I'd like your input on what you'd like from a (possible!) new book on marketing libraries...

I’ve decided to avoid a long introduction and get straight to the point: I’d love your feedback on what a book about library marketing should contain. Here’s the form. For those interested, I’ve put the context below the embed!

I wrote The Library Marketing Toolkit in 2010, and it was published in 2011. It went incredibly well considering my relative inexperience at that time, and has become one of Facet Publishing’s best selling books ever.

However. It’s 13 years old now. That is SUCH a long time in library terms, in marketing terms, in life terms. I love the case studies in the book, but there’s not a single word of my parts I’d keep the same - it’s not that I disagree with my past self as such, I’ve just learned so much more about marketing in the intervening period. I’ve done so much marketing myself, and worked with literally hundreds of libraries on theirs - so I’d say different things if I were writing it today.

So perhaps the time is right to create a new marketing book, and before I get too far down the road with planning I wanted to get some feedback from the library road - hence the form above. If you take the time to fill in the form, or share it or this post with your networks, I’ll be really grateful. Cheers!

It's 10 years since The Library Marketing Toolkit was published!

It’s a summer of Tin anniversaries for me - first 10 years of freelancing, and now 10 years since my book, The Library Marketing Toolkit, was launched into the world on this very day in 2012.

Facet Publishing approached me in late 2010 about writing a book on marketing libraries. They were actively seeking to bring more ‘new professionals’ into their author-pool at the time, and I think I was a major beneficiary of that - I wasn’t nearly as qualified to write a book on this subject back then than I am now! Bethan Ruddock also wrote The New Professionals Toolkit over the same sort of time-period, and it was an exciting era for sure.

The timing was actually pretty tricky for me, because another thing that happened in 2010 was my daughter being born. When I was asked about writing the book I initially said ‘I would love to do this but I can’t do it this year’ and whilst Facet were very understanding, they did say that the book would be written by SOMEONE this year and they’d like it be me, but if it would happen without me if I couldn’t do it. So my wife and I talked about it and decided that for the doors it would open, writing a book would be a worthwhile short-term crisis to have… It was, just about, but I wouldn’t recommend having a new baby and a book to write to anyone, because if you’ve got a full-time job as I did then you’re writing at weekends and in the evenings, whilst trying to parent, and that is pretty brutal. Thank you so much to Alice for putting up with all the accommodations necessary to get the book done.

The sales figures

Books about libraries are niche. There are a handful of publishers, most selling books at VERY high prices in order to meet their costs, selling mainly to libraries and sometimes to librarians. The books don’t sell in large numbers; I was told that 300 would be a decent number to sell.

Mine turned out to be one of Facet’s best ever sellers, and the total sales figures after a decade are these: 2118 books sold, of which 1916 are paperbacks and 202 are ebooks. It continues to sell a handful of copies each year.

I took this screenshot when it reached number 1 in the Amazon.co.uk chart (and by chart I mean the super-specialist chart library-related books go into…); I had a similar one when it did the same thing in the US Amazon chart but I can’t find it now. I don’t mind telling you I was unashamedly thrilled about this!

Is this Windows XP? Either way it’s time-capsule of a screen-shot…

I didn’t keep a regular track on its chart position, but in 2013 it did briefly rise to number 17 in the overall (not just library-related, but all industries) chart for Public Relations, which was exciting…

The Open Access debate: does it harm sales? (Spoiler alert: no.)

One particular detail I find interesting, is what happened when I made chapters available Open Access. When I wrote the book in 2010/11, OA was not something I was aware of at all. Then as I was educated about it by my network on Twitter, I started to pester Facet about letting me make some or all of the Toolkit available Open Access. They were kind enough to let me make four chapters available OA: I know this isn’t the ideal scenario of the whole book but this was a new area to them with their policy still under development, and I really appreciated them being more flexible than saying either ‘no’ or ‘one chapter only’.

Anyway, up until 2015, the Toolkit sales had basically halved each year. It happened like clockwork - around 1,000 sales in the first year, around 500 in the second, around 250 in the third and so on. However, the year after I made the OA chapters available, sales didn’t halve, for the first time ever; in fact they stayed the same as the previous year.

Now, there is definitely correlation there - can we claim causation? Of course we can’t be completely sure - who knows what other factors were at play in book sales over the 12 months - but I see it as fairly compelling evidence that apart from being A Good Thing generally, OA can also lead to more book sales than would have been the case without it.

In addition to this of course, lots more people have read the OA chapters so more people see the work. At the time of writing, the most popular OA chapter from the Toolkit is the Strategic Marketing chapter, which has been downloaded 2,042 times, which is very close to the 2,118 book sales; between them the OA chapters have been downloaded over 4,000 times.

The writing process

Some stuff came very easily as I was writing - all the social media things for example - and other things required a lot more chipping away at to work properly. I showed the chapter on strategy to my friend Andy Priestner because I was really struggling with it. He gave me SUCH useful feedback, especially about the level of ambition the chapter was showing: essentially his point was (and my memory is genuinely abject so sorry if I’m misquoting you here Andy): if you’re going to get people to do strategic marketing, they need to aim higher than you’re suggesting in your chapter: they need to change user behaviour and that’s no small thing. This advice was so important, no just to the book but to my overall approach to marketing, and I still talk about ambition in marketing in the workshops I run today, 11 years later.

I have learned things about the way my brain works over time: one is that I have to get SOMETHING down and then make it good later, rather than trying to write well straight away. Whether it’s a presentation, an article, or even a whole book: some sort of draft - honestly, it can be any old nonsense - is needed before I can make sense of ideas and organise them. I then rewrite the rubbish draft, and then refine, refine, refine. So in I finished a draft and sent it off to Facet in December 2011, not in the hope that they’d like it but in order to have finished part 1 of the process - writing something down - so I could get on with part 2, writing something good.

At this point I started making major revisions, literally ditching entire chapters and restructuring whole sections of the book, and in the meantime Facet sent the 1st draft to Antony Brewerton, I think at my suggestion because I really admired his thoughts on libraries. He came back with a review of it, and quite honestly it was BRUTAL. There was nothing unkind about it and he was very encouraging, but he pointed some flaws I was all too aware of and it was savage to read it.

I just found it and reread it, 10 and a half years later, and it was still painful: my skin went hot and I think I probably went red, sat here at my PC in 2022 - it was so spot on as to the problems with the book. As well as pointing out stuff I already knew was a problem, he also had a huge number of constructive suggestions and drew attention to lots of things I didn’t know were problematic until he pointed them out.

In short, it was exactly what I needed. Some things I couldn’t change (Antony wanted to see more evidence of marketing campaigns I’d run, but at that stage I simply hadn’t led any!) but all the things I could change I did. In early 2012 between January 25 and February 20 I rewrote the book into the version that exists today.

If by any chance you’ve read the book and found it useful, thank Andy and Antony if you see them!

The publishing process

The publishing process itself was surprisingly painless. An early conversation with the publisher was about writing style - could I write in my own voice? The answer came back yes, very much so. I think this the only way I could have got through it, because I dislike academic writing intensely. The amount of great ideas that haven’t had the traction they should have in librarianship, because their authors have used the construct of academic writing to communicate, drives me mad.

Facet worked with me on the process of working out exactly what the book should be and the kinds of chapters it should contain. They were happy for me to either write it all or edit a volume of contributed chapters; I wanted a halfway house with case studies, which they were fine with. We agreed the deadline and wordcount, they supplied me with a style guide, and then largely left me to get on with it, rather than constantly checking on progress, which I hugely appreciated. They were really supportive when I needed support (especially Sarah Busby, the commissioning editor at the time), but didn’t micromanage anything.

I opted to pay for an indexer rather than to do the indexing myself - a decision I would highly recommend! They’re really good at it and by that stage of the process you are completely sick of your own work… It’s worth noting that while a publisher will do some marketing of your book, it’s really on you. If you want to sell copies, you need to put the work in to market it. So I set up a website for mine, I made a Slideshare presentation about it, it had its own twitter account. I really went for it, and that’s what you have to do to raise awareness and shift copies.

There were some great reviews, and the ones I loved were the ones which really got where I was coming from - not just telling people how to market their library, but trying to reassure them that they could. One review in the Australian Library Journal ended like this and really made my week:

“The whole book has a reassuring and inspiring tone: ideas and approaches outlined in the book appear absolutely achievable and commonsensical. I suggest that you buy, borrow or beg a copy today.”

The case studies

To be absolutely frank, there’s not a lot of my own writing in the book which I fully stand by now. It’s not that I disagree with past me, it’s that I’ve learned so much since that’s superseded what I wrote.

However what really holds up a decade later is the case studies. I could not believe the people who said yes to writing for my book! I am still honoured they did, and they wrote REALLY great stuff. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to this! They all did so for free (I actually negotiated my own royalties down in order to get them each a free copy of the book as payment) and I’m hugely grateful.

The follow-up…

I’ve been asked more than once to write a sequel to the book, and I have not done so. This is mainly because it was a huge amount of work, a sort of once-in-a-lifetime level of commitment.

I haven’t ruled out self-publishing a book though: the attraction would be I could sell it waaay cheaper, I could publish it on the timeline of my choosing, and make it the length I wanted rather than needing to achieve any sort of target. So if I ever write a follow-up, I’ll let you know.

If you’ve bought the Toolkit for yourself or your library, or read any of the OA chapters, then thank you! I hope it was useful.

Australia! I am in you in April, running some marketing workshops...

Phil Bradley always said you could travel the world on a library degree, and that seems to be coming truer and truer. 

In April I'm running some workshops on marketing libraries, in Australia. If this is a side of the information profession you're interested in, I'd love to see you there! The dates and cities are:

• April 20th: Melbourne
• April 22nd: Sydney
• April 24th: Brisbane

The training company who've asked me over to do these has put together a pretty comprehensive brochure detailing what we'll cover. You can see more info as well as booking details over on the PiCS site, and I've embedded the leaflet below.

Marketing Your Library Service workshop details

The key to good marketing is to promote one thing at a time

If you've got a great idea, don't dilute it. Simplicity results in better traction for your idea. You need to give people one idea at a time, so they can grab onto it, digest it, and see how it relates to them. Not only that, but the simpler the idea, the more likely it is for people to share and pass it on. Think about the really successful online writers, like Seth Godin. He's made a career out of taking single concepts, focusing on them one at a time, and getting a bajillion hits to his blog as a result. Once people buy into his one-key-thing-at-a-time approach to ideas, they're then more likely to buy into him as a concept, and push his (more complex) books up the best-seller charts.

So, keeping things simple isn't dumbing down. It's providing people with an easy way-in. That's just good marketing. Much of marketing is to simply get people in the door - THEN you can give them a whole variety of reasons to say inside.

Most of the readers of this blog work in the information profession, like I do. This means we have a complex sell. Library services are myriad, but your promotion must be in bite-sized chunks. Libraries are complicated, but your marketing must not be. The secret to good communication is to market one thing at a time.

Here's an example of a poster promoting a library. In theory, it ought to be good. It looks okay, uses a nice font. But more importantly, it tells you about all sorts of amazing library services! What's not to like? How you can resist this?

But actually, this poster doesn't work. There's too much going on, it does not provide an easy way in. You're relying on people grabbing on to the part that relates to them, and then taking an action (coming to the Library) because of it - in most cases, that's too big a leap of faith. You're much better off dividing that list up into individual posters, and putting them in the most relevant areas for their specific target groups. So for example this message, even though it's only one useful thing instead of many useful things, is a much more powerful piece of marketing:

Then you make ANOTHER poster to cover another aspect of the original:

Or you can take multiple concepts but tie them together into one easily-digestible, relate-able, shareable package:

Finally, if you really want to put several library services into the same piece of promotion, you can do this and STILL have the one simple message for people to take away. In the example below, you're saying to people that the library is a welcoming place, that they can come in and use the wifi and enjoy the cafe, without being judged for not using the books and journals. But you're also listing all the other things they MIGHT do if they so desire. As I said above, much of marketing is to simply get people in the door - then you can give them a whole variety of reasons to say inside.

So remember, keep it simple. Market one thing at a time. It WILL yield tangible results.

(All of these posters are available on my Flickr account via an Attribution Creative Commons licence. Note that it's NOT a 'no-derivs' or 'non-commercial' license - in other words if you can find a use for these ideas, but want to change and adapt them to your own purposes, feel free to do so.)

Marketing Libraries: What the not-for-profits can learn from the lots-of-profits!

A couple of weeks ago I presented a webinar for WebJunction on marketing libraries. Part 1 of this post is all the information from the presentation, including a video archive of it, and Part 2 is about the process of presenting in a webinar, for anyone interested in that side of things.

Part 1: Marketing Libraries

The webinar covered marketing principles (several ways to start thinking like a library marketer) - and marketing actions (ways to communicate including Word of Mouth, the website, social media etc). There are various ways you can access the content.

If you want a brief overview:

Here are the slides, with a couple of bits of info added in so they make sense without me talking over the top of them.

Marketing Libraries: What the not-for-profits can learn from the lots-of-profits! from Ned Potter

If you want the full detail:

You can view the full Archive (combined archive of audio, chat, and slides) - this requires JAVA and is a bit more technically complicated than the options above and below, but you get the full experience of the slides, me narrating them in real time, and the chat happening in real time, where you'll find lots of good ideas.

If you want a version you can watch on any device:

Here is the YouTube vid of the webinar - the good thing is you can watch this on a phone etc, the downside is some key points are missed where it skips or the live-streaming briefly went down, and it's hard to read the chat that added so much to the presentation. (You can, however, download the  chat (xls) to read in Excel as you go along.)

When I get a bit of time I'm going to break this down into smaller videos on each topic.

Part 2: Presenting a Webinar

Presenting a webinar is an inherently odd experience because you can't see the faces and responses of your audience. I rely on this a lot to know what is working and what isn't - a presentation is all about communication, after all. Not only that but it's a much bigger audience than for a normal talk - there was nearly 600 people watching this as it happened.

Above is what my desk looked like - iPad to monitor tweetstream (which I didn't have the wherewithall to actually do), landline phone to speak into (I had it pressed against my ear for the first half hour before realising there was nothing to actually hear), G&T to drink (later decanted into a glass with ice, don't worry), iPhone to live-tweet pre-written draft tweets from (it was too stressful to do this well, so I sort of tweeted them in clumsy groups), PC to present from and clock to keep to time by.

I asked for some advice on Twitter about what makes a good webinar - much of it was about good presenting generally, but the web-specific stuff centered around making it as interactive as possible (the technology limited how much I could do this, but I tried...) and giving people time to catch up (I think I pretty much failed to do this). Very useful advice from Jennifer at Web Junction included not putting any animations on the slides because these don't render well in the webinar environment (if I wanted stuff to appear on a slide as I went along, I made two versions of the slide and moved between them). The particular platform we used meant I had to dial in with a phone - a PHONE! - and talk into that whilst manipulating the slides, that was very strange. I had a practice run the night before and I'm glad I did - in essence I found out I just cannot present sitting down, I need the energy that comes from pacing around, so I ended up using my slide-clicker so I could wonder about my house without having to be too close to the PC... The downside to this is I couldn't monitor the chat nearly as well as I wanted to, to respond to questions, because I often wasn't close enough to read the small text.

This was the first time I'd done one of these solo - previous webinar experience had been as part of a panel. As is often the case, as soon as I've done something properly and learned how it works, I want to do it again but much improved based on what I now know. So I'm hoping to work with WebJunction again next year (I find their site a really useful source of information and expert opinion). But the feedback from this one was great, some really nice comments in the chat and even a reference to my accent via private message...

I enjoyed this whole thing, and clearly live-streaming and web-based events are going to be more and more important. They're very convenient for attendees, less so for presenters (I had to banish my family upstairs for example!) but I did get to wear shorts for a presentation for the first time, and even drink Gin & Tonic during it, and that was ace.