Sam Missingham introduces Meet The Booktokers

In this podcast MediaCat's Content and Social Media Editor, Svilena Keane, speaks to the founder of The Empowered Author and Meet The Booktokers, Samantha Missingham. They discuss the evolution of book marketing and the idea behind the newly-launched platform, Meet The BookTokers. This interview has been shortened for clarity and length. Hi, Sam. Please introduce yourself to our readers My name is Sam Missingham, and I'm the founder of a new community called Meet The BookTokers. I also have another community called the Empowered Author. My background has always been in marketing in magazines and then marketing in books. So, I started working in business to business and consumer magazines, on magazines such as Marketing Week and Design Week. I also worked on consumer magazines about cars, weddings, photography, gardening and all kinds of things. But I guess they all have something in common; which is actually about building a community around content as the number one thing. And then secondly, trying to convince that community to spend some money on your content in a number of different ways. How have you seen book marketing evolve over the last two decades? Book publishing is one of those industries that has had a healthy and robust book selling. We've had physical bookshops, we've had some chains, and we've also had independent booksellers who've always done really well. The digital transformation of the book industry, which started in about 2009, gave tons of opportunities but also some huge risks that book publishers had to get to grips with. When Amazon came along and successfully implemented its ebook platform, that was the starting point. They started with print books, but once they went into digital, publishers feared that the whole industry would go from a physical to a digital-only world. We then also had Apple coming into the market with their iPhones and their iPads, which opened up a whole potential of apps, and book publishers thought everybody was going to read book apps or ebooks. At the time, some of the deals going on for ebooks were for just 20p. That is not a great model for a book publisher. Book publishers have one revenue stream, which is the money from selling their books. So if suddenly your books have no value, it's not a great outlook for you when you start putting that into the future. So, publishers panicked and tried lots of things that failed. They're not good at innovation on many levels, while Amazon was busily innovating and doing incredible things for books. The marketing that happened for books was actually about marketing to booksellers. So that would be a whole strategy of how to communicate to the likes of Waterstones or your independent booksellers to sell as many books as possible. The difference between a bookshop and any online retailer is that a bookshop has a finite number of books. Now, if I put this into context, on Thursday (10 October) we had what is called Super Thursday in the industry, which is when the most and the biggest books are published because it's the run-up to Christmas. On that day, 1,900 new books were published. But what do you think about trying to get 1,900 new books into a bookshop? You have to think they are only going to stock the books that they think are going to do the best. What would you say we're seeing today? <p c