Why (Sell and Market) Books?

Write-up by Greg Kornbluh (Harvard University Press)

Susan Donnelly, Harvard University Press (HUP) director of sales and marketing, began her session by asking the assembled 15–20 guests for a round of introductions. Among them were authors, librarians, book dealers, collectors, and a few folks working in publishing. All book people, but from a number of different angles, and that diversity was reflected in the questions and discussion that followed.

Susan started her talk by offering a straightforward answer from HUP’s perspective to the question posed by this conference: “We make enough money to cover our costs and stay in the black by publishing books, so we continue to do it.” She went on, though, to talk about HUP’s mission to produce and disseminate important scholarship, a concern that goes beyond the bottom line.

She discussed how changes in the book world at-large are affecting HUP. On the subject of e-books and technology, she expressed confidence in the continued relevance of HUP’s model. “From where we sit at Harvard University Press, the book does not appear to be an endangered species,” she said. According to Susan, HUP is not anticipating e-book sales accounting for more than 10% of HUP’s total sales within five years. “The reading experience of big, fat books does not transition well to the eReaders currently available,” she said.

She said that the complete reshaping of the book review scene has probably been more significant than the technological changes. There was a time, not so long ago, when one big, glowing, definitive review could be all a book needed to really take off. “There were a handful of review outlets,” she said, “and they meant everything.” Now, at least for a publisher like HUP, the demise of the newspaper book section and the ensuing online fragmentation of the review scene mean that the big, book-making review just doesn’t really exist anymore. Instead, there are countless review outlets spread around online and in print, and many of them are pretty specifically targeted. That can be a great thing for readers, and to ensure a breadth of book world coverage, but for HUP it also means a sea change in the way that book publicity works. Publicists and marketing people now have so many more outlets and reviewers with whom they have to establish relationships. As Susan put it, “The more opportunities there are, the more work there is to be done.”

Susan explained that HUP basically publishes two kinds of books, both of which highlight and depend on first-rate scholarship:

Books that can be pitched to the general reader, and then go on to a second life as a course adoption title.

Books for the scholarly or specialist audience that are often produced by junior faculty as part of their tenure requirement.

Generally, she said, HUP publishes books that are in conversation with each other. She gave the example of HUP’s publication of John Rawls’ landmark A Theory of Justice, which helped to define modern political philosophy, and subsequent publication of Amartya Sen’s 2009 The Idea of Justice, which is a direct engagement with Rawls. Next will come Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs, another “big idea” approach to justice, due this fall, and then, next spring, Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities, which details a definitional approach to justice developed in conversation with Sen.

Like Tim Jones in the preceding “Why (Design) Books?” session, Susan spent time detailing HUP’s reintroduction of The Image of the Black in Western Artseries this fall. She explained the history of the series, how it began in the 1960s as a project of the Menil Foundation, for whom HUP distributed the original volumes. The series was never completed, and the archive was eventually brought to Harvard’s Du Bois Institute. Susan talked about how, years ago as a travelling sales rep for HUP, the accounts she’d visit would often ask whether the series would be completed, and whether HUP would reprint the original volumes, some of which had long been unavailable. In collaboration with the Du Bois Institute, HUP is reproducing the original volumes, with new, full-color designs, completing the previously unpublished volumes, and adding a new volume covering the 20th century.

Susan talked about why she and HUP believe this to be an important series, and she discussed the strategy for helping to ensure that the series makes a splash and gets the attention that it deserves. She displayed a variety of marketing material for the series, which included two different versions of a blad, postcards featuring the covers of the first four books, and a small bi-fold brochure meant to facilitate the pre-purchase of the entire ten-book set, produced at the request of series editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. There has been a push to get media coverage focusing on Professor Gates and his co-editor, David Bindman. There are a number of launch events in the works, including at the British Museum. And talks are underway for the staging of a major, touring art exhibition to coincide with the completion of the series in 2015.

Susan explained how a series like this could be greatly helped by positive review coverage, but that it can be difficult to get reviews for an incomplete collection of books. She also explained how difficult the timing for reviews of art books can be, as they can’t be reviewed from galley copies like text-only books, but that production schedules often don’t allow much time between the mailing of finished review copies and the publication of the books. She noted that the series had been included in Publishers Weekly’s fall roundup of “sleepers” from independent publishers, and described how helpful that sort of coverage can still be.

The session closed with a round of questions on topics as varied as rights reversion, BISAC codes, remaindering, and profit margins.