Together with the recent growth of the publishing industry, the sales and marketing division of publishing firms began getting into prominence. They were soon becoming increasingly involved in the publishing decisions, gradually taking away the editorial control.
Marketing in book publishing took off from a mediocre position, from more as a support based role. With the editorial being involved in order booking and dispatch, marketing was primarily restricted to sales related activities like producing catalogs and posters, and arranging advertising. But with the development of the global publishing industry and international selling authors, marketing personnel were called in for a bigger role.
The new era of publishing required a market based approach, something which other global consumer products had put in place long back. The new approach required partnerships, selling arrangements, and more importantly determining what would sell and what wouldn’t. Marketing directors started to have a say in what is being acquired by their publishing house, predicting what would sell and what wouldn’t. They had their own eBook promotion plan for individual titles.
The growing competition in the publishing industry and the development of social media for publicity only made marketing more important. Marketers were soon involved on deciding which genre of book would go well in which kind of reading devices and in which geographies. Marketers make sure that their books were on the shelves of both big and small distributors, wholesalers, libraries and bookstores.
The book marketer has indeed transformed to play a major role in the marketing of books for the publishing houses. Marketing of books are more important, perhaps most important in the growth of the publishing house. Today’s publishing industry, with its eBooks and online retailers might have made it easy moving stocks or distributing it to prospective readers. But however, like said before vital decisions are to be made with regard to selecting and using the services, which has made the marketing manager too important in the publishing arena.