Branding Books, Branding Readers: Marketing to Teens in the Digital Age

Abstract

Bridging historical and contemporary practices of marketing books to young people, Chapter 2 is dedicated to practices of marketing books, and uses an interview with a veteran children’s book marketer and interviews with marketers at small, medium, and large publishing companies to compare practices before and after digital technologies. Earlier, marketing to young people was a top-down process, as children had to be reached via a series of gatekeepers, including parents, teachers, and librarians. Now, digital technologies enable a disintermediated space in which publishers can communicate directly with teen consumers via their proprietary online sites. As a result, technology is shifting traditional definitions of “marketer,” “author,” and “consumer” in favor of collaborative communities of online immaterial and affective labor by publishers, authors, and teen consumers. Consolidations in publishing houses and changes in bookselling practices, from the rise of the superstore to Amazon.com, transmedia, and a push toward hypercommercialism, lead to a new model of publishing, in which books become brands and readers too are branded (e.g., Twilight-reader) and commodified. Publishers’ online spaces and free social media resources theoretically give all publishers the same opportunities for reaching young readers, but interviews with marketers at a small, a medium, and a large publisher demonstrate that this is not exactly the case.