Meet Morgan
Messing founded Logue Social to work exclusively with authors to increase his/her/their fan-base, consumer-engagement, and book sales.
October 6, 2023
Today, the go-to source for recommendations for what to buy, watch, eat, or read lies in social media. Various industries such as fashion, entertainment, technology, and hospitality, have embraced this behavioral change and invested in bolstering their social media presence to fuel growth.
The literary industry is the outlier. For the most part, the literary industry has failed to evolve to fit the social media landscape. The vast preponderance of leading authors and publishers maintain subpar, outdated social media profiles, often having fewer followers than book sales. While the industry continues to prioritize traditional marketing tools for promoting upcoming books, a substantial portion of their audience has migrated to social media for book recommendations.
Consequently, while overall book sales have not seen a drastic decline, there has been a redistribution of sales across authors. Increasingly, book sales are driven by the effectiveness of the author’s social media presence and/or support of social media book influencers and communities. The industry has constructively empowered non-expert book influencers to pick winners and losers amongst authors.
Just as consumers avidly follow founders of clothing brands, readers are eager to connect with authors. Yet, unlike prominent clothing brand founders, authors seldom share compelling content or interact with their communities. By underestimating the significance of social media, the publishing industry is forgoing new potential customers and new revenue streams. In simple terms, the problem in the literary social media realm lies more in the supply of engaging content rather than demand.
The rise of fashion influencers has universally invigorated consumer culture, paralleling how book influencers are driving book sales. Fashion brands have adeptly harnessed influencer marketing to promote their products, yielding significant conversions. Similarly, authors should be collaborating with established and up-and-coming book influencers, leveraging their capacity to boost book sales.
Fortunately, there is a strong desire to hear from authors on social media and that engagement translates to book sales. Colleen Hoover represents “proof of concept.” With the help of her 3.9 million cross channel social media followers, the once self-published author was responsible for approximately 80% of the bestselling novels of 2022. Hoover’s social media content has fueled a community of passionate “Cohort” members who rave about her various novels across social media.
From the perspective of the publishing industry, Colleen Hoover should be a wake-up call that a paradigm shift is needed in the marketing sphere. In a New York Times interview, Hoover’s publicist refers to the “Cohort” Tiktok content as “better publicity than anyone in sales or marketing could have engineered.” However, since Hoover’s breakthrough, the literary industry’s marketing approaches have remained largely stagnant. Whereas consumer brands in most verticals have figured out how to effectively sway, collaborate with, and “engineer” social media communities around their product to stimulate sales, the publishing industry continues to be an exception. Why?
Hoover’s social media success should serve as a blueprint for future authors as they navigate book marketing. According to a 2023 study of Americans, 84% of Gen-z, 73% of Millennials and 45% of Gen-x use social media as their primary tool to discover new movies and television. The answer is clear: social media drives and provides the vast majority of content people choose to consume. And rest assured, these numbers are only growing.
Literary industry, it’s time to LOGue on.
Work Cited:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/books/colleen-hoover.html
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