Skip to main content

Introduction to Marketing for Smaller Publishers

The marketing department of a publishing company is an exciting place to work. It is connected to all other departments – design, editorial, production, rights and sales – and has to interact with and collaborate with them all. Beginning your marketing career in publishing can be a bewildering position to be in. This course is designed to explain what happens within a marketing team and your role within it.

You need to learn who all your audiences are – including the consumers who buy your books, your colleagues in different departments and the retailers who will sell and promote your titles. You also need to understand the costs of the available media options, how to work effectively with your colleagues in publicity and how to measure the success of your campaigns.

In publishing, you are often expected to pick everything up on the job, and there is little time to ask questions. This course will explain clearly exactly what happens in all parts of the publishing process – within both trade and non-trade publishing – and give you the chance to ask all the questions you have had since you started. It is also a good introduction and explanation of marketing methods and tools for those who work in small publishers and whose main role is not marketing, and who want to understand how to execute marketing activity.

Marketing is as much about numbers as about words. Being able to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns is essential. Understanding your part in the business and what you are trying to achieve is crucial when both budget and activity have to be spent as effectively as possible.

Once you have taken this course, you will be a much more confident and knowledgeable marketer.

Who is it for?

  • Assistants and executives starting in publishing marketing departments
  • those whose background or role is not in marketing but have to take on some aspects of this work.

Note that this course focuses on marketing with smaller budgets, across academic, consumer (trade), educational, non-trade and professional publishing.

Programme

Day 1

Session 1: Introduction

  • The function of marketing

Session 2: Marketing options in publishing

  • Marketing 101
  • Case study
  • Budgets

Session 3: Retail marketing and working with sales

  • Supporting sales
  • Bibliographic systems and metadata
  • Working with the trade

What will you achieve?

On completing this course you’ll be able to:

  • identify and place the function of marketing within the publishing process, both internally and externally
  • plan and execute a marketing campaign
  • make a successful campaign and learn how to measure and evaluate it
  • understand the requirements from sales and the book trade

Programme

Day 2

Session 4: Direct to consumer and owned media

  • The big guys of advertising
  • Digital marketing

Session 5: Brands and authors and backlist

  • Ongoing brand campaigns
  • Authors’ voices
  • Promoting the backlist

Session 6: Planning a campaign, measuring effectiveness

  • Creating a marketing campaign?
  • Measuring effectiveness

Next session

Please email to find out when this course will be running

Price

£360 + VAT

A number of discounts are available

Course format

  • Virtual classroom
  • 9.00am to 12.30pm 
  • 4 x 1½-hour sessions, split across 2 half days, 1 week apart

What you will need

To join the course, you will need access to a computer or laptop with a camera and microphone. You will need to activate a free Zoom account to join the course. This takes 2 minutes and does not require any payment. It is purely for administrative purposes.