Episode 14: Mary McAveney on Book Discovery

The BookSmarts Podcast, with Joshua Tallent

Mary McAveney, Chief Marketing Officer at Open Road Integrated Media joins us this week on the BookSmarts Podcast. Mary has extensive expertise in marketing, strategy, and branding in the publishing industry, and now helps the Open Road team tackle marketing and discovery with data-driven tactics and a comprehensive understanding of direct-to-consumer marketing.

In this episode, Mary and Joshua discuss the opportunities and challenges around book discovery. As sales have moved online, publishers have increasingly become more responsible for their own book discovery, and that can be a real challenge for publishers who have not tackled book discovery before. While the focus is often on the big titles that will make a splash, it is the debut authors and lesser-known titles that can suffer the most from discovery problems.

As publishers take on that challenge, there are many opportunities available to them, but in essence book discovery comes down to building solid SEO on your website and creating and cultivating connections with your consumers. Mary shares some wonderful insights and suggestions to help publishers build their discovery platforms and cultivate those connections to increase visibility of their titles.

BookNet Canada study: Aged like a fine wine: What's the ideal age for a backlist title?