Wi14 Education: Maximizing and Marketing Pre-Order Sales

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At the “Maximizing and Marketing Pre-Order Sales” education session at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute 14 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, booksellers discussed the ways that stores can successfully promote and sell pre-order titles.

Booksellers Robert Sindelar, Dave Lucey, Sarah Goddin, and Suzanne Droppert and ABA's Geetha Nathan and Joy Dallanegra-Sanger
Booksellers Robert Sindelar, Dave Lucey, Sarah Goddin, and Suzanne Droppert and ABA's Geetha Nathan and Joy Dallanegra-Sanger

Now that pre-orders are becoming an increasingly important way in which books are sold and marketed, working with publishers can help indies avoid lost sales, lost PR, and lost market share. In the session on Wednesday, January 23, panelists learned about some of the new methods developed and tested by ABA’s task force of indie stores, including processes and protocols for stores using various POS systems. ABA member booksellers can visit BookWeb’s Education Resources page to see a complete video of the session (booksellers will need to log in to BookWeb.org; e-mail [email protected] for login credentials).

The panelists were Suzanne Droppert, owner of Liberty Bay Books in Poulsbo, Washington; Sarah Goddin, manager of Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina; Dave Lucey, co-owner of Page 158 Books in Wake Forest, North Carolina; Robert Sindelar, ABA’s president and owner of Third Place Books with three locations in the Seattle, Washington, area; ABA IndieCommerce Senior Manager Geetha Nathan; and ABA Senior Program Officer Joy Dallanegra-Sanger, who led the session.

Droppert, Lucey, Goddin, and Sindelar all own stores that were among the 22 members of ABA’s Pre-Order Task Force, which was formed last year to explore how stores could maximize pre-orders through marketing, tracking, and reporting sales of seven pre-selected books.

Starting about two years ago, Sindelar said, the issue of pre-orders began coming up when ABA would make their annual publisher visits. “These publishers said, ‘Some of our biggest books of the year, books that end up being big in your stores, have a tremendous life before publication; tremendous revenue gets generated. The indie channel makes up maybe 5, 10, or 12 percent of our sales on other books, but on these pre-orders you are 0 percent, and we believe those are going to [Amazon]. You are doing yourself a disservice by not pursuing pre-orders more aggressively.’”

While making pre-orders a focus for indie bookstores seemed at first like an intimidatingly large task, it appeared that, with some planning, many of the hurdles could be overcome, said Sindelar. “It was clear some stores have had some success with pre-orders, so we decided to get aggressive about it and work with the publishers to figure out how to get on the other side of it,” he said.

Dallanegra-Sanger noted that the first months in a book’s life cycle are critical, heavily influenced as they are by television and social media, and this is especially true now that pre-orders make up a growing component of a book’s ultimate sales.

“What we found by asking some of our publishing colleagues was that, in the life of a frontlist title, pre-orders can account for 3 to 30 percent of the total sales of that book,” she said. “Some of the titles that are 30 percent are the books that indies really excel in; they are the more literary titles and they are the ones that have a big fanbase. They are not the huge titles that every mass merchant carries. So it is even more important that we get in the pre-order game.”

ABA began to work on the issue of pre-orders last spring, starting with the creation of an e-mail address publishers could use to inform ABA about a new cover reveal or a drop-in title, so that the association could let booksellers know immediately. This was a change in course from the previous year, when many publishers did not prioritize indie bookstores in the on-sale date game plan for huge-selling titles like A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo and Fire and Fury. This year, many were quick to inform ABA about important dates, said Dallanegra-Sanger.

With Becoming by Michelle Obama (Crown), ABA had the jacket up on IndieCommerce store websites “literally within seconds of when Michelle announced it and people were able to take pre-orders,” she added. For Fear by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster), “we had the information from the publisher ahead of time and our total preorder numbers were almost 1,000 copies. That is unheard of.”

Over the past year, said Dallanegra-Sanger, ABA also founded the association’s Pre-Order Task Force, which is made up of 22 stores from across the country, of every size, and of every level of pre-order experience. ABA then chose seven books for these stores to sell and track, most of which were either signed or came with a giveaway item as an incentive for customers to pre-order: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green (Dutton), The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton), Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Knopf), Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny (Minotaur), Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin (Bantam), Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper), and Diary of Wimpy Kid: Meltdown by Jeff Kinney (Abrams).

Stores within the task force reported their sales results from July to November 2018 and participated in regular calls with ABA staff to check in. Individually, they engaged in different types of marketing for these campaigns; for example, Lucey had his staff use markers to create handmade signs to promote Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Meltdown, since some of the digital assets provided by the publisher, in his opinion, didn’t translate as well in-store.

For An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Droppert of Liberty Bay promoted the title on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at least once or twice a week, and the store website features an exhortation to customers to pre-order their books there. She also has a blackboard behind the front desk to remind booksellers to mention authors whose books are currently available for pre-order, especially if the customer in line has just bought a backlist title by that author.

Dallanegra-Sanger said it is important “to get the publisher to help us give something of added value [to the customer] as a way to distinguish us from our online competitor who has most of this business. And that way we can really retrain our customers” to think of indies first when pre-ordering books.

Coming up, booksellers should be hearing from their sales reps at Doubleday regarding a pre-order promotion campaign just for indies to help promote Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. If they sign up by March 20, booksellers will get incremental cartons of signed books and a promotion kit that includes an easelback poster, graphics and language for social media, and limited-edition bookmarks. Dallanegra-Sanger stressed that it is important when doing pre-order campaigns with signed copies and/or giveaways from publishers for booksellers to make sure to report the sales on the on-sale date. If publishers see increased sales, this makes it more likely they will be inclined to create more pre-order promotions for indies.

To create more resources for publishers and booksellers to coordinate on pre-orders in the future, ABA also came up with a pre-order calendar, where booksellers can view a list of suggested titles with good pre-order potential, specifically books with added value items or signed books. In addition, ABA has also created pre-order ads that appear in the Indie Next List flier, along with digital marketing assets for these books.

At the session, booksellers received a cheat sheet for reporting pre-orders to six types of POS systems, and IndieCommerce Senior Manager Geetha Nathan provided tips for bookstores to maximize digital assets on their store website. To conclude, task force member Goddin told attendees that one of the most important reasons to start taking pre-orders is that the customers who will take you up on the offer tend to be the ones who are most enthusiastic and excited about these authors’ new titles.

“These customers are the ones who are going to be contacting their friends and putting it on social media, so giving up that part of the market would just be a huge mistake,” Goddin said. “It’s worth the trouble it takes to get it all aligned. We are far from perfect doing it in our store, but I think it was well worthwhile.”

Booksellers will have the chance to engage in more education about pre-orders at this year’s Spring Forums with a new session titled “ABACUS and Pre-Orders: Two Programs You Can’t Do Without.”