In today’s fast-paced and highly saturated publishing environment, a book’s success is often dependent on a creative and ambitious marketing endeavor. Professionals representing a variety of publishing markets will present case studies on real marketing campaigns that helped their books find success in today’s crowded market. Panelists will explore the goals and strategies driving their campaigns, challenges faced, and how each campaign helped effectively bring its book to the people who matter most — readers. This luncheon is a great opportunity for authors, editors, publishers, and fellow marketing and publicity professionals to learn about successful marketing campaigns and gain inspiration for new ways to promote their own content.

Presenters

Vanessa Wright is currently a senior publicist at Llewellyn Publications. She has previously worked as an acquisitions editor for Llewellyn and was a bookseller and manager with Barnes and Noble for over five years. Vanessa will be focusing on the importance of making it personal in a successful publicity campaign. Her presentation will focus on an especially successful campaign that thrived because of the personalization behind her outreach. And the importance of making it personal in publicity also extends to relationships with clients and authors. These personal touches allow a successful publicity campaign to rise above the basic steps of creating a publicity plan, selecting a media list, and sending out a press release. While these steps might help a publicist stay organized, the practice of making it personal will help her land the hard-hitting media outlets that every publicist dreams of scoring for her clients. After a twenty-plus year career in the music business,

Steve Roth switched media formats and began working for The Quarto Group in 2011 (then known as Quayside Publishing). Steve is a senior marketing manager, creating marketing and publicity campaigns for books on gardening, rural living, travel, and pop culture. Originally from the east coast, Steve has lived in the Twin Cities area since 1994. Steve will cover the now year-plus campaign for the Cool Springs Press title She Sheds: A Room of Your Own, published January 15, 2017. He will focus on the ways a very traditional marketing campaign can still be effective when executed properly, coupled with the timeliness and trendiness of the book’s subject and great content. Steve will also discuss how to lead a successful marketing campaign, even when the author does not have a strong social media footprint. The success of the She Sheds campaign continues in 2018 as a backlist title with more upcoming national media — building the author’s brand, launching a new product line, and setting up her next book, due out in fall 2018.

Dan Verdick is the director of national sales for Baker & Taylor Publisher Services, the distribution arm of the global wholesaler. Dan has worked extensively in publicity, marketing, and sales in his publishing career, and his marketing successes include booking authors on many of the biggest media outlets in the market, including CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, USA Today, and more. Dan’s presentation will cover a couple of the lead nonfiction title campaigns he led for IB Tauris, a publisher client based in the UK working to break into the US market. Themes will include: What — and when — is a marketing plan? Basic rules to live by when marketing a book, and why killer cop y— and the right copy — is more important than ever.