Direct mail, once the engine behind such successful bookselling businesses as Book-of-the-Month Club, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and Time Life Books, was a major channel for marketing books as recently as 20 years ago. A victim of the growth of large bookstore chains and later of the Internet, direct response bookselling is no longer is regarded as viable. But many of the skill sets developed by direct marketers decades ago are highly relevant for modern book marketing—especially when one considers that the Internet itself is the best direct-marketing channel ever invented. And as eBooks continue to change the structure of publishing, publishers will find themselves under increasing pressure to embrace direct-marketing methodologies and connect directly with their readers, rather than reaching them through book retailers and other intermediaries as they have traditionally done.
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Notes
Eventually, for commercial reasons, they began to select the book of the month every three-and-a-half weeks, causing the book clubs actually to have 17 “cycles” each year.
Time Inc. acquired BOMC in 1977. In 2000, Time merged BOMC with the other major US book club company, Doubleday Direct, Inc., which was owned by Bertelsmann. Time and Bertelsmann managed the clubs jointly until 2007, at which point Time withdrew from the venture.
Whether the direct-response booksellers made money on shipping and handling is a complex question, the answer to which probably turns on what level of overhead could be fairly allocated toward their warehouses and fulfillment centers. But this writer cannot forget the comment an industry colleague made to him years ago, which we’ll paraphrase as follows: “We’re not in the publishing business; we’re in the list rental and shipping and handling business. We break even at publishing and make all our money on shipping and renting out customer names”.
The perspective being laid out in this section of the article continues to borrow liberally from the views articulated by Mike Shatzkin, who has been one of the leading voices in the publishing industry arguing that publishers who don’t start to focus on “vertical” audiences will eventually die.
Another critical success factor is the ability to test which segments respond best to which offers, presented which way. The subject of testing is a rich one that we do not have room to delve into here.
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Goff, N. Direct-Response Bookselling: How it Died, Why it is Alive Again, and Why it will Become Even More Important in the Future. Pub Res Q 27, 259–267 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-011-9219-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-011-9219-2