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MIA0010.1177/1329878X18783008Media International AustraliaNolan and Dane

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Media International Australia

A sharper conversation: book 2018, Vol. 168(1) 153­–166

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DOI: 10.1177/1329878X18783008
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marketing in the age of the journals.sagepub.com/home/mia

algorithm

Sybil Nolan
The University of Melbourne, Australia

Alexandra Dane
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Abstract
This article explores developments in book publishers’ use of social media (SM) as a marketing
tool, particularly the rise of customer-focused marketing. Surveying the literature about publishers’
engagement with SM marketing (SMM), we argue that discourse modes of publishers’ SM practice,
and the larger marketing ecologies of which this practice forms a part, have been transformed
by contextual changes in the mediascape wherein publishing professionals are implicated through
their sustained SMM activities. These changes include the rise of algorithmic filtering and paid-
for content on Facebook and Twitter, industry’s embrace of data analytics, and the connection
between them. The article explores the growing divide between small and large publishers in
terms of their financial and cultural investment in data analytics, and concludes that the notion
of SM as an equal-opportunity marketing tool in book publishing has proven demonstrably false
because of this divide. The authors offer further avenues for much-needed research in this field.

Keywords
big data, book publishing, Facebook, online marketing, social media marketing, social media,
Twitter

Introduction
Social media marketing (SMM) emerged as a distinct subfield of marketing circa 2008, as the
advent of the smartphone confirmed the potential ubiquity of social media (SM) platforms such as
Facebook (FB) and Twitter. Since then, SMM has established itself as a dominant pillar of

Corresponding author:
Sybil Nolan, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Melbourne, VIC, 3010, Australia.
Email: sybil.nolan@unimelb.edu.au
154 Media International Australia 168(1)

contemporary marketing practice, thanks largely to the parallel rise of data analytics which enable
the targeted use of SM data collected in real time or over significant periods. Lev Manovich sees
these post-Web 2.0 developments as a distinct new era in the history of media technologies, ‘the
stage of media analytics’ (Manovich, 2018); marketers call it ‘the age of the customer’ (Dempster
and Lee, 2015: 2). Both definitions are instructive. As SM has been more deeply integrated with
data analytics, it has evolved into a major disrupter and force for innovation in business and indus-
try across the global economy. Government departments, retailers and hard-hat industries such as
mining, are all part of a ‘second wave’ of SM disruption driven by the application of analytics
(McCosker, 2017: 123).
This article explores this period of SM disruption within one of the oldest media and communi-
cation industries: book publishing. It does so through a survey of the literature on book publishers’
use of SM as a marketing tool. Looking at the field from 2009 to the present, it charts the changing
nature of SM marketing and online community building in book publishing, from the early days of
publishers’ Twitter accounts to the nuanced data-rich interactions between large publishing con-
glomerates and fans on FB which represent the contemporary reality. Focusing on the ‘trade’ sector
of the Australian publishing industry (the sector providing books for general readers), its research
draws from and speaks to the experience of Anglophone publishing more broadly.
This study, while set against the context of the sweeping changes described above, is also
grounded in the well-established professional discourses of book publishing, a highly traditional
industry with an entrenched philosophy of the distinct roles of author, publisher and reader – nota-
bly the centrality of authors and publishers in determining the economic and symbolic value of the
work, and the reader’s correspondingly marginal status as bookshop customer. Over the past dec-
ade or so, the industry has been forced to amend its traditional charts of relations, and draw readers
directly into the field of literary production as authors, tastemakers and direct customers (Driscoll,
2014; Kist, 2009; Lloyd, 2008; Purcell, 2011; Tian and Martin, 2010; Ray Murray and Squires,
2013; Squires, 2007, 2017). As this article shows, readers’ labour has played an increasingly sig-
nificant role in publishing operations, particularly in marketing. Publishers have been hungry for
readers’ insights and voluntary enterprise in promoting books they have read and enjoyed. Yet
despite the substantial evidence of readers’ widening impact on the industry, traditional book pub-
lishing has struggled with the notion that ‘we [are] all cultural intermediaries now’ (Smith Maguire
and Matthews, 2012: 551). Professionals who have spent decades in publishing know through their
own lived experience the years and funds that must be expended to accumulate the networks and
expertise required within the traditional industry to produce the symbolic value of the book
(Bourdieu, 1993: 36–37).
An eminent American publisher summarising the role during his career says that ‘publishers
have been primarily arbiters: arbiters of taste, which generally reflected their own predilections and
passions, arbiters of presentation, … arbiters of edition and price – how many copies it would be
safe to print and at what price point a copy could be prudently and profitably sold’ (Godine, 2011).
Australian publisher Michael Heyward says evocatively, ‘We are a tribe, practising our arcane arts,
pursuing our wobbly economics’ (Heyward, 2016). Their comments indicate how strong tradi-
tional publishing’s professional identity is, and how steeped in the mystique of interdependent
business and literary judgement. While both men represent successful independent publishers
rather than the multinational corporations, they also embody and evince the industry’s historical
view of the publisher’s role.
The attitudes of traditional publishers towards SM’s place in book publishing, particularly in its
contemporary imbrication with data analytics, are thus relevant to the industry’s approaches to SM,
and consequential for publishing organisations’ choices about how to approach book marketing.
Just as significant is the related question of the organisations’ ability or willingness to resource SM
Nolan and Dane 155

activity. As we discuss below, the literature reveals an increasing divide between larger companies,
particularly multinationals, which are pouring human and financial resources into SM marketing
and data analytics, and smaller ones unable to match them. For these reasons, investigating
Australian publishers’ use of SMM is important to understanding the forces shaping our publishing
industry in the post-digital era.
With more than 56 million sales of consumer titles in 2015, and a total revenue of about $1.6 bil-
lion across both consumer and education publishing (Zwar, 2016: 1), the industry is a significant
cultural and economic resource in Australian national life. Not surprisingly, given the rise of
e-books and the bookshop closures that followed the global financial crisis, much of the recent
scholarship about disruptive technologies in the Australian book industry has focused more on
changes to markets for books (Zwar, 2016: 1), than changes to book marketing itself. The canoni-
cal research on SM marketing originates in media studies, business studies, the science of market-
ing, and digital sociology. In this article, we adopt Anthony McCosker’s (2017) arguments from
media studies that there have been two distinct temporal waves of SM disruption of industry, and
frame our account of changes in SM marketing in book publishing accordingly. As McCosker
argues, organisations and media workers are ‘implicated in’ and contribute to the development of
affordances of the platforms they use (125). Book marketing practice and culture reflect but also
influence the platforms on which this work is performed, and these platforms in turn reflect and
influence book marketing practice and culture. Our account analyses both incremental and dia-
chronic changes in SMM in the book industry, since both have produced the reality of contempo-
rary publishing industry practice and its apparently problematic future.

From first to second wave

Even before the launch of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader (2007) and Apple’s iPhone (2008 in
Australia), marketing scholars had published research showing that customer reviews on Amazon.
com and Barnesandnoble.com appeared to influence book sales (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006).
Although Australian trade publishers were deeply concerned about Amazon at that time, they
were still heavily dependent on their traditional market model – publishers as wholesalers, with
sales mainly made in traditional physical book formats by bricks-and-mortar retailers. The early
Web 2.0 era presented them with multiple opportunities and threats from new technologies: the advent
of Nielsen BookScan, which provided publishers for the first time with comparable, up-to-date
hard data about book sales and the performance of sales channels; the rise of sophisticated sales
and distribution software which greatly improved supply and distribution of stock to bookstores,
but prompted major reform of existing warehouse arrangements; and the apparent threat posed by
Google’s announcement in 2004 of its plans to scan millions of volumes held by university and
public libraries and make them available through Google Books (Donoughue, 2006: 12–13;
Hutchinson, 2005: 48–50; Webster, 2005: 81–85).
Against this background, traditional book publishers were, perhaps understandably, relatively
slow to embrace the social networking sites (SNS) that emerged as public platforms in the mid-
2000s. This is reflected in the professional literature of the era. The fourth edition of the standard
text How to Market Books concentrated on the usefulness of websites, blogs and email as market-
ing tools, while noting briefly the potential of social networking for ‘viral marketing’ (Baverstock,
2008: 154, 271, 311).
Most established Australian publishers joined Twitter in 2009 (including, but not limited to, Penguin
Books Australia, Pan Macmillan, Text Publishing, Hardie Grant Books, Scribe Publications, and
Melbourne University Publishing). A similar rush occurred in Britain (Thoring, 2011) and even in the
home of the new platforms, the United States (Teicher, 2009). Publisher interest was apparently piqued
156 Media International Australia 168(1)

by a report released in March 2009 by Nielsen that showed massive growth in the number of SM
accounts and consumer time spent on social networks: SM use now outstripped email use.
Nielsen’s report emphasised that advertising was anathema to SM users – ‘advertising on a
social network is like gate-crashing a party’ – and that social networking was about conversations
and community-building controlled by users themselves (Nielsen, 2009: 5; Crawford, 2009: 530–
531). The report also offered publishers a way of engaging readers: ‘fan sites or sponsored groups
are, perhaps, one of the more successful examples of social network marketing that touch on the
principles of interactivity and adding value – such as offers, sneak previews and co-creation of
content’ (Nielsen, 2009: 6).
FB was already by far the largest SNS (Nielsen, 2009: 2), and home to many sponsored groups.
Twitter was an idiosyncratic community of clued-in individuals more or less resistant to advertis-
ing. ‘Abandon all thoughts of Twitter being a professional marketing tool’, one SM expert advised
(Brogan, 2010: 99). Twitter’s creators gave users control over their own timelines (Crawford,
2009: 526), and also restricted flagrant advertising in the Twitter feed (Quin, 2015; Thoring, 2011:
143; Twitter Blog, 2013).
In retrospect, book publishers’ strong embrace of Twitter appears highly significant. Through its
community-building affordance, this SNS seemed to offer the opportunity both for broadcasting
and more intimate messaging with publishing and literary insiders. Publishers constructed their
own communities by choosing whom they followed and retweeted.1 These communities were vis-
ible to their members; essentially Twitter embodiments of actual literary and publishing fields
(Driscoll, 2013: 104–105). The publishers surrendered none of their traditional role as arbiters of
literary fashions and tastes; on Twitter they were in control of the message, and able to maintain
what Crawford (2009) dubbed ‘engagement-at-arm’s-length’ (p. 531).
Anne Thoring’s (2011) study, an early content analysis of British publishers’ activity on Twitter,
is a foundational text for understanding the way publishers used this SM tool during the first wave
of SM disruption. She found that by 2010 the community-building function of Twitter was well
understood by publishers, especially by small and medium-sized houses. The discourse mode in
her sample of 462 tweets collected from 10 publishing houses for a single month that year was
conversational: inclusive, interactive, and avoiding the blatantly promotional. Only 44% of the
tweets analysed related directly to books and/or authors associated with the tweeter’s list. Indirect
promotions, such as giveaways, competitions and games, and tweets about writers’ festivals, made
up 24% of the sample. Remarkably, 29% of all tweets were unrelated to publishing, and apparently
designed to ‘humanize the company’. This reflected the participatory and collaborative ethos of
SM marketing, according to Thoring (2011: 142). With hindsight, if the incidence of publishing-
unrelated tweets was indeed so high, then publishers brought unusual levels of improvisation and
even perhaps play to their first attempts at SMM.
Thoring dubbed medium-sized publishers Twitter ‘precursors’, because they joined not only
tweeted often but also interacted with their followers in a conversational way. Her study suggested
that medium-sized and small publishers were less likely than large ones to use Twitter for naked
advertisement, more actively engaged in retweeting and more likely to tweet outside business
hours. Large publishers could gain hundreds of followers by tweeting often, without following fol-
lowers back and/or conversing much with followers.
However, sample size was a significant limitation of Thoring’s study, particularly in relation to
the subsample of large publishers, which consisted of only two. Six years later, Melina Hughes
(2017) followed up, analysing the Twitter use of 60 US publishers and imprints over a 2-week
period. Her research, conducted at Portland State University, Oregon, suggests that a transforma-
tion had occurred in the way publishers use Twitter as a brand-building and reader outreach tool.
By 2017, large publishing houses consistently had the most followers and were also the
Nolan and Dane 157

most frequent tweeters. Almost all the publishers sampled demonstrated important features of
‘best-practice’ for SM marketing: tweeting more often than Thoring’s sample, and ensuring that the
great majority of their tweets contained links, particularly links that led to rich media.
Most significantly, Hughes found that the subject matter of tweets contrasted strongly with
Thoring’s study. In 2010, the majority of tweets posted by publishers contained no promotion at all,
or only indirect promotion. In 2017, around 80% of tweets contained content directly related to
titles on the publishers’ lists. Large publishers were particularly disciplined in ensuring that links
landed on their ‘properties’ – their titles and book covers, their authors’ blogs and events. While
some care must be taken in comparing the two studies, allowing for differences in sampling, it is
clear the conventional wisdom that Twitter was about building connections and conversations had
been replaced by demands for precise writing that reflected SM’s increased robustness as an instru-
ment of e-commerce thanks to the rise of analytics.
Other studies of Twitter bear out the increased importance of ‘hard’ content in publishing’s
SMM. In Britain, Criswell and Canty (2014) tested two refined SM marketing campaigns, for The
Song of Achilles, the prize-winning debut novel of Madeline Miller, published by Bloomsbury, and
Stephen King’s The Wind Through the Keyhole, a late addition to King’s Dark Tower series pub-
lished by Hodder & Stoughton. Both books were in the adult fantasy genre, and sold tens of thou-
sands of copies after their release in the United Kingdom in 2012. Criswell and Canty found that
King’s existing online fan communities, as well as the FB pages and Twitter streams established by
the publisher to engage fans of the Dark Tower series (in the style of FB discourse modes recom-
mended by Nielsen back in 2009), helped to support strong sales of King’s book immediately after
its release. However, both the hardback and paperback editions of the title quickly ‘sold out’ its
established community and sales dropped off sharply following an initial spike.
The case of Miller was markedly different. As a debut author, she lacked an established online
fan community. Yet her book outsold King’s, despite a reactive SM campaign from her publisher
which only kicked in strongly after she was listed for the 2012 Orange Prize; it then built metrics
quickly. The timing of the shortlisting was fortuitous, since it coincided closely with the first cru-
cial month or so of the novel’s appearance in bookstores. Several weeks later Miller won the prize,
and sales of The Song of Achilles continued strongly on the back of this win.
Criswell and Canty’s study failed to address a fundamental reality of the book industry that
might have been implicated in their results: no two books, even those of the same genre, are fully
interchangeable in comparisons of sales and marketing campaigns, because their content is differ-
ent and readers react differently.
Nevertheless, their study illuminated fundamental characteristics of SMM: first, illustrating that
it can be difficult to confect virality on Twitter and FB, and that limits exist to what marketing
within SM fan groups can achieve; but second, revealing the potency of certain types of events in
SMM discourses. The SM buzz that built around Miller’s debut demonstrated the power of literary
prizes as SMM content, supporting analysis by Driscoll (2013) that a strong synergy exists between
Twitter and news about literary prizes, which not only generates strong numbers of likes and
shares, but often pulls in contributions from both high-prestige literary and publishing figures, and
dedicated fans. Analysing tweets about the 2012 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards,
Driscoll documented the range and interconnectedness of powerful agents (authors, editors, liter-
ary media, libraries etc.) who participated in these posts. Using sentiment analysis tools, she
revealed the overwhelmingly positive tone of the tweets she sampled, and ‘the conspicuous absence
of criticism and debate’ (115). The ‘superficial content’ of the conversation belied its significance,
according to Driscoll, who saw a network of actors in the literary community attempting to build
connections while symbolically appropriating something of the cultural and economic prestige of
the prize (119).
158 Media International Australia 168(1)

Driscoll’s study and the others discussed here reveal the ‘stickiness’ of events such as Miller’s
shortlisting and subsequent victory in the Orange Prize. As Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg
Sedo (2013: 141) noticed, the great advantage of literary prizes to book marketing is that they help
sell books while preserving books’ symbolic status, because ‘the economic relations structuring the
transaction are not rendered visible to the consumer’. This is even more the case in the indirect
marketing performed through social networks, where professional rivals send collegial congratula-
tions to prize winners, and readers recommend winning titles to friends and followers.
Twitter discourse about literary prizes meets both publishers’ and readers’ needs, then. Because
of this, the good news event can be factorised on SM into almost infinite ‘micro events’ that gener-
ate further traffic. To give a brief example of how the Madeline Miller event was extended. On 12
October 2012, more than 4 months after Miller had won the Orange Prize, Bloomsbury’s editor-in-
chief, Alexandra Pringle (2012), tweeted:

http://nyti.ms/VRXgmg JK Rowling says Madeline Miller’s THE SONG OF ACHILLES is the best book
she’s read this summer @BloomsburyBooks

The ‘event’ here is the news of Rowling’s endorsement of Miller’s book. This announcement
appears in the New York Times, in its ‘By the Book’ feature (By the Book, 2012), a weekly interview
with an author about their personal reading. Pringle’s tweet follows principles of best writing for
SMM. ‘JK Rowling says Madeline Miller’s THE SONG OF ACHILLES is the best book she’s read
this summer’ captures the key ideas in a short, conversational sentence, which includes the keyword
phrases ‘JK Rowling’, ‘Madeline Miller’ ‘The Song of Achilles’ and ‘best book’. Cleverly, this
syntax also contains a sentence within a sentence: ‘THE SONG OF ACHILLES is the best book’.
The text also contains a shortened link to the By the Book article on the NYT website. Users who
clicked through read that Rowling, Bloomsbury’s star author, ‘loves’ Miller’s prize-winning debut
novel (a book also published by Bloomsbury). This ‘news’ not only constituted cross-promotion of
Bloomsbury authors, but it was not as fresh as the tweet made it appear. Rowling had first said she
loved Miller’s novel in September 2012, in an online video interview with the London Guardian.
But as Rowling was one of the biggest literary celebrities in the world (and still is, with more than
14.3 million current followers on Twitter), it made good marketing sense for Bloomsbury to repub-
lish the comment. A similar tweet was posted by Bloomsbury Australia soon after Pringle’s tweet
appeared.
This brief amplification of Criswell and Canty’s study reveals how SMM discourse captures
fans’ enthusiasm and carries it on in a structured discourse mode of ‘events’ and ‘micro-events’,
consisting of messages whose careful composition follows the arcane rules of writing for search
engine optimisation: that is, the use of keyword phrases, semantic search and prominent placement
of hyperlinks to rich media. The similarity to news discourse structures here is not at all surprising;
the difference, as the cases of Pringle, Rowling and Miller demonstrate, is the capacity of SM to
factorise real events (the winning of a literary prize) into infinite micro-events.
Such writing is the result of SM marketers’ increasing mastery of their science. But it is also a
response to changes since 2013 in the affordances of Twitter. The Twitter feed, once relatively free
of advertising, is now heavily encumbered with it; and where a user’s timeline was once a construct
of the user’s own community-building on Twitter, it is now also a product of the platform’s algo-
rithmic filtering. Thus the effort to achieve stickiness becomes paramount.
These developments have taken their toll on the participatory, collaborative culture of SM
described by Thoring in her 2011 paper. As Simone Murray (2016: 14) observes in a research
article concerned with the impact of digital marketing on the activity of publishing and on liter-
ary culture:
Nolan and Dane 159

‘In the ‘how to’ genre of book-marketing advice, there is an insistent refrain of how not to sound like you
are aggressively spruiking a product, while at the same time taking an avid interest in user statistics, sales
spikes, and the best channels for increasing consumer spend.

This approach is ‘patently disingenuous’, she argues.

Beneath the superficial affectivity of SM marketing discourses (a conversational poetics of
personal enthusiasms), a programmatic transformation of SM communication has taken place,
rendering the social networks quite different places to 10 years ago, when as Thoring (2011: 141)
noted, the balance of control of the content was with the consumer. This change seems to parallel
changes in computer-mediated discourse generally. Linguistics scholars have documented a spe-
cific turn from digressive naturalistic conversation that occurred as Web 2.0 developed. In contexts
where video or news was offered, users tended to respond to these discourse cues, rather than to
other commenters (Herring and Androutsopoulos, 2015).
As Bucher and Helmond (2018) discuss, platform users and marketers/businesses exist in a
somewhat dependent relationship with the platforms themselves. The affordances of a platform
(such as the character limit of a tweet) influence user behaviour; however, increasingly opportuni-
ties to monetise, together with user behaviour, influence a platform’s affordances. As the ability to
understand the way individuals interact with and on each platform becomes more sophisticated,
those who control the modes of communication on platforms respond (Bucher and Helmond,
2018). The increasingly nuanced insights gleaned from user data feed back into the affordances of
the platforms and the way brands and organisations interact with their established communities
(Athique, 2013). The best-known example of this is FB’s increased requirements on corporate
content, which include the down-ranking of mere text posts and the up-ranking of posts that use
rich media, particularly video, because users like video – they watch it, use it and share it. There is
a circular relationship of cause and effect evident here, with user preferences shaping SNS
affordances in ways that then directly influence the type of content book publishers can usefully
post on SM aimed at their readers.
Murray (2016: 19) pondered whether by engaging with the digital literary sphere, publishers
risk ‘disintermediating themselves out of the publishing process’, and wrote that she feared the
answer might be yes. Two years further down the track, though, it is clear that the balance between
publishers, authors and readers has changed again as major players in the publishing industry have
grasped the opportunities offered by media analytics, particularly through recent developments in
artificial intelligence (AI). For large publishers, the main value of SM engagement is that with the
right analytical tools, corporations can actively follow their readers through the Internet, learning
more about their profiles, their likes and dislikes, and marketing to them accordingly. Multinational
publishers are most likely to possess the economic and social capital to run analytically informed
marketing, and then to work the results back into SMM strategy that is part of an overarching mar-
keting system. The next section discusses this development, and the growing inequality between
large and small publishers it is causing.

SM and the publisher’s enclosure

Software to analyse SM use already existed by the time most book publishers took to Twitter in 2009.
Radian6, for example, enabled brands to follow their mentions in SM posts. Google Analytics could
measure traffic to business’s websites from SM. FB was quick to offer users its Insight analytics, which
in combination with Google Analytics, enabled a company to track which FB ads sent traffic to their
website, how long the user stayed, how many pages they visited and if they completed a transaction on
the site (Zarrella and Zarrella, 2011: 261). As most trade publishers (who create books such as adult
160 Media International Australia 168(1)

fiction and popular non-fiction, and children’s books) were (and to a large extent remain) wholesale
businesses, such information was not as potent as it would have been for retailers. For book marketers
it was harder to demonstrate sales conversions without, say, setting up online readers’ clubs on their
websites, and tracking readers’ positive responses to book offerings, including online sales. The weak
link between their SM marketing and sales conversions, married with the surge in popularity of e-books
circa 2010–2011, tended to force them further towards direct sales, especially sales to individual cus-
tomers rather than niche groups and organisations (Throsby et al., 2018: 7). Publishers increasingly
began to act and/or think like retailers, and understanding and engaging with readers’ tastes and SM
activity became more important.
SMM now must offer more than an opportunity to communicate directly with readers: taking
ownership of reader data appears to be increasingly important to publishers. Recent refinements in
the capability of analytics, especially through the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), have dramati-
cally increased the value of SM marketing, providing tools that allow much timelier and finer tar-
geting of readers by marketers who are not IT nerds. For example, when a reader signs up for a
publisher’s newsletter, AI tools enable the company to respond with a customised letter ‘based on
the customer’s known attributes, all within a fraction of the time it might have taken even a year
ago’ (Kho Davis, 2018: 1). Analytics now offer more granular insights into user behaviours and
preferences, partly through the more powerful integration of a range of datasets (2).
New data released by the authors of Macquarie University’s major research project about change
in the book publishing industry (Throsby et al., 2018) confirms that large publishers in Australia
have overwhelmingly increased their investment in SM marketing and analytics over the past five
years, in terms of both software and staffing. Large publishers in the Macquarie survey had increased
their use of Nielsen BookScan (100%), data analysis of internal databases (83%), website analytics
(100%) and SM metrics (100%; Throsby et al., 2018: 29). In terms of staffing, 67% of large publish-
ers said they had created new positions, including in SM book promotion and in data analysis (30).
SM promotion was the largest change recorded across publishing organisations of all sizes, with
85% of respondents reporting they now use SM in book marketing and promotion. But the report
drew sharp attention to the fact that large publishers were ‘most active’ (33) in implementing new
digital strategies, and were most likely to report that their organisation’s financial position had
improved over the past five years (18). In contrast, 43% of small publishers recorded a deterioration
in their financial position (18); only one-quarter of them used data analytics to exploit their internal
databases (28), and only 14% of them used market or consumer research reports (28).
Not surprisingly, given that small publishers were early adopters of SM, this group did show up
as users of SM metrics (64%). Many small publishers show commendable initiative in the way they
apply free or inexpensive SM analytics. In Zwar, 2016 case studies of Australian publishers Jacinda
Woodhead, editor of the literary journal Overland, outlined her approach: generating a weekly email
newsletter containing clickable content, analysing its impact with a tool called Campaign Monitor,
and using Twitter and FB for promotion of the high-impact items (Zwar, 2016: 150).
However, larger publishers have far more leverage in terms of analytics, thanks to their superior
resources. A recent article in Book Business explained how Penguin Random House UK used ‘site analyt-
ics and insights culled from newsletters and SM [to paint] a detailed picture’ of their readers; segmenting
them into appropriate reader groups, ‘in order to connect the right readers with the right books’ (Harvey,
2016). Claire Wilshaw, an audience development director at Penguin Random House UK, explained:

Our audience segments were created from extensive studies of different types of readers, and they group
people together based on their attitudes, behaviors, and motivations, for example how technologically
savvy they are or which other brands they admire and follow. This knowledge is constantly enhanced by
our daily conversations with readers on our social channels and website, and analysis of our communications.
Nolan and Dane 161

Listening tools and other customer research provide a detailed picture of audiences, while the
texts of SM conversations and other interactions with online reader communities allow publishers
to drill down in the data. The key ingredient of this customer-focused approach is the publisher’s
own engaging content: a well-stocked website, plenty of interesting interviews, videos and forums
that users can engage with to generate more data about their preferences, and well-targeted and
well-written SM posts linking to the publisher’s properties. The increased emphasis on develop-
ment of their own websites reflects publishers’ alienation from FB as it drives corporate organisa-
tions towards promoted posts and paid advertising. Cambridge University Press, for example, uses
SM to direct users towards its own website, blog and webinars, ‘platforms where interaction is not
mediated through third parties’ (Horne, in Baverstock, 2015: 460).
Marianne Martens’ (2016) study of digital book marketing in the United States suggests that SM
marketing (both SM content and associated listening tools) is the linchpin of brand marketing to
teens, capturing these readers’ interest in recognisable transmedia properties such as vampire love
stories, and then driving this interest into publisher domains and SM pages, to create user reviews
and fan fiction, to play games and view videos, or simply to chat in fan forums: all activity that
these users then post about to their own followers on SM. In effect, these teen readers become
marketers of the brand, contributing their own labour to its promotion (60).
Indirect as such SM marketing is, in combination with branding it is an effective selling tool for
books, because branding enables publishers ‘to sidestep the time-consuming, costly, and often
haphazard work of identifying or creating a unique audience for each and every title in their cata-
logs’ (Striphas, 2009: 115).
Martens’ (2016) study helps account for the phenomenal rise of Young Adult (YA) fiction in the
past decade, but also notes that the SMM of some larger publishers amounts to ‘digital enclosure’
(p. 60). She borrows from Mark Andrejevic’s definition: ‘the creation of a digital realm wherein
every action and transaction generates information about itself’ (Andrejevic, 2007: 2). This lan-
guage is echoed in Zwar’s (2016) study, which quotes an executive from a successful romance
publisher discussing the ‘need to corral and talk to people who share a particular readership’ (73).
Authors too are caught in publishers’ enclosures. Although some authors run their own thriving
SM communities, ‘the publisher remains central to marketing efforts and relationship building’,
according to Martens (61). This is particularly visible in the relentless cross-promotion of titles and
authors by larger firms. Martens interviewed one vice-president of marketing who described how
she ‘harness[ed] the social media footprints of several authors in order to maximise cross-promo-
tion’ (Martens, 2016: 69), by asking authors to cross-promote on their own SM accounts other
authors from the publishing house.
A recent content analysis of more than 450 Canadian and US electronic newsletters by DeNel
Rehberg Sedo and Samantha Rideout (2017) demonstrates the systematic use of cross-promotion
in email newsletters, aligning backlist authors with front-list authors and prize-winning authors
with those just making their debut, while grouping titles from the same genres together. The
research demonstrated the importance of email newsletters in large publishers’ perpetual campaign
to sell backlist.
Significantly, for this paper’s argument about the rise of ‘eventing’ and ‘micro-eventing’,
Rehberg Sedo and Rideout also analysed the discourse structures used in their large sample of
newsletters, and found them to be ‘formulaic’. Publishers in the United States favoured the inclu-
sion of the term ‘best-selling’ or ‘bestseller’, while Canadian publishers were more likely to pro-
mote ‘prize winners’. These findings suggest that publishers in both groups employ ‘event’
discourse in online communications that are used for SM listening.
The use of analytics not only builds engagement between customers and publishers, it also helps
publishers build their lists. Rick Joyce, a digital change agent who was hired by the US firm
162 Media International Australia 168(1)

Perseus Books as its chief marketing officer in 2014, explained to the trade how the publisher
began using the social-listening tool ForSight to collect reader data generated from Twitter, FB and
YouTube activity. From this activity, a database was established to generate further analysis of
emerging trends and inform acquisition decisions (Harvey, 2015: 16–17). For Joyce, this reader
data allowed for ‘facts, rather than hunches’ to inform the publishing process (Joyce, in Harvey,
2015). Perseus has since been acquired by Hachette Books, a publishing multinational which has
increasingly interested itself in the use of analytics.
Zwar’s (2016) study of Australian publishers gives a detailed account of Hachette Australia’s
effort to focus its marketing towards consumers. The publisher uses a panoply of SMM tools,
deployed in combination with customer insights research and a customer relationship management
(CRM) platform, to more accurately market according to reader preferences:

Those insights inform how we acquire books, what we acquire, how we target them, how we position
them, our metadata, our covers, our key lines, the key words that we use in our metadata and our digital
marketing. (Ractcliffe, in Zwar, 2016: 64)

Our discussion early in this article of the traditional publishers’ role as arbiter indicates how
philosophically problematic the use of data analytics and AI is in commissioning and acquisition.
As the above examples suggest, the publishing industry’s publicly characterises insights from ana-
lytics as helpful adjuncts to professional decision-making. This view has been mirrored in inter-
views conducted by publishing studies scholar Claire Squires (2017) with 19 commissioning
editors working at British publishing’s coalface. ‘When I asked editors about how digital technolo-
gies might affect their commissioning decisions … their responses largely showed them to be
operating using the same paradigms that were in place in the 1990s’ (32). They relied on their own
judgement, using data available to them for ‘testing your instincts’ (29, 34).
It is a live question whether editors’ and publishers’ sense of how they commission reflects
the contemporary reality. How well do publishing professionals really understand the
affordances and influence of data analysis and AI, and how it is impacting business and industry
more generally? If other industries have found it impossible to remain immune from the pres-
sures of data insights and SM, as both Manovich and McCosker suggest, why should publishing
in the end not yield? Furthermore, are some small publishers working outside large corporate
environments actively resisting the brave new world of data analytics and the rise of the reader
on SM, because of their attachment to the traditional role of publisher as independent literary
arbiter and/or their resistance to algorithmic-driven publishing? These are intriguing questions
for anyone interested in the future of book publishing. Research by Mark Davis (2007) and oth-
ers reveals how larger publishers have increasingly vacated the field of literary publishing, as
the symbolic value of the printed book declines in contemporary culture. As Emmett Stinson
(2016) writes, ‘a fundamental shift has occurred in the mediation of literary production, which
is now principally undertaken by small and independent publishers’ (p. 23). Much more inves-
tigation of the growing digital divide between large and small publishers is needed to under-
stand how much this divide reflects deliberate choices by publishers, as well as differing
resources.

Conclusion
The scholarly literature examined in this study puts paid to talk that SM communities are relatively
inexpensive to establish and maintain, and that the opportunities presented by these technologies
are levelling the playing field between small independents and large publishing conglomerates.
Nolan and Dane 163

Reviewing literature that spans more than a decade, this article tracks the changes in the book
industry’s conventional wisdom around SMM. Where SMM was once about building a community
of followers for the purposes of a captive audience for marketing messages, it is now more con-
cerned with the management of that audience for the purposes of extracting data around audience
segmentation and reader preferences, using analytics software whose speed, precision and depth of
insight is often determined by the price of the package.
The research explored in this article goes some way to understanding how the publishing indus-
try is changing in the post-digital era, in light of the ‘second wave’ of SM disruption that has
resulted from the rise of refined and powerful data analytics. However, further research is needed
to understand the role of SMM and what Manovich calls ‘media analytics’ in the evolution of pub-
lishing practice. Among the considerations future researchers should seek to investigate are the
ways that publishers – whose professional identity is enmeshed with crafting, controlling and
packaging written texts – are grappling with the notion that SMM is more than just sharing wisdom
with a captivated audience; that maintaining a community of engaged and active followers is now
a vital part of both the marketing of books and the understanding of what readers want. Hence the
rise of ‘eventing’ in SMM, a practice whereby ‘sticky’ news items (broken down into component
parts in order to extend their life and value) keep fans involved in conversations around texts and
authors, providing detailed data for publishers to extract.
Our research suggests that a shift needs to occur in both the way researchers investigate SMM
practice in the publishing industry and the way publishers understand SMM. Rather than being just
discrete interesting and witty text-based interactions, SMM posts are rich data points that can pro-
vide publishers with detailed insights into the profile and preferences of their readers. How these
rich data points influence decision-making processes across the publishing industry is an important
avenue for further research. Martens and Redo Sehberg and Rideout have done important work in
this area, but there remains much more to be done.
Our survey of the existing research shows that the hopeful notion of SM as an equal-opportunity
marketing tool has already been proven false. This is partly due to the receding opportunities for free
marketing that FB and Twitter offer. As one expert puts it bluntly, for marketers, FB is no longer
conversational, but about building paid reach (Joe, 2014: 54). Both of these dominant SNS have
consciously turned to algorithm-driven businesses whose principal source of revenue is paid adver-
tising, increasingly ratcheting up the pressure on organisations’ attempt to use them for unpaid
marketing. As the SNS’s business models have altered profoundly, from non-commercial networks
to listed companies worth many billions of dollars, marketers’ approaches have had to alter too. Not
surprisingly, large multinationals have been best placed to respond effectively.
Just as with traditional publishing, inequality of resourcing is entrenching larger publishers’
advantage in the marketplace. This is made clear in the rise of ‘media analytics’ and AI in decisions
making processes within large publishing houses. Research conducted by Manovich (2018) serves
to highlight the sense that large publishing conglomerates will struggle to resist the rise of AI in
commissioning and acquisitions, a practice common in born digital platforms and publications. He
writes, ‘The older players are gradually moving towards adoption of analytics, but key decisions
(e.g. publishing a book) are still made by individuals following their instincts. In contrast, new
players [such as Google and Amazon] from the beginning built their businesses on computational
analytics’ (480). As analytics continue to provide increasingly comprehensive reader descriptions,
publishing decision-making must inevitably become more automated, and acquisition ever more
bound up with marketing analytics, despite the long-held ideals of ‘gatekeeping’ that underpin
these processes. This is where the gap between the big data rich and the big data poor, as articulated
by Boyd and Crawford (2012), intersects with the polarisation of the publishing field, and the small
and independent publishers face being left behind by the rise of expensive data analytics.
164 Media International Australia 168(1)

It is, however, important to keep in mind the idea that this digital divide is not necessarily the
disaster that it first appears. While it is likely that the gap between big data rich and big data poor
will be exacerbated with the increasing prominence of media analytics, many small and independ-
ent publishers are not interested in growing to be the size of the multinationals, and commercial
profit may not be their primary pursuit. ‘Editorially driven’ publishing characterises a good number
of small and independent publishing houses, and constitutes a practice that will continue to be at
odds with acquisition derived from SMM reader data (Thompson, 2012). Research into the atti-
tudes of different-sized publishers and their relationships with reader data as a source of informa-
tion in the whole publishing process is required to understand what this digital divide means for
publishing practice across the industry. If one of the fundamental functions of book publishing,
what Bourdieu (1993) called ‘the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value
of the work’, is increasingly delegated to readers, then the commissioning and acquisitions role,
already altered by the rise of literary agents in the first decade of this century, will be much further
diminished, particularly in the large corporations (p. 37).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant
(DP170103192) ‘New Tastemakers and Australia’s Post-Digital Literary Culture’.

Note
1. Now Twitter has its own algorithms, and users’ feeds are a combination of their personal choices and
Twitter’s priorities, including paid advertising.

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