Publishers must shake up their marketing strategies and focus on building big brands across all formats in order to compete at the top level, Pottermore c.e.o. Charlie Redmayne told delegates at the FutureBook Conference 2011.

Speaking at a session devoted to "The New Publisher", Redmayne, previously of HarperCollins, said publishers needed to look to other media businesses such as Disney to learn how to develop authors into brands, as the output of traditional publishers is challenged by an increasing volume of self-published content, resulting in a squeeze on the midlist.

He said the key was to build brands with sustained effort, over years and across all different platforms. Redmayne dismissed the "old world" model of putting marketing budgets behind every author as spreading resources too thinly and "not sustainable". Publishers need to look at ways of publishing smaller or midlist authors "more cheaply", building marketing through free tools such as social media, he said.

"You've got your big brands right at the top, you've then got your midlist, and then the long tail, and what is happening is that people like Amazon are helping lots of new self-published authors come in and build that long tail.

"You've got literally hundreds of thousands of new self-published authors coming in, that's pushing on the midlist and making it harder and harder to make that profitable, so what publishers- end up doing is all trying to compete at that top level. They are all trying to get those big brands because everybody knows them; they are competing for this and the price goes up and up."

He added: "What publishers need to do is understand how to develop brands themselves, and that is not by doing a two-week book campaign and then forgetting about the author for another year until they write another book. It's about investing in authors over a two-year period, and if they have the skillsets to do that and make a commitment to do that, they'll be a great deal more successful over time."

Pottermore is trying to "give a brand a future across every platform", creating a "perfect experience on every device", and "owning" the relationship with the consumer by selling directly, Redmayne said. He added: "There are many brands that could also do this—brands like Bond, for example, where you have a fanbase that buys into and understands the brand in a different way."
Sourcebooks c.e.o. Dominique Raccah said it was the responsibility of the publisher to "make" the author. "It's about planning; investing in long-term resources and getting really creative-—we need to make more of an author than they could make of themselves. If we can't do that, then we should give up."

However, Jonathan Williams, founder of Boxfiction—which sells digital serial fiction, often based on TV series—said the challenge of consumer marketing for books was that a book is not an "inherently scaleable" product, unlike other consumer goods, such as washing powder and tinned food.

Report by Charlotte Williams