Episode 53: Advertising Strategies for Publishers and Authors

Daniel Berkowitz is the Ad Sales Director for Bookshop.org, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. He is also the founder of AuthorPop, a one-stop shop for every author’s digital needs.

He joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss the importance of book advertising for both publishers and authors. He has worked with authors at all stages of their careers to help build their audience and increase discoverability, and previously spent several years at Open Road Integrated Media as Executive Director of Paid Marketing, where he worked with both authors and publishers to drive discoverability of their titles through targeted advertising solutions.

Find Daniel Berkowitz on LinkedIn and click the following links to learn more about Bookshop.org and AuthorPop.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This month on the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m chatting with Daniel Berkowitz, who is the ad sales director at bookshop.org where he works with publishers and authors and a range of other partners to advertise books and services. He also operates a consultancy called AuthorPop, where he works with authors and others on digital marketing initiatives. Daniel, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

Daniel Berkowitz
Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it’s really exciting. I got to see you; I guess we’ve probably known each other for quite a few years, because you used to work at Digital Book World. You’ve you’ve been in Open Road Media for a while. You’ve been in marketing and publishing for a pretty long time, and we’ve been in the same circles. And you came out to the Publishing Innovation Forum in 2024 and really appreciate you got you coming out and being part of that. So yeah, it’s great to see you, and a great to kind of have a conversation about Bookshop, because Bookshop is just blowing the doors off stuff. It’s awesome to see.

Daniel Berkowitz
The success has been wild. And, you know, I joined close to two years ago at this point. And Bookshop started, I think, technically, it sort of went “to market”, for lack of a better way of putting it, in 2020 right before the pandemic. So I wish I could take some of the credit for it. I think I’ve had a hand in the recent success of the company, but in terms of just getting it off the ground and building awareness, and actually getting customers to be aware that this is a viable alternative to buying your books online from our friends in Seattle. I can’t say I take too much credit for that, but it was a company that, you know, during the pandemic, when I found out about it, when I sort of first discovered it, I thought to myself, this is a really cool idea. I’m gonna monitor that. I’m gonna keep that in my back pocket. And, you know, it was just when the job came up, I was like, I got to get in there somehow. So I’ve been very happy here.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Yeah, it’s great what has happened, and I’m really glad to see the success. And today we want to talk about advertising and marketing on the book side. You have a lot of, like I mentioned before, a lot of background in that. And you know, Bookshop is trying really hard to take on some of the bigger players in the retail space. And to do that effectively, you have to market your books well. You have to really understand how marketing books work. So let’s talk a bit about advertising first. The advertising and book selling is a unique thing. It’s not necessarily the same thing as advertising in other parts of the world, other industries even. So, let’s talk a bit about that. What do you think are the biggest challenges to advertising in the book selling space?

Daniel Berkowitz
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, it really cuts to the heart of it. There are so many books out there. There are just so many books published, whether it’s traditional publishers, indie authors, the rise of hybrid publishers, all of the AI-generated slot that’s coming out there now. So it’s really hard to just break through the noise, right? No matter how you’re publishing your book, be it traditionally, whether you’re doing it yourself as an indie author, you can do everything right. You can write the greatest book ever. You can have a beautiful cover. Your metadata can be great, you know, all that stuff, right? But if no one knows the book exists, how’s anyone going to buy it? So, you know, being able to break through that noise. I hate to say it, but it’s almost as if you don’t pay to have your book. If you’re, you know, John Grisham, if you’re Stephen King, right? Like everyone’s gonna buy your book. Everyone’s gonna be aware that your book exists. But for a debut author, a smaller author, sort of in that mid tier, if there’s no real, paid advertising behind it, it doesn’t need to be a ton of money. But if there’s nothing behind it to sort of consciously go out and target readers, it’s gonna be very difficult for people to know that book exists. So paid advertising is, I don’t wanna say it’s a necessary evil, but sort of the best phrasing I can think up right now, and that’s really sort of the hardest part I think about getting a book to market, right? I mean, I’m not breaking new ground here, but just making sure that people know that the book exists, right? And advertising is obviously a great way to do that.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and like you said, there’s, what, a million new titles published every year, traditionally, or something like that. There’s probably 3 million at least, published non-traditionally. It’s a big market, and every year you’re having to try to stand out against all of those other people. Yeah, it’s hard to do if you don’t actually put some money behind it.

Daniel Berkowitz
Absolutely. And not just, you know, not just books. We’re in the attention business, right? I mean, you’re competing against podcasts, you’re competing against Netflix and Prime and Hulu. You’re competing against sports. You’re just competing against anything that is vying for people’s time, just, you know, spending a half hour on social media scrolling, right? So it’s difficult to break through all that noise.

Joshua Tallent
So what would you say if, and there’s probably, I mean, I’m assuming there’s a big difference between what an author might spend on advertising versus what a publisher might spend and different strategies they would take. But if you were an author, let’s say you have an author consultancy, and you’re approaching this question of, I’ve got a new book, I’m gonna put it out there, what kind of budget is like a baseline and then what would you recommend as far as, like, yeah, we’ll get into that in a minute. But what would you say is, like a baseline budget, a mid-tier budget, a ‘hey, let’s do everything we can’ budget for someone who is in that author space and trying to figure that out.

Daniel Berkowitz
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it depends on your goals to some extent, right? You know, first off, if you’re an author and you’re not using a traditional publisher, you have funded all of this yourself, I think you need to be realistic at the outset of the process. Are you looking to get your money back out of this? Are you looking to make money? Is this a one off book for you? Are you writing genre fiction and this is a series, and your goal is to have 10 books in this series, and then maybe the first book you’re actually going to lose money on, because you’re giving that book away for free, right? Are you looking to build a mailing list and market to those readers over and over again? So I think the first question is really just sort of, what are your goals around it? That said, depending on where you’re advertising, there are Pay Per Click platforms where you can do quite well with a very modest budget of a few $100, right? Amazon, Meta, BookBub ads can be very effective as well. Couple other platforms out there. Is your goal just to put all of your money into Amazon, which I would not suggest, but it is where most of the sales are happening unfortunately. Is your goal to just put all of your money into Amazon, really channel your sales there over a 24-48 hour period, try to rise to the top of the best seller list. And now you’re getting some more organic visibility. And now you can put in your metadata and on your website, I’m an Amazon Best Selling Author, all that sort of stuff. Is that your goal, right? Because if so, that’s going to change your strategy. But to be somewhat prescriptive. If you’re an author, I do think you have to go into all this with eyes wide open. And I do think if you’re in this for the long haul, if you’re not doing this just for fun, and there’s nothing wrong with doing it just for fun. I’ve worked with many authors who are of a certain age. Maybe they were a doctor or a lawyer. They made some good money. They always wanted to be a writer, but they had kids, they had a job, right? And so this is sort of a passion project, and they invest a few thousand dollars in the whole process. And they say, whatever happens, happens, and if that’s you, that’s great. But if you’re trying to build a career, no one is going to know that that book exists if you’re not putting money behind it, right, as we were saying before. So starting off with a few hundred dollars, seeing where that goes, but you can spend thousands of dollars. We have publishers who will put two, five, ten thousand dollars into a book with us. And sometimes they’ll just focus on week one sales. That’s all they want. Sometimes it’s a big pre-pub campaign. Sometimes they want a really long tail for it, and they want to stretch it out to a three month campaign. So it really just, sort of getting back to what we were saying before, it all starts with what the goals are, and I think that then informs the strategy a bit.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. And if you look at traditional publishing, the majority of publishers, especially if we’re talking about trade publishing, get the majority of their sales from backlist titles. So if you’re starting out as a new author, you have to understand that 70% of sales are backlist. You don’t have backlist as a brand new author, so you got to build that. And it takes time, and it takes, like you said, building a brand, and even thinking of yourself more as a content producer than an author, in some ways, so that you can think through, how can I get people to buy into the worlds that I’m creating, the ideas that I’m promoting, the whatever it happens to be, it’s not just the one thing that I wrote this one time. I’ve worked with authors when I was an ebook developer, worked with authors who would come back to me every year with a new update to the same ebook. You know, they’re writing the same book again and keep on going with that same book. There’s a point at which you just have to say, you know, write something new. Come up with something different. That may not be working for you if you’re just hammering on the same nail all the time. It’s beneficial to, you know, think differently and kind of come at it from different perspectives sometimes. So let’s talk about kind of what works with advertising, and regardless of budget, we’ll go past that and just think about, what are the kinds of things that actually do benefit a book in trying to market it out to people who actually are readers?

Daniel Berkowitz
Yeah, absolutely. And I really liked your point that you just made. I mean, we are in the content business. I don’t like that word, content, content production, content producer. But, you know, it is what it is, right? And, yeah, it’s like, at a certain point, write the next book. I don’t know if this is an absolute truth, but I’ve heard it said many times, the best way to drive awareness of your first book is to publish a second book. It’s more touch points, it’s more opportunities for people to know that you were out there. So what was the question? Sorry, more around, just best…

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, what works is kind of the question. But to that point, if you look at authors that have been successful, especially self-published authors that have been successful, quite a few of them have done exactly that, where the first book is just fodder for the second. But I’ve seen sales reports from some of these authors, where they they write the first book and they make a certain amount of money on it. They write the second book, and the second book hits a really higher point, because now people know about them. And then the first book picks up and catches up to the second, right? Especially in a series. If you’ve got a series, you want to read the first book first, but there’s, there’s a value in having that building over time, right? You’re constructing a process, and you’re constructing a kind of a backbone over time that then gives you something to work with. So, yeah, okay, back to my question. What kind of advertising, if we’re talking about book advertising, what kind of advertising works well?

Daniel Berkowitz
Yeah. Great question. It very much depends on the author, right? You know, one thing that we see a lot of publishers do now, and I saw this in my days where I was working at Open Road, and a lot of our work was around promoting discounted or price promoted ebooks, and publishers would send us their list a month ahead of time, or two months ahead of time, whatever it is. And what we would see very often, and I know that this was very intentional, is a publisher has a book coming out in two months. Well, we want to sort of raise awareness of the first couple books that they have, or the the first book that they have. So let’s discount that book; we’ll take it, the ebook, take it down from 14.99 to 4.99, 3.99, whatever it is, increase the sales a bit, increase the awareness, drive it up the best seller list a bit. Do whatever you’re doing with the algorithms. That’s a whole world I don’t understand. And that’s part of their their marketing strategy, right? Like they’re they’re putting some money into that, right? Beyond ebooks, if we’re just sort of focusing on books as a whole, definitely know what the audience is. Right? Not every book makes sense. I shouldn’t say not every book makes sense to not. Not every book makes sense to advertise on every platform, but I think certain platforms have the right audience for your books, and so I think you have to sort of know that going into it. Really just sort of having a sense of, first off, having a clear sense of what the budget is right? Like going into that ahead of time, when it comes to sort of like the logistics of working with us, or a similar type of retail, or a similar type of platform that has that audience, right? Because that’s what you’re coming to Bookshop for as a publisher, as an author, just sort of as an advertiser is our audience. We have several million readers. You can access our audience on the website. You can access them over email, but once you know, “I’ve got X number of dollars”, whether it’s $200 or $20,000 or anything in between. Come to us as soon as you know. Let’s have a conversation. What are the goals here? Do you want to start this campaign before publication? Are you trying to drive pre-pub awareness of it? Did you want to do a giveaway where you’re getting arcs into the hands of readers? Right? How soon are you getting those arcs in? Do we want to start that six months ahead of time? Do we want to capture those email addresses and then re-target them, right? Like, there’s a lot we can do depending on number one the budget, but along with just the timing of it as well. So the sooner a publisher can reach out. And we have publishers who reach out, you know, a week before pub to two days before pub even. And you know, well, if we can work with you, we will certainly work with you. You know, we’re Bookshop. We’re a very nice place. We try to accommodate everyone. Try to be as flexible as possible, but especially if you’re looking to secure the best inventory, day of publication, week of publication, the sooner you can reach out the better, and then just having a really good sense of, nobody knows the book better than you as the author and you as the publisher. Right? You’ve been working on this book, the author, you’ve been working on it for years, the publisher, you’ve been working on it for a year, year and a half, two years, right? 20 people have read the book at this point. You know that audience. There are certain things that we can do. We can look at it, and we can make a very educated guess at who are the best readers we should be targeting. We can look at the BISACs. But if you know comp titles, comp authors, if you say to us, I know this book sort of looks like this, but it actually we think really could appeal to these readers as well. Can you kind of build a custom segment for us; that information is super helpful, so just giving us all the information you can at the outset can be really beneficial to the campaign success.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that knowing your audience is really, really important, and so is having a platform. You know, people talk about platform all the time, but it is the one of the keys to success for any author or any publisher, is to know who is buying your book? Who are the people that actually are going to be interested in this title. Like you said, comp titles come into play in that and even just recognizing, you know, where the market is. A lot of publishers, for many years, publishers left all of the book selling aspects to booksellers alone. And now it’s become very clear over the last, you know, 10-20, years, that you have to build the brand of the book, of the publisher, and you have to build the brand of the author, and you have to do things like having email lists and working on community aspects and things like this that actually help you build up that platform. Again, whether it’s for an author or for a publisher, so that people can pull you out of that mess of all of the other people that are out there.

Daniel Berkowitz
Oh, absolutely, you know, getting back to what we were saying before, there’s so much noise out there. So however you can engage those readers, but not just engage them, but engage them in a very meaningful way. So yeah, to your point, whether it’s on social media, building a community, whether it’s through your website, and, you know, lead generation and trying to get those email addresses that you can then go ahead and re-target, but retarget in a meaningful way. Maybe if you’re a publisher and you’re trying to do direct selling, maybe you’re offering discounts, or whatever it is, or there’s giveaways or things like that, to…I don’t know if reward is the right word, but just to engage, just to engage those readers. Because there are so many books out there, again, and there are so many publishers, and I mean, my bookshelf behind me is filled that top row is all books that I haven’t read yet. I see a cover that I like, you know, I might buy it, maybe I’m in the minority there, but I just, I can only read so many books at once, right? And I can only read so many books over the course of the year. So it’s very important whether it’s publishers, whether it’s authors, to really engage their readers in a meaningful way.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. And this also kind of leads to that question, too, of if you’re building a platform, you’re building a brand. You’re building out understanding about who you are as an author, who you are as a publisher, what kind of books you publish. There’s the issue that comes into play of like, I published this book, and I want to track the efficacy of every single advertisement. Talk to me a little bit about how that works, and the is it even possible?

Daniel Berkowitz
It’s a great question. Yeah, attribution, right, it’s getting harder and harder, and so, you know, I’d say at Bookshop, anytime you book a campaign with us, whether it’s for $100 or $100,000, we provide full campaign wraps. At the end of the campaign, we tell you what the CPC was, what the CPM was, what the click through rate was. We give you all the sales that we can track, right? Because we can only track the sales on our website. One of the things I really like about my job is I get to work with a ton of different publishers, dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of publishers, Big Five down to the Indies to independent authors to mom and pop shops, and everyone does sort of look at things a little bit differently. And I think the publishers that are, I don’t know if successful is the right word, but the ones who I think are looking at this holistically I think are the ones that are doing it the right way. I think attributing sales to advertising is something of a fool’s errand nowadays. Now, there are definitely things you can do on certain platforms. There’s, you know, pixels where you can sort of track traffic to some extent, right? But, you know, book selling is a very unique thing where it’s not really a closed loop. It’s not like you’re selling some vacuum cleaner through your website. You’re selling it directly, right? And so you’ve got your email list and you’ve got your social followers, and you’re tracking them through the entire process, you know, of ultimately converting that sale. This is very different. Most publishers, even if they are selling directly through their website, the bulk of their sales are certainly not happening there. So you can’t 100% absolutely attribute all of the sales of every ad campaign accurately, and so, you know, I’ll give you sort of an example. Let’s say you’ve got, you know, a pretty sizable budget for a book, and you advertise through Bookshop, and maybe you’re advertising through AMS, and you advertise through Meta and Publishers Weekly, and you get a New York Times book review, right? And let’s say someone gets our Tuesday email day of publication, and they see the book in there, and they’re like, okay, that cover looks cool. I read a little bit about the book. I click into it, all right, looks cool. I’m not gonna buy that book, right? And then two days later, they get a Facebook ad for it. They’re like, oh, there’s that book again, right? Then Sunday comes around, they read a New York Times book review about it. Then a week later, they walk into their indie bookstore, they see the book. It’s on one of the front tables, and you’re like, you know, I’ve been seeing that book a lot. It got a good review. I’m gonna try it out, right? It’s like, well, who got that sale, right? Like, how do you attribute that sale? It seems to me that all the advertising you did was very effective for that now, as Bookshop, sort of practically speaking, we can’t track that sale, right? Like, we can tell you that your ads got clicked, right, but we can’t say, like, oh yeah, we tracked that user and they then walked into a bookstore and bought the book, right? So I think attribution is very, very difficult today, again, if not sort of outright impossible. And so I think, you know, look, if you’re running campaigns and you’re getting, like, $6 cost per clicks, you know, like, something is wrong, right? Like, it’s not an effective ad campaign, not that that would ever happen with us. But you know, then something is wrong, it might be time to take a step back. But if the metrics are really solid and the book is sort of overall selling well, keep doing what you’re doing, right? And you’re totally justified inn being critical of your partners and the retailers that you’re advertising with, and having conversations, I think all that is totally warranted. But I think selling books is really difficult. I think advertising books is really difficult, and I think there needs to be a bit of, I don’t wanna say wiggle room, but just a bit of understanding, right? And it’s not like a cop out, or, you know, anything like that. It’s just that’s the way. I remember years ago being a Digital Book World, and I forget who it was, it was someone within the industry talking about a study they had done, and, you know, I’m going to butcher it, because I’ve heard this multiple times now, but someone needed to see a new cover eight times, you know, something like that. I’ve heard as high as 20 times, right? I don’t know if that’s accurate, but you know someone needs to see the cover multiple times. And let’s say they even need to see it just four times, right? Maybe they see it twice on Bookshop, maybe they see it once on Amazon, once on Facebook, and then they go into a store and buy it, right? Or even if they just buy it on Amazon, or they buy it through your website. Well, those ads then serve their purpose. They got people to know that the book exists. So there is a bit of tug of war right between awareness, sort of CPM and conversion, or sort of click through with CPC. You want both of those metrics to be really good, but I think there just needs to be. You need to look at it sort of a bit more holistically. I hope that made sense.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that makes total sense, yeah. And I think it ties really well into this concept of building your platform and building your connections and building your community and knowing your audience. You know, if you you can’t make a book; you can’t make a book succeed by just promoting it in one place. It has to be a broad range of different types of promotions and advertising and everything else so that, so that people see it, and they see it again, and they they get, like you said, get interested in that. So in our last couple of minutes here, give me the pitch on Bookshop. What sets bookshop apart? Why is it so important, and what is it that you guys are trying to do?

Daniel Berkowitz
Yeah, Bookshop is a wonderful; it’s a wonderful place. We are the only way to buy books online and directly support the independent bookstore ecosystem, right? I mean, you can go to an indie bookstore, physically buy a book. You’re supporting that bookstore. You can, if the bookstore has a website, you can buy it from their website and directly support them. But Bookshop really solves a need in that selling books is very hard, and making it as a bookseller, owning your own bookstore, engaging with customers, selling books to customers, that is a very difficult thing to do. The margins are very small, rent is very high, so Bookshop helps to solve that need. We have over 2,100 bookstores in our network, so to sort of take a step back, what we do is, when you buy a book through our website, we give more than 80% of the profit of that sale to bookstores, right? Like no questions asked, all they have to do is sign up on our website. They go into the pool and they get 80%; it’s divided up amongst the booksellers, obviously, but they get 80% of that profit. And as a customer, you can create an account with us and tell us which bookstore you want your funds generated from your sales to go to. So we’re giving away all of our money, right? That’s why the advertising is so important to us. It helps to sustain the business. We are a certified B Corp. That means that we sort of put the greater good above profit. We’re just generally a great buying experience online. I think we have the highest trust pilot score of any online book retailer. Our shipping times are good. We really do compete on price at this point. We’re certain, you know, we’re not Amazon. We’re not going to take a loss on the books, right? Like we need to generate a profit to give it to the bookstores. But if, as a reader, I’ll say this if, as a reader, you care about supporting independent bookstores, you care about supporting that literary ecosystem that allows authors to have a job. Right? Buy through us; we’re helping to keep that alive. And as a publisher, you need a viable alternative to Amazon, right? And it’s not charity. I mean, we have 2 million readers. We sell a ton of books. We’ve sold so many books that since 2020 we’ve given over $35 million to bookstores. That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of sales that are coming through here. And our readers are very, very engaged. We’ve done studies on them that you know, we know how many books a year they’re buying. We know what their income is. These are high income readers. They buy lots of books, and it is just a great platform to get as a publisher, as an advertiser. It’s a great platform to get awareness for your books and to get your books in front of the right readers. The tech that we have is very sophisticated. We can really target the right readers for you. We can put together really robust campaigns that allow us to sort of hit a wide swath of readers, as well as target the same reader, the ideal reader for that book, multiple times. And we’re flexible, and we can work with you on a single title basis, on a multi-title basis, there’s a lot of ways to work with us. So I would encourage anyone just to give us, at a minimum, just give us a try.

Joshua Tallent
Awesome. That’s great. Well, Daniel, I really appreciate you joining me today. That’s been a great conversation. The importance of advertising can’t be understated. I think there’s a lot of value there, and for any author, any publisher that is considering, how do I how do I make my book more visible? What do I do? Bookshop is obviously a great place to do that. So thanks for coming on the show.

Daniel Berkowitz
Of course. Thanks so much again for having me.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, where can people follow what you’re doing online? Where can they learn more, not just about Bookshop, but about the work that you’re doing with with your AuthorPop as well.

Daniel Berkowitz
Yeah, absolutely. You can always, you know, come check me out on LinkedIn. For AuthorPop, you can go to authorpop.co to find out more information about that. And for Bookshop, just head to the bookshop website, browse around, sign up for email lists. You’ll be very happy with it.

Joshua Tallent
Awesome. Well, that’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating in Apple Podcast or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And we also appreciate it when you share the podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.