St. Martin's Builds Buzz

New York — Book publishers face numerous challenges in today’s marketplace. There are fewer brick-and-mortar bookstores, less shelf space, less titles going into alternative channels, more competition from e-books, challenges of getting mobile-optimized and dynamic pricing online, to name a few.“At the same time, there are more opportunities than ever to reach consumers through social media and content marketing and so much more data available to target and reach consumers in more meaningful ways,” says Jeff Dodes, executive vice president of marketing at New York-based publisher St. Martin’s Press.For the summer 2016 U.S. debut of “Behind Closed Doors” – a psychological thriller that was unknown stateside – St. Martin’s Press teamed up with New York-based agency SheSpeaks for their first launch together.St. Martin’s pursued a deep influencer and digital effort to create consumer buzz quickly. “Behind Closed Doors” was published in the United Kingdom in January 2015, then acquired by St. Martin’s in February 2016 for a publishing date six months later.SheSpeaks ensured an organized burst of activity across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter just before publication. The activity worked in tandem with “a major organic social media campaign” executed by St. Martin’s during the summer months, Dodes says.St. Martin’s first gave SheSpeaks a specific demographic profile of the targeted readers for “Behind Closed Doors,” and then the agency looked at bloggers within its network who reach that profile. For the most part, the book was targeting mothers and women who read popular thrillers such as British author Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl on the Train.”In April, St. Martin’s gave away 5,000 copies of “Behind Closed Doors” to targeted readers on Facebook and suggested how to share and spread the word about the book. SheSpeaks layered on top of that by sending out 450 books to influencers in the summer and included an “instructional bookmark” inside each book that doled out social media guidelines and a checklist to help them execute. The mom bloggers wrote book reviews, filmed videos and posted social conversations around the #BehindClosedDoors hashtag. In addition, SheSpeaks launched a Twitter Party on the actual release date of the book with its influencers and the author of the book, B.A. Paris. St. Martin’s added to the conversation with its own social media push, advertising on Facebook, targeted programming on Hulu, a print ad inside People magazine, sponsored content advertorials on Popsugar.com and Bustle.com, and “strong promotional support from independent bookshops, Barnes & Noble and Amazon,” says Dodes.The influencers generated 109 million impressions and reached more than 14 million people, according to SheSpeaks. More than 40 influencers wrote blog posts in early August to garner 271,000 unique visitors. More than 220 reviews were cast by SheSpeaks members on Amazon, Goodreads and the SheSpeaks website. The Twitter Party reached more than 3.4 million people and drove more than 95 million impressions.“Everything integrated seamlessly,” Dodes says. “We had the right book at the right time with the right campaign to drive it. That doesn’t happen often. The toughest part is the timing. When you release the book, there are so many factors involved that make it unpredictable. In this case, the ‘stars aligned.’”St. Martin’s Press has launched campaigns larger in scale than the effort for “Behind Closed Doors,” but Dodes says what makes the campaign unique is “how directly we can attribute our social media campaign in concert with SheSpeaks activities to the success of the book.”Dodes says the campaign helped get “Behind Closed Doors” on the printed New York Times “Best Sellers” list for four weeks. It continues to sell well several months after publication. “Those are the kinds of results we are looking for,” Dodes says.

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