A Focus Group of One?

If you’re in the publishing business, in all likelihood, you have never used market research, you have never run a focus group, and you have probably never utilized industry wide sales statistics to make a decision about any aspect of publishing a book.

In fact, publishers, editors and even book sales professionals seem proud of the standard methods of decision making in the book industry.  How many times have you seen a book cover decision made by one person?  Or over-ruled only by another tiny set of responses, maybe one or two book buyers, a couple of sales reps, or maybe a favorite bookseller?  Similarly, how often are decisions about strategy made based on personal experience – “I don’t know anyone who reads a book on ____(name your platform)” for example?  Or “there aren’t any readers for this book in ____(name your city)” for another example?

Aside from looking at the performance of comparative titles (which never seem to really match your book anyway) or making a price decision based on a quick survey of the competition, not much research ever seems to happen in the publishing business.  We don’t talk to readers aside from our friends at dinner, we don’t research what people are reading, what they think about prices, formats, marketing techniques, retail displays, customer service, etc.  

Of course, most publishers don’t have any significant contact with readers in the first place.

How about research, really deep and meaningful research about the role of reading in society, where people buy books, how many people go to libraries every week, how do professors choose books for course adoptions, how many students out of a given number in a class actually buy or read assigned books?  

How many people give books as gifts and how do they choose what to buy?

So many questions that arguably only a few people in the book business know anything about.  And what is really interesting is that so many people in the book business either don’t care, or are proud of not doing research, market or otherwise, as part of their company’s mission.  They base decisions on what they like, or what they see riding home on the train, or what people they socialize with tell them at dinner parties.   And they dismiss market research as either unaffordable for publishers or the wrong approach to a creativity based business.   

Of course, the art of writing does rely on the creative spark of creators, but publishing is the business end of a creative process, and business needs information!

So what is wrong with this picture?

I recently came upon this quote by Jeff Bezos (in conversation with Charlie Rose):

"Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies...the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other."

And that’s true enough.  But if you don’t understand who your customers are and what they want, like, and appreciate, how will you be able to create and present them with products that resonate and that they will be willing to buy from you?

Knowledge = power.  Knowledge comes from meaningful research.  We must always celebrate the inspiration and creativity that lie at the heart of the creative process,  in fact the publisher’s passion for finding and publishing books and believing deeply in them is their core value add as businesses.  

If publishers paid more attention to finding and publishing work they truly love, while at the same time embedding an understanding of the cultural zeitgeist in their publishing processes, it is almost certain that they would be less worried today about the future of books and reading.