As I’ve written my business plan for Army Ant Publishing, I’ve done extensive research on the world of publishing. Here is an article I found useful:

Make Marketing a Core Business Strategy by Chip Conley and Eric Friedenwald-Fishman via PMA.

There’s an awful lot of ignorance in the world of business about what marketing is all about. There are two reasons for this. First of all, marketing professionals have done a terrible job of defining their field, and have allowed hucksters and gurus to appropriate the word as a snazzy synonym for “sales.” Second, marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses many different activities that are only really related in the regard that they end with the customer. Thus someone who works in marketing might work in sales or advertising, but they might also work in product development, or marketing research, or public relations, or another similar field.

Thus when many small publishers hear the word “marketing,” they immediately begin to fear the costs and scope associated with some elements of marketing (such as advertising and promotions) and put off developing a marketing strategy for their products. Sadly, their misunderstanding of the word prevents them from laying an important foundation in their business.

Today’s article does a great job of explaining things.

Many people use the word marketing to refer to a broad set of promotional and outreach activities aimed at communicating a business proposition to customers and other important audiences. These activities often include advertising, media relations, direct mail, promotional offers, online promotions, sales materials, and various tactics. While all these are important, we are focusing here on marketing strategy.

Strategic marketing involves acquiring a deep understanding of the needs and desires of your existing and potential customers, and designing your business (products, services, delivery mechanisms, customer experience, branding, outreach, and more) to meet or exceed their needs and desires. At its core, good strategic marketing can be deeply aligned with building a socially responsible business because it demands a constant focus on the customer’s needs, drives development of quality products and services, and often encourages alignment with customer values.

Thus, marketing is a core business strategy. Think about it as a baseline of business development and ensure that marketing-based questions and analyses are present and utilized in all business planning processes. Instead of mapping out the product concept, price point, and manufacturing and distribution plan, and then asking, “How will we sell it?” ask, “How do we design the product concept, set the price, and so on to best meet the needs of the market?”

As I’ve said in my “Marketing 101″ articles, marketing is often thought of as being divided into four fields: price, promotion, product and distribution. There’s an awful lot of talk about target markets, secondary markets, and other stuff like that. But really, the whole thing can be summed up in three words: understand the customer.

So a practical marketing strategy is just a simple document that explains who the customer is, what the company is doing to meet the customer’s needs, and how the company plans to make the customer aware of its product. In publishing, this can be an easy thing to do if you begin with a customer-oriented product, like a how-to manual or a cookbook. But it can be an extremely difficult thing to do if you’re starting with a creator-oriented product, like a line of novels or a book of poems. It’s hard to classify the customers as having a need beyond “entertainment” with these products, and really, the reason they’re developed in the first place is because the author is interested in telling a story, not because anyone is demanding to hear it.

Different products require different types of strategies, but the article is quick to point out that there is a difference between marketing tasks and marketing tactics. The former are part of product development, while the latter are “tricks” geared at selling more products. Marketing tasks make an excellent foundation for a product line and will guarantee better sales in the long run; marketing tactics are intended to boost sales regardless of quality and are often put into use when a publisher needs to move its books quickly to cover the costs of a print run. If you’ve worked for a company that has a failing product, you’ve probably heard this line of thinking before — “Product X isn’t selling. We need to figure out a way to move it.”

But no matter how much time a publisher invests into these tactics, the company is more often than not wasting its time and money without a well-developed strategy. There are companies that know how to consistently generate great sales because they are in tune with their customers. And then there are companies that seem to “win the lottery” from time to time and lose money on everything else. This is because they are focused on their products, not their customers.

Many marketers do not maximize and leverage resources because they invest in marketing tactics before establishing a marketing strategy. Focusing on an ad, media release, brochure, Web site, or other promotional tactic before identifying your priority audience and your core value proposition creates waste, inefficiency, and missed opportunities, just as would purchasing Sheetrock, pipes, and windows prior to developing a design concept and blueprint for your home.

I recommend reading the rest of this article; it’s loaded with plenty of good ideas and principles. In the meantime, let me close with an analogy that publishers will hopefully be able to relate to.

Joe owns a factory that makes ladies’ straw hats designed to keep the sun off a woman’s neck and shoulders while she’s outside. Larry is his competitor, with a similar factory that makes similar products. Both companies sell their hats to a chain of touristy stores along the beach. Joe wants to corner the market to keep Larry from expanding, so he makes several attempts to one-up his rival.

• First, Joe tries to improve the quality of his hats, but he can’t really do that without making his costs go up, which will raise the price of his hats and put him out of business. So he abandons that line of thinking.
• Next, Joe looks for a way to lower the retail price of the hats, but he’ll only be able to lower them by about a dollar per hat, which will cut heavily into his profits without making a big difference in his sales. Plus, Larry will continue selling hats for slightly more, which means he’ll make more money. So Joe abandons that line of thinking.
• Next, Joe looks into setting up a hat stand on the beach where he can sell hats directly to tourists for a larger profit that he’s getting through the retail stores. But the stand will cost a lot to set up and staff, and besides, people walking along the beach don’t carry a lot of money with them. The stand will be lucky to break even. So Joe abandons that line of thinking.
• Finally, Joe decides to ask some customers what they would like to see in a straw hat, and he is surprised to find that they want hats that won’t blow off their heads when the wind gusts across the beach. The problem can be solved with a simple strap that only costs a few pennies to add in.

Joe listens to the customers and adds the strap. Within a month, his hat sales begin to double, and Joe soon finds out that Larry is scrambling to figure out why his own sales are dropping. Joe has scored a marketing victory.

But the straps are uncomfortable and not very stylish, so Joe decides to take advantage of the situation by introducing a new product — a smaller, more stylish hat that is designed to stay on a woman’s head without needing to be anchored to her chin. The hats are well-designed, and they look nice. But no matter what Joe tries, they simply will not sell. He finally asks some customers why and finds out that they don’t want hats that are small or stylish — they want hats that will keep the sun off their neck and shoulders. Thus in his zeal to improve the product, Joe has forgotten about the customer, and he has lost the ground he gained.

I’ve noticed many companies going through this sort of cycle. What’s sad is that they never seem to learn their lesson — that the basic rule of marketing is to always, always understand the customer. And so they gain ground with their successes, and lose ground with their failures, and always because they listen to the customer out of desperation… not out of habit.

Everyone knows the saying that “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” And yet all of us do. While some of us will make exceptions when we’re hunting for a specific title or author, most of the time, the cover is the first thing we use to judge whether or not we’re even interested in picking up a book. But believe it or not, it’s not just the artwork on the cover that affects our decision; it’s also the little details that our mind picks up subconsciously.

I love the way today’s article gets right to the point:

Did you know it costs just as much money to create a bad cover as a good one? Or that you can make a great cover mediocre with a few small changes? Even an award-winning image can fall flat if it’s paired with a poor font choice, or manipulated in a way that distracts from the overall impression the cover was intended to convey.

The author of the article goes on to explain that there are really two things wrong with most covers: the use of images, and the use of fonts. I certainly agree with the former; indy publishers often overreach, trying to cram complicated photographs or artwork onto covers when they really just need something simple and iconic. Trade publishers, on the other hand, often go so minimalist with their weird cookie-cutter designs that they set a bad example for the rest of the industry. A book cover should offer a teaser of what’s inside without giving away the surprise. It should entice, and nothing more. But too often, book covers seem to be trying to tell a story of their own. In the realm of fantasy and sci-fi books, the covers often don’t even match their respective stories.

I like what the author of this article has to say about images.

Many things can contribute to a poor cover design, but most of them stem from simple lack of knowledge. The most common mistake may be using an image that doesn’t properly demonstrate what the book is about. Remember, your book is selling the solution, not the problem. If you’re publishing a diet book, you’re selling fitness and slimness, so do not put an obese person on the cover. If your book is about raising a happy baby, do not display a picture of a crying toddler.

If there’s no way to illustrate your solution, then use a text-only cover or one with an abstract background that provides graphic detail but without any feature photo or illustration. Plenty of bestsellers have no images on them. And fight the urge to illustrate a word in the title improperly. If your book is called A Blueprint for Happiness, do not put the blueprints for a house on the cover. Your book is not about building houses.

Another mistake is what I call image desperation. Either no suitable images are available, or a publisher whose budget is too small to pay for an image decides to make do with free artwork. It’s never okay to put a typewriter on a guide for modern writers. Likewise, don’t use a photo of tattered old leather-bound books on a manual for publishers (except, perhaps, if it has a significant amount of material on using antiquarian books or library resources for research).

Then there’s the cliché. Puzzle pieces, chess pieces, and light bulbs have pretty much been done to death. Unless you’re confident that you’ve thought of a completely fresh way to handle these common images, don’t go there. The paper in the typewriter, the close-up of the keyboard, the giant calligrapher’s pen—they’ve all had their day too. Let them rest in peace. One of the worst examples of the cliché mistake that I’ve seen was on a business strategy book. Its cover featured a photo of a chess piece—the pawn.

This is all common sense sort of stuff, but what often happens to indy publishers is that they plan the cover on their own as an afterthought, or they hire an “artist” to mock up a cover instead of a professional designer. That’s fine, if the publisher can pull it off; it’s just one of many ways publishers can cut corners on costs. But if the cover fails the grab the reader’s attention, or in fact repels readers, the publisher has failed to do his or her most fundamental marketing duty: to package the book properly.

The second area of offense, fonts, is a little less obvious to most people. Part of the problem is that most of today’s computer users don’t know anything about the various font families that have been used in typesetting for decades, nor do they know that in print, a serif font should be used for regular type while a sans-serif font should be used for titles and headlines. They might not even know what a serif is. I’ve seen covers where the designer has used five or six different fonts on a single side. It looks atrocious, and while most consumers might not think “Ooh, these fonts are all wrong; I’m not going to buy this,” they will often, on some subconscious level, realize that something is wrong.

The author of the article addresses this as well:

But it’s not just images and fonts that are important. It’s the details and way they are handled that give a cover that polished, professional look.

Problem areas frequently include font selections and kerning (the space between letters). Inexperienced designers often leave too much space between letters, or make spacing uneven. As a general rule, tamper with default kerning only if type is 18 points or bigger, and make sure you or your designer uses the proper software, such as Illustrator, InDesign, Quark. or PageMaker, for laying out the full spread. PhotoShop should be reserved for image manipulation or creating the title and front cover. It is not designed to lay out small text blocks.

As for fonts, it’s rarely a good idea to mix one typeface with another of the same style (script, sans serif, serif). If you want to use a script font for the title, then find a serif or sans-serif font that goes well with it, instead of using another script font. And avoid inappropriate and trendy fonts. Comic Sans has no business on a book cover, and Papyrus, while it is popular, is now being overused.

One thing that’s not noted in this article, but worth mentioning all the same, is that many computers’ pre-installed fonts are not in the public domain, and you are actually supposed to pay a royalty for using them in commercial design by either purchasing the font license from the creator of the file or by paying a usage fee. The Microsoft standard fonts (Times New Roman, Verdana, Arial) are permitted for commercial use, as are many of the fonts used in open source projects like Linux. If you are unsure of whether or not you are permitted to use a font in your design, contact the creator of the font for more information. Alternately, if you work with a professional designer, he or she will more than likely own the license to a large library of fonts and will be able to find you a close approximate.

If you want to see some good examples of cover design, check out the Book Cover Express website. The folks at that company also run a Book Cover Design blog that’s loaded with good, technical information.