Today I am writing about a subject that I have touched on in Shelf Life many times but have never spent a full Shelf Life actually discussing, which now I think on it might have been for the best because it’s not that interesting? But, look, my stock-in-trade isn’t interestingness it’s useful information and sometimes that’s interesting and sometimes it’s not. I don’t make the rules about what’s interesting. Sometimes the business of selling publications isn’t very interesting. Actually, all the time. Writing, editing, and producing publications is interesting. Selling publications is the worst. But if nobody sold publications then nobody would get to write, edit, and produce them. Fortunately there are people out there who like selling publications because it’s not me.
Today’s Shelf Life is about the people who buy and use publications (eg, books). These people fall into three distinct but overlapping categories. Here are the definitions I’m working with today:
Customer—a person or organization who buys goods or services.
Consumer—someone who purchases goods or services for personal use (as opposed to purchasing them for resale or production); someone who uses (consumes) something.
End User—the person who actually uses or operates something, like a computer or a book.
Decider—the person who makes the final decision about whether and what to buy.
When I say distinct but overlapping, here’s what I mean.
When I choose and buy a book for myself from Barnes and Noble, I am the customer in that situation as well as the consumer and the end user and the decider. When Barnes and Noble buys 10,000 of that same book from the publisher to stock their shelves, they are the customer and the decider but they are not the consumer or the end user. If I like that book so much I go back to Barnes and Noble and buy another copy of it to give my mom, I am this time Barnes and Noble’s customer and the consumer (I am buying the book for personal use, ie, gifting) and the decider but not the end user (I am not going to use the book for its intended final purpose, ie, reading).
There are a lot of situations in publications purchasing where the decider—the person who is making the decision about what book to buy—is not the reader or end user. Some common examples are when the decider is:
A community or academic librarian
A parent
A gift-giver
A teacher or professor
Those people all make decisions about what books get purchased without necessarily having any input from the end user. Further, those deciders might be spending their own money (a parent or gift-giver), an institution’s or the tax-payers’ money (acquiring librarians), or may even be making a decision that determines how the end user (eg, a student) or their proxy (eg, the student’s parent or guardian) spends money.
For instance, a college professor decides what textbook their students will use for a particular class (decider). The school bookstore then acquires stock of that book from the publisher (customer). The book may then be purchased for use by a student enrolled in the class (end user) with their mom (customer) supplying money to cover the purchase. This is a case where the person who is ultimately going to use the book to learn from had no agency in the long chain of buying decisions that led to the book coming into their hands.
If you take it even a few steps back to the acquisitions editor at the publishing company, when that person originally “bought” the manuscript from the author—or, more likely, solicited the author to write a textbook and prepared the contract—their decision was based on whether or not the textbook company’s sales reps could sell the textbook to professors—not parents (who are paying for the book) or students (who are using it).
What I am getting at with all this is: The person who has to be convinced to buy a book is almost never exclusively the person who is going to be reading that book. Yes, at the end of the day, you have to convince the end user to read your book. Even if they end up with the book in their hand (or on their Kindle) without purchasing it, they still have to decide to read it. This goes for textbooks, too. Let me tell you, students can take a class and purchase the book and never crack it open. Not that textbook authors particularly care as long as the book sells. But writers of fiction care. We want people to actually read what we wrote, I think.
But you will likely have to convince a number of other people to buy your book before you get a chance to convince the reader to read it, as it’s fairly unusual for the end user to be the only person involved in a book-purchasing decision.
The exception to what I just said is when you (the author) sell a book directly to your end user (the reader), for instance if you self-publish and sell books direct to readers through a service like Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark. This is a scenario that is gaining market share and growing bigger all the time. More books are being self-published, and more authors are choosing to self-publish, every year.
If you’re self-publishing and selling books direct to readers, you only have to sell to readers. That means you only have to appeal to readers. You don’t have to worry about also appealing to wholesale book buyers or librarians. If you write for a young audience (children or middle graders) you probably also have to appeal to the end-user’s parent. But mostly you’re marketing your product toward the reader.
If you’re going the trad-publishing route (or intend to) and you want your book on store and library shelves and display tables at Costco and stuff like that, there’s a whole slew of other people you have to appeal to along the way. This includes the people who help you get traditionally published (agents and editors), the people who promote your book both within the publishing company and without (marketing and sales reps as well as book reviewers and influencers), and the people who purchase your book for resale or other re-distribution to readers (librarians and wholesale buyers).
If you cringed at the word influencer because it made you think of TikTok or Instagram, know that I’m using in the ages-old marketing sense that includes TokTok book influencers but wasn’t coined by, or to describe, them. An influencer is anyone whose views influence any stage of the buying decision; so, yes, this includes booktokers and bookstagrammers but it also includes, for instance, people like Barack Obama who put out lists of the best books they read this year; influential newspaper book review sections like the ones in the New York Times and the Washington Post; and your neighbor you ran into at the grocery store last week who told you about that great book they just read. “Social media influencers” are just one very, very small piece of the wide world of purchase influencers.
Perhaps you are thinking: Gosh, I’m an author. My job is writing a great book, not figuring out how to sell it to all those different kinds of people. Well good news: If you are traditionally publishing, your publisher has—either in their employ, or on freelance contract, or as a vendor of some kind—people who know how to do all those things. As an author in that scenario, one of your big responsibilities will be to not get in the way of those people doing their job. What I mean by that is, trust those professionals to know their jobs. I’ve encountered a lot of authors who put up resistance to the publishing company doing the publishing company’s job on the grounds of “Well, I think my readers are going to be people like me and I would prefer it a different way.” While your readers may very well be people like you who would prefer it the same way you would, those aren’t the only people the publishing company has to think about when they’re planning how to market and sell a book.
Let me give you an example from textbooks, because textbooks have a neat and tidy separation of decider and end user. A company I worked for had a big name in psychology attached to write an introduction to psychology textbook. Intro to psych is an enormous course market with more than 1 million undergrads taking that class every year. A lot of schools require that undergraduates take one course in the social sciences and intro to psych is the one most of those undergrads will default into if they’re not a social science major otherwise. Anyway, there’s a lot of end users for a book in this space. It’s a large market.
The author wanted to take a new and different approach to the way the book would be organized. This author wanted to put the brain stuff in chapter 3 (meaning, the chapter about the anatomy of the brain and brain chemistry and stuff like that). Problem: In every other intro to psych textbook on the market at that time, the brain chapter was chapter 2. This meant that pretty much every syllabus in the intro to psych space everywhere was set up to cover the brain stuff second and not third. If the author had their way, and organized their book such that the brain chapter was chapter 3 and not chapter 2, that meant that any college professor, were they to adopt this book, would have to re-do their syllabus to cover the material in a different order.
Nobody is going to do all that work to switch to a new textbook when they could just keep using the book they’ve been using for the last three years and not do all that extra work.
So we, as in we the publisher, talked about this with the author and laid out the pros and cons. As the author, they wanted to do something revolutionary in this market space and change the way students learned this information. As a publisher, we wanted to sell enough books to make a profit on this title. Our visions for the project were at odds because we realized we were not going to be able to do both things.
Now: This was down to the order the information appeared in the book, the way it was organized, and not the material content of the book. We didn’t tell this person “nobody cares about the brain, delete the brain stuff.” Maybe we would have if nobody cared about the brain but people care about the brain a lot, as it happens. My theory is because it’s the brain part of us that decides what we care about so naturally brain puts itself high up on the list.
It’s not the publisher’s place to ask authors to make substantive changes to their book so it can sell more. Publishers won’t acquire a book in the first place if they think it needs those kinds of substantive changes to sell. But publishers do make marketing-adjacent suggestions and requests that may not jive with your original vision for your book. These are things like JK Rowling famously being asked to use “JK” as her pen name instead of “Joanne” to appeal to boys and girls equally. Publishers sometimes request or suggest title changes, or go in a different direction on things like cover design than what the author may have originally envisioned. That kind of thing.
As the author, this book is your show. You have the final say on things like your pen name and your book title and I’d be very surprised if a contract fell out over something like that. It’s an author’s prerogative to advocate for their book and their vision for it. That said, publishers know their business and there are a lot of sales and marketing factors that go into a successful book. Come to the table prepared to champion your vision for your book—but prepared to listen and learn, too. We should all be writing for our readers and, at the end of the day, writing the book we want to read. Marketing, though, is a whole other ball game.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.