Links of the week July 22 2024 (30)

I have spent a week in a multilingual country with 60 million inhabitants, many races, terrific political instability, and a huge gap between rich and poor.

This could have been describing my home, the United Kingdom, but it was South Africa. I was invited to travel there by Jonathan Ball Publishers, the largest sales, marketing, and distribution partner of a distinguished roster of international publishers: HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Simon & Schuster, Faber, Thames & Hudson, Hachette, and many others, large and small.

I was principally there for Ball Publishers' sales conference held in Walkersons Private Estate near Dullstroom on the very high veld. The estate is brilliantly run by Alex Band and Fiona Scott-Berning.

Anyway, to business. Last year saw retail book sales of 7.6 million units generating 1.8 billion ZAR or South African Rand (US$98.1 million, £76,9 million) with an average unit selling price of ZAR234 (US$12.75, £9.99).

If you've ever used digital advertising to market a book, you've used AI. All the major digital platforms use AI and machine learning to optimize ads. Simply put, the platforms automatically serve the best-performing ads to the demographics that are clicking on them the most.

But the advent of generative AI-like Midjourney-and the ability to create images ‘out of thin air' and copy from a prompt herald a new era of opportunity in Advertising and Publishing.

Books have a fundamental problem when it comes to marketing. They are packed full of ideas, lessons, imaginings, creativity, wonder, and all manner of richness that feeds the soul and nourishes the mind of a reader. But all of this is often left underused in marketing because most books have only one visual marketing asset: their cover.