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Do We Need a Completely New Approach to Marketing Books?

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Part 1 of an exclusive Designers & Books survey

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Today we’re pleased to publish the first in a series of articles that we hope will evolve into an ongoing forum for discussing best practices, creative thinking, and innovative approaches to marketing books.

The impetus for this initiative comes from comments Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle made at the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair. In his keynote address, Dohle was optimistic about the state of the global book business, maintaining that the industry was “doing better now than it has been for the past 50 years, and perhaps even since its inception, and that was some 500 years ago.”

At the same time, though, he did, in his words, “pour a little cold water on the subject” when he identified various challenges he felt book publishers, sellers, and authors needed to address. Key among them was this: “We need a completely new approach to marketing books.”

Now, with the start of a new decade, we’ve decided to try to understand what members of the publishing community took away from Mr. Dohle’s comment about marketing two years ago and get a read on their current thinking.

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