Transcript: Managing disruption: Online book marketing in a volatile age
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Ainsley Sparkes: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today’s Tech Forum session. I’m Ainsley Sparks, Director of Marketing and Communications at BookNet. Welcome to “Managing disruption: Online book marketing in a volatile age.”
Before we get started, I’d just like to acknowledge that BookNet’s operations are remote, and our colleagues contribute our work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Ottawa, and the Potawatomi, the Métis, as well as the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Those are the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vaughan, and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose land you are joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry as we move towards a framework that supports spacemaking, which ensures that marginalised creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and lead.
And now for just a little bit of housekeeping before the presentation. We’re looking forward to a Q&A session at the end of this presentation. If you have questions at any time, you can put them in the Q&A panel and we’ll get to them at the end of the presentation.
And now I’m going to introduce Ariel Hudnall. Ariel is the managing director of Serif, a literary marketing agency specialising in book publicity and advertising, author platform development, and storytelling strategy. She holds a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser University, where she also teaches digital book marketing as an instructor. She’s on the board for the Canadian Book Club Awards and over the last 10 years has worked or volunteered in the industry as a beta and slush reader, developmental and acquisitions editor, book designer, advertiser, publicist, and marketing consultant. She lives in the Cariboo region of B.C., the ancestral lands of the Nazko, the Lhtako Dene, and Carrier-Tŝilhqot’in peoples. Thank you for joining us today, Ariel.
Ariel Hudnall: Thank you so much, Ainsley. It’s my true pleasure to be here and get into a really important conversation, I think, for so many on the call today. I’m going to go ahead and just quickly start sharing my slides. One of the things I want to note before I start showing you different pieces of material is that this presentation is going to show you a lot of data. I’m not going to go over all of the data here, but it’s mostly here since you will receive the slides after this presentation to give you a sort of baseline if you want to refer back to some statistics you heard or saw for your own marketing plans in the future.
Likewise, this presentation, as you’ll see on our table of contents today, is that we’re going to be starting at the macro level, really looking at where we are, where we’re going, before we move into more strategic aligned for the book industry spaces with data-informed strategy, and then also building strategy in a harmonised way with the values that you have as an organisation. At the end, I’ll give you some quick round rapid-fire tips before we open it up for the Q&A.
So, let’s go ahead and get started here. So, one of the things I want to start with is whenever we’re dealing with volatile moments in the industry or major disruption is we always have kind of, I think, a little bit of a catastrophising response to that information. We are like, “It’s the end of X because of Y,” and we’ve seen that time and time again, this has not been true. So traditional and self-publishing models now work in tandem. They are almost inextricably linked in acquisitions in some ways. Ebooks did not kill print, audiobooks did not kill ebooks, and of course hardcovers are still much beloved by much of the reader community across the globe.
Similarly, online, TikTok seemed to be the be-all and end-all of content creation over the last few years, but when we actually look at the data, a platform that we’ve really kind of ignored and put off to the side, Facebook is still the number one platform worldwide. So, these are just some quick helping us remove our biases as we move into the presentation today.
So, you’re going to see a lot of data graphs to the right of my presentation here. I am not asking you to read them at the slides. They’re here again for the slides so you can see them after the presentation, or I believe they’re going to drop this in the chat, a link to what’s called the “Digital 2026 Global Overview Report” from Meltwater and We Are Social. I’m using this to kind of set the stage for where our data is in 2026 in terms of social media and advertising use.
So, some quick things that I’m pulling out from this report, which is 700 pages long, is Facebook is still the number one platform worldwide, almost 57% of social media use happens on Facebook. What we also know is that there’s been a lot of growth in the audience of social media in the last few years. Two of three people worldwide now use social media. This basically means that we can’t expect that number to grow much larger. I think in Canada and in the United States, the saturation of social media is around 93%. There are no new people coming to social media. We need to be able to reach the people that are already here, whether they’re aging out or aging in.
The other thing, which I think is going to be good news for everyone here, is that actually social media has become really decentralised. More people use more than one social media platform in their daily life. The average is actually almost seven different channels per person, which is great news because that means you don’t have to put all of your eggs in one basket. It’s not always going to be Meta, it’s not always going to be X or YouTube, etc.
The last thing I’ll mention, of course, is for YouTube in particular, they are the only one that has a slightly unique user base. One per cent of their user base you will not find on any other platform. There’s a lot of opportunity to cross-pollinate your audiences across many different social media channels.
Okay, so where we are now, again, looking at age distribution is when we start to get some really interesting data points. Maybe not totally unexpected, but what you can see in the left column here is between the ages of 16 and 34, social media ads are the primary way that people are finding brands, finding products that they’re interested in. And I’ll note here that they say social media ads but ads can be organic promotion or paid promotion. They’re kind of bundled together in this data set, so it’s a combination of both. So, that probably has to do with its prominence for this particular age group. Secondary to that is search, so going to Google, going to ChatGPT and asking something. Search is another way that they find new products and brands.
Search becomes more prominent as we get to the middle age. So from 35 to around 54, or rather 64, search is the primary way people are looking for things. We’re starting to see an edge out of open exploration and curiosity to just looking for the facts, looking for what they’re looking for as quickly as possible, which is a search feature. What happens around the 45 range is that we start to see TV ads. Now TV ads, of course, are probably out of the purview of many people’s budgets on this call today, but we can also think of this in the terms of YouTube ads or other type of Amazon business ads, which can play on Amazon Prime TV, for example.
And then, of course, at the 65 and up, we have word of mouth. And here social media can be considered a word of mouth, but in this case, I think they legitimately mean in-person physical conversations with other human beings as word of mouth. What this means for us as we’re dealing with kind of the volatility of how marketing moves in and out of fashion is we need to keep a really close eye on the primary vehicle through which we can send our message out into the world. So if you are an organisation, a publisher, an author, a bookseller whose primary customer you know is within like a 20-year range, if you’re in a much younger range, you know social media is going to be king for you. But if you’re somebody whose customer kind of skirts between these different generations of upper young and middle-aged, you might need to have a split marketing platform that basically puts half of your effort into social media and half of it into search. So really understand who your customer is and how old they are. I would say age is actually a much bigger indicator of where your customers will find you than gender or something like that, like geolocation.
Some other discoverability methods that I thought were interesting as I was reading this report were of course social media comments. So, we’re seeing a progressive approach of followers being less important than engagement rate, so making sure you’re responding to comments on your social media, seeking out conversations that are happening on other accounts and responding to those. Of course word of mouth, so in bookstores, you know, again social media word of mouth. Retail websites over personal company websites, so Amazon, any retailer, booksellers, that kind of thing. And then of course ads on websites is about 22%, so that’s Google display and so on.
And then of course one of the things that you’ll see in this particular thing if you blow it up later is a bunch of different reasons that people are using social media. But if we coalesce them into basically two different things, it would be information gathering or entertainment and fun. You can decide which camp I think you want to be in, but it’s important to be consistent. So, if you’re going to take a serious tone, continue to have that serious tone. If you’re going to be entertaining, continue to be entertaining. It will preserve your resources as much as possible.
Okay, the last thing I want to bring up in the kind of where we are portion of this is we need to really think carefully about the user, so hopefully eventual customer, and what their intent is. And the prevailing wisdom has been, you know, for every platform you need to separate your content out. So for Facebook, it’s about that human connection. For Instagram, it’s visual experiences and videos and kind of that influencer cult mentality. TikTok is entertainment and memes and reels, trendy dances, etc. LinkedIn and X are for staying informed either professionally or with current events, etc. But actually these are only the top reasons that someone uses social media.
So if we look at later this one, again, you don’t have to read all of this here. But for instance, when we look at Facebook, yes, 72% of people are on Facebook because they want to connect with family and friends. But literally every other reason to be on social media is around 55% or higher. So you don’t have to completely split your content streams based on, well, this works on this platform and this works on this platform. Preserve your resources and start working towards content that makes sense for the product, for you, for the author, and let the content flow out to those platforms as it will.
The last thing I’ll say here, and this is my final bullet here, is we as organisations or individuals are kind of in the unfortunate situation right now of being on the back pedal of social media change, this kind of disruption that’s happening around the space. And so what that means is we’re often reacting to things that are changing. The algorithm has shifted. Ads are performing in a different way. Now we have AI, all of these different things that kind of disrupt the way we are told to do things. This reactionary mindset I think is incredibly unsustainable for our industry and we need to really have a reset. So let’s kind of talk about where we can go from here knowing what we know.
So if any of you are subscribed to the BookNet Canada newsletter like I am, you will have seen a very important, wonderful goodie in your inbox today, the “Book Marketing Report for 2026.” I highly encourage you to give a read of that. So my numbers here might actually be a little out of date now. But what we do know is that over the course of a week, almost half of Canada’s population engages with a book in some way. That’s a lot of people. That’s over 30 million people. Plenty of customers hanging out in Canada for us to hawk our books to. But for some reason, Canadian publishers in particular only hold, this is the new number, 6.2% of the total market share of books purchased in Canada. What that tells me as somebody who’s been in marketing for over a decade now is that we really need to rethink how we’re looking at books, how we talk about books, how we share books, because we’re not reaching that market as thoroughly as we could be.
In terms of different marketing approaches, I’m going to go into each one individually briefly here. So let’s start with social media. As I said, social media strategies really need a reset. And I think part of the problem is when you’re in a volatile space and disruption is happening at every corner, our immediate knee-jerk reaction is we must follow that trend. We must change this thing. We must abandon what we think was working or not working because this is what a generalist is telling us to do. But the book industry is a very specific beast. We know this in retail also. If you’ve done any kind of sales to a retail organisation, it’s not the same as selling a handbag or a piece of food or any other kind of tech. Books are very unique beasts, and we need to recognise and accept that our marketing is always going to be a unique beast also.
So ultimately, what I’m trying to say here is we actually shouldn’t let social media dictate the conversation. Social media is only a tool. It is really just a distribution channel for another way to sell a book. And as you can see on the right side here, we have a lot of social media channels now. They’re only going to get larger. We have, including here, five now for just Canada, just in Canada. These were developed in Canada within the last five or six years. I encourage you to start thinking about social media as just almost like an RSS tool. If you’re familiar with Web 2.0, RSS way back in the day when you could just subscribe to a blog and get information, that’s really what social media is going to feel like also. So now is the time to rethink our social media strategies, really think about how can we build content that works for us, that has our unique voice, our unique message, and is not being driven by the urgency of social media change. Okay. And we can, of course, talk more about specific examples later in the presentation or in the Q&A. So please do submit your questions.
In terms of advertising, I really think it’s critical for everybody who buys ads to think very carefully about diversifying their investment. It can feel almost habitual every season for every book. We’re going to run a Meta ad. We’re going to run a quick Google ad. The event’s coming out in 30 days, so we’ll run an ad for two weeks, that kind of thing. And we’re always buying ads in the same places, and we’re always using the same targets, and we’re always using the same messaging. And what ends up happening at some point is the ads work, but they’re not building momentum, which means that every single time you’re running an ad, you’re actually starting over. You’re having to find the audience again. You’re having to create another message. You’re having to, again, that kind of reactionary space with advertising.
So this is especially important because I know that digital advertising is going to be facing disruption pretty soon. We’re already starting to see it. You know, Meta just lost a huge lawsuit. And is that going to change how advertising is able to run on the platform? Google may change the way it does display ads, or there may be a new ad block tool that blocks all ads from view. Amazon could lose its market share. Stranger things have happened. How are your customers going to continue to find your books if the primary vehicle through which you have run ads disappears in a month, right? Are you building enough diversity, and are you retaining your new customers so that you are able to market to them consistently over a longer period of time? What’s the strategy your particular organisation or company needs to be able to perform better over time? And I’ve posed some other questions here for you to think about as you think about your strategies.
Okay. So now let’s talk about influencers. I often make the distinction between influencers with a capital I and influencers with a lowercase i, which I think would encapsulate a lot of the influencers that we connect with in the book industry. I’ll actually give a shout out here. BookNet Canada just came out with a podcast episode with Naomi Bacon, who is the founder of Tandem Collective. It’s an amazing podcast about influencer marketing, which I highly encourage everyone to listen to. But she, I think, had actually a better terminology for it, which was a macro creator, which is someone who has a higher subscription model, like thousands and thousands, or a micro creator, which is like maybe a thousand followers.
The key point with an influencer marketing campaign is that I would use them for communities you will never reach as an organisation on your own. So, same advice I would give to an author. If you have built a platform that, and let’s say you’re a children’s book publisher where you are publishing and promoting a lot of children’s books, and then suddenly you decide to do an acquisition for an adult fiction title, the established audience you have created is not ready to receive that product. They are expecting, anticipating children’s books, and so you may lose a great amount of promotion, of sales, if you’re only marketing to that group you’ve already established. Influencers can bridge the gap. So that particular publisher could go look for adult fiction reviewers and put most of their marketing into that plus ads and have a more robust campaign than what I would traditionally suggest, which is reach out to your mailing list, remarket to your particular audience. So influencers are there to bridge the gap, to fill in the spaces that you can’t reach, whether that’s a platform you’re not on, a genre you are not commonly talking about, etc.
But the bigger thing also to keep in mind is, you know, Canada was able to successfully do influencer marketing for the last few years without paying influencers. That time is at an end. The bigger the accounts, we are increasingly finding at Serif that all of these accounts have brand managers, which is good for the creator. It means it’s sustainable for them, but it means they’re also out of budget for a number of publishers in Canada in particular, usually starting at like $5,000 or more for one piece of content. So it can be quite… We can feel priced out of that situation.
But in lieu of budgets, the things that have always worked for us will continue to work. Build a relationship. Start with thinking about maybe changing the way you’re doing contesting. Have the influencer run the contest and get the cachet of running that particular exclusive contest or set up an affiliate programme where if someone uses a code at checkout, that person’s earning a revenue on the amount of books that they were able to push sales for. Treat them almost like a bookseller. You could also do partnerships for events, VIP access, swag of course, but thinking really carefully about what is sustainably achievable for you as an organisation, no matter how big you are, to build a relationship with an influencer if paying them out of pocket is just not on the table.
Okay, I will go through this particular slide a little quickly only because it’s a huge topic, but I want to give the high notes here for you. So when we are creating copy, which we’ve created a lot of copy in this industry, one of the things that I have noticed, and I actually just gave a presentation on this in terms of book descriptions, is book descriptions have kind of been relegated to a passive piece of marketing copy. So it’s not even on the back cover of the book anymore. It’s on the interior. And if you go to Amazon, product descriptions are kind of hidden. So descriptions almost feel like a non-starter with marketing, but that could not be further from the truth.
What needs to happen is we need to change the way we write copy. We’re in the era of GEO/AEO, which if you’re not familiar with these acronyms are generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation. So, GEO is like when someone asks Claude or Gemini, “Hey, recommend me a book,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But answer engine is like Google summary. So you search for something and an AI summary appears, and then you never click a website to go find out more. Websites, the way we write websites, the type of materials that we have on websites needs to be more robust. And for book descriptions, we need to be loading those descriptions with keywords, the answers to questions we can predict a customer might be asking. So if it’s a nonfiction book in particular, you should be mentioning as much as possible contextually in the book description. I would actually consider your online retail description as like, you know, metadata heavy, whatever, whatever. But on your website, I might actually consider an expanded book description, something that has much more information about it to build credential, to build authority. So when someone searches for that, that product’s website page gets shown as the top result over a retail website. This can expand out to social media because social media is now SEO-rich. So you can search for something on Google and an Instagram post will appear in the search results.
You should also be encouraging your authors to develop better copy for their websites. If you are a bookstore on this call, do you have a page on your website that talks about your curation, who you are, how important you are to your particular piece of community, or is it just the shop? Think about extra things you can be adding to further accentuate the information around who you are. Of course, the invisible, deeply important metadata and keywording. The thing I’ll note here is please don’t make up your keywords. Keywords should be data-backed. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner. You can use predictive text in search fields to figure out if your keywords are real or not.
And the last one I want to mention is kind of a hot tip. Alt text on images, incredibly important for accessibility, of course. But if you have good alt text, you can also appear in image search. I have personally done a blog series 15 years ago and it gets over a million views every year just because of the alt text on my images. That’s it. That’s all I’ve done. So, alt text can be incredibly important.
So now that we kind of know the playing field, let’s dive in a little bit deeper and we’re going to start with data-informed strategy. So, I have a little takeaway sheet for everybody on the presentation today. You’ll get this in your email and it basically looks like this. It’s a little toolkit to help you build a data-informed strategy. And it has all the extra information about data to be paying attention to and where to find good data. But the key methodology is that while something is working, while we see it as working through data results, we can continue to stay the course. Even if we feel like a lot of disruption is happening around us, if suddenly engagement is kind of like tanking, it seems everywhere but we’re still okay, don’t change your method because it’s still working. But you’re keeping an eye out and pivoting as needed. That’s the kind of key methodology behind a data-informed strategy.
The really important thing, especially these days with, again, the decentralisation of social media, the decentralisation of the internet is that data shouldn’t be single stream. One of the reasons that I linked that social media report at the beginning of this presentation is that they are collating data sets from eight different sources. So, it’s a pretty accurate picture of what social media use looks like these days. The same should be happening internally at your business. Are you looking at Meta to Google results? Do they seem like they match? Is something happening there? Are you looking at your age gaps in social media versus advertising versus web traffic? Are your Mailchimp open rates and clicks translating into sales on your website? Are all of these kind of processes being reviewed regularly?
Choosing your baseline data carefully is also incredibly important. So if you have never tracked data before, what we call baseline data is basically a 90-day window of very functionally the same data, not doing anything special, just doing what you’ve always done. And for 90 days, tracking that data, getting your averages, and from there you start experimenting and then you’ll know if something is working or not working.
So when I say don’t make decisions from outlier data here, that means let’s say you have a really great month in February for social media. One of your posts went super viral. You got the video cut just right, the music was trending, everything was great. In March, you’re going to see a sudden drop in your engagement unless you have another viral post. March’s numbers will look negative if you’re comparing to February. So instead you should compare March to January or March to March of the previous year, something that is more apples to apples rather than apples to CDs. So think about your baseline data very carefully because you’re going to make a lot of decisions based on that. So it should be as pure a data set as possible.
And then finally, we want to really understand where our sales and purchasing decisions happen. Again, everyone’s going to have a bias around this is where the decision is happening. This is like really important channel for us, or we’ve always done ads here and that’s been really important to us. But if we don’t really understand how those purchase decisions are happening, we may be misinterpreting the data we’re seeing. So it’s really important to look at trends rather than a single data point. Again, we can look back at like, for instance, the age factor for discovery, which I showed previously. So we get a lot of clicks on social media and on the social media, it’ll say your ages are 25 to 35, let’s say, but then you go to your website, Shopify or something like that. And the data is telling you, no, most of the purchases are from 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds. There’s some gap here that wasn’t social media driving those sales. Something else made those sales happen and we need to find out what it was.
Okay. So, what does this look like in practice? When we are using data to make our initial decisions around what to do and what not to do, we’re going to start prioritising the things that show returns. So a good example for us at Serif is we’re on Instagram and we prioritised it for many years because we’re a book marketing team and we’ve got to have books on Instagram. That’s really important. But what we found over time is actually we weren’t getting any referrals from social media. No one was going to our social media to say, “Yes, we’re going to hire Serif to do book marketing because their book marketing looks great,” or something like that. What actually ended up happening for us on Instagram, which had the highest return, was we were building relationships with influencers. And that was where the real moneymaker for us happened because then we could tell clients emailing us, “We have relationships with 80-something odd influencers in Canada, and we can send your book to them.”
And so for us, the mental shift happened where Instagram was not a priority for us. Actually, our priority was to build relationships in the direct message space and in the comments space of influencers rather than creating our own content. And so you also, as a business or individual, need to look at what are the social media channels that are really driving the results that you care about. Not that everyone’s telling me you have to be on Instagram, you have to be on LinkedIn. Anytime you hear that, you need to pause and really think about, but why? What is the goal you have for that platform? If it’s not meeting that goal, can it meet that goal? Is your audience there? All of those big questions kind of come into play with a data-driven strategy.
In terms of advertising, thinking about data in the sense of, whas been the click-through return or engagement rate over time for this particular platform or target? So maybe you have bought ads using the same target and the same methodology for several years now because it’s process and habitual. But when’s the last time you tried a new age bracket? When’s the last time you tried a new outlet for your advertising? Maybe you have reached peak saturation with that subscriber base and you need to go somewhere else. So for me, example, a good example would be, I use a lot of Meta ads for this particular client. But in the last couple of years, we’ve been like, “Let’s actually try Reddit instead. Let’s get a different audience, a different vibe and see if we can grow that audience even larger because we’re seeing it stagnating somewhere.”
And finally, a really easy way to kind of keep your strategy nimble is to know who your competitors are. Same with like a comp title for anybody doing acquisitions, we want to make sure that we are aligning with best practices that are actually working in our field. When we’re looking at comps, we want to make sure that any of our competitors that we choose, if you’re choosing another bookstore, if you’re choosing another publisher, they should either be at your level or above your level in terms of engagement rate, not followers, but engagement rate. Look at how many comments they’re getting, DMs they’re getting, reshares they’re getting, Instagram shares, all of those metrics without you having to peek in the backend. Followers don’t matter because followers age out. You need to be looking at their current active engagement rate.
Okay. So now let’s move into what I like to call values-driven harmonisation. So that’s data is going to tell you ideal scenarios. It’s up to you as a business owner or marketing professional to take that data and convert it into something that is functional and sustainable and values-aligned with your organisation.
So one of the things that I think social media trend chasing really obfuscates for a lot of us, because again, we’re in that reactionary mindset, is that we forget that social media is just a tool to connect with our audience. That’s all it is. And users don’t engage with products. They engage with the people talking about the product. And so that’s why any social media trend, including those trendy TikTok reels, the reason they do well is because people find humour or connection through the people they’re seeing on the other side of the lens. This doesn’t always have to translate into someone has to physically be in front of the camera or around the camera video, but it needs to feel direct. It needs to feel like a person is talking to them. It can be messy. And a word that I’m starting to see more and more in the online space is something called friction. It needs to feel not necessarily conflict but there’s something that’s keeping you grounded in the material you’re seeing.
And we can see why friction is important with the very short-lived history of Sora AI. Sora AI dropped. It lasted four months and it’s now being discontinued. And that was an AI-driven platform, fully AI. But the other part of that story that doesn’t get shared as much is Sora had a huge download, people interested in it. And within a month, the user drop-off retention ratio was 99% left, 1% stayed. So that human connection, that human resource, again, the way you handsell books is going to be the gold mine of how to talk about books in social media. Forget trends. Let’s just be organic and talk about books in the way that excites us because that will excite somebody else.
The next thing about a values-driven harmonisation is we have to really honestly think about resource. And for a lot of publishers, resource is time, money, your capacity to be creative. If you’re tired all the time, you can’t be creative. So we need to actively be considering what is our true resource with the data we’re seeing. And so again, data will show ideal, but everyone needs to be thinking about the reality of their capacity. And that can mean being ruthless towards low-return activities.
So if you’re finding, hey, social media is really cool, love it, but it takes us 15 hours to do a reel and I could run an ad that has higher conversion in four hours, advertising is going to win 9 out of 10 times, right? Unless you don’t have the money resource. But if you think about time and money as the same thing, how much is 15 hours of staff time worth, right? So, thinking about what are the ways that you can cut down on the amount of stuff you’re doing?
We’re seeing this a lot outside of the online marketing world with author events. So, people are pulling back from author events because they were expensive and time-intensive, and you only sell a couple dozen books maybe. It’s not a good time investment. We need to use the same philosophy when we’re thinking about online marketing.
The end goal here is to build an ecosystem that is self-regenerating. So it takes care of itself. It builds itself over time. And we need to understand that the building of that is going to take a lot more time, but once it’s set up in place and running on its own, the dividends are immense later. And so what tools, what platforms do you need? I’ll go ahead and give you kind of a spoiler here for most of you. It’s going to be your mailing list. Mailing list is incredibly important.
Okay, so let’s get into some practical rapid-fire tips. For socials, this means prioritising content distribution by platform, which we’ve talked about. Seeking out communities that are already established with influencers and with comments. Creating platform-agnostic content, content that can easily be shared across many platforms. Looking underneath aesthetic to understand true performance. We can think something looks awesome, but if it doesn’t test well, the aesthetics never mattered. It’s always about timing, keywords. What was the caption? What was the context within which it was posted? I put this as boldly as I can. UTMs. These are a signifier tag that you add to the end of a URL. It basically tells all kinds of trackers where your person came from, where did they go afterwards. Really important. You can do these for free. You don’t have to know any special code. Just search Google URL campaign builder or just search Google UTM and it’ll show up in the search results for you.
Next, we’ll be going into advertising. So for advertising, you want to be rigorous in your review of the data. You want to employ remarketing, which is marketing to people that went to your website or went to your social media accounts, which is very easy to do. And you also want to be setting new target goals regularly. New audiences, new age groups, new platforms, new channels, really make sure that you’re refreshing your user base as much as possible, even though you’re trying to retain the people you already have. Remember that diversification and experimentation are key. And again, UTMs, really important.
For influencers, we’re seeking out influencers on platforms you’re not already on or for book topics or genres you don’t normally publish. In every other case, be your own influencer. Think of your content that way. And then of course, personal discount codes. So rather than giving someone just like a Fall 2026 discount code, give them their name 50 or something like that so that it feels more personal.
Moving on to websites, we’re going to be building out for GEO, AEO, and SEO. And through that, we’re preempting questions. So what are people putting into these querying engines? Let’s go ahead and answer those in advance. Making sure credentials are mentioned vividly. Adding links to your media and award announcements and not just quoted text. So in this case, if you’re from the early days of SEO, that inbound/outbound link ratio, it’s actually really important again, not just for SEO, but for building credentials, for showing an AI engine that you’re being referenced a lot. And in some cases, on Amazon ads, we actually have a question about Amazon A10, which is a kind of search algorithm. Those external links matter a lot to ranking in search.
For mailing lists, sign-up forms at every stage of the customer journey. So do you have people asking…getting their email on your homepage at the end of the cart? Are you putting it on social media regularly, funnelling people towards the most stable channel for marketing? Engage with that list often, even if it’s low-content delivery. One of my favourite publisher newsletters in Canada is actually McGill-Queen’s University Press. They don’t write any content for their newsletter. It is just the book information. Out now today, here’s this cool book that we already know you’re interested in, because when you signed up, we asked you what genres you wanted to hear about. So, really think about what is the way you can maximise resource and time with what works. Your number one priority for disruption management is your mailing list. People don’t change their emails. They do age out of social media or quit it because it’s suddenly scandalous to be on that platform.
Contesting, we’re not doing contests for follows or engagement. So, comment for entry or follow for entry or share for entry. Those are old-fashioned and not effective at going as far as contesting could go. Instead, sign up for our mailing list to be entered to win. And if you can’t share a link, like if you’re on Instagram, you can use tools that can help you share the link. So DM “bookstack” or comment “books” to get the link and we’ll DM you kind of situation, which we see everywhere. And every contest and every mailing list sign-up link that’s being shared on social media should have a custom landing page either on your website or through your mail management system.
Custom landing pages are really important because when people click, they want to immediately know where they are, that it’s the correct link. There’s a lot of mistrust if you get a link that takes you somewhere you’re not expecting. So don’t send them to your regular page. Make sure it’s like, you know, “Thanks for your interest in this book. To enter to win, give us your email address and we’ll sign you up for our newsletter and get in touch with you on this date kind of thing.”
Okay, I’m happy to relinquish my slides here to move into the question format. I’m really excited to hear what everyone has to ask. One of the things I’ll note here is if there’s any question you have that I’m not able to get to today, feel free to send me an email at [email protected].
Ainsley: Thank you so much, Ariel. That was really interesting, informative, engaging. And I feel like people might think that we’ve asked you to be our influencer with the amount of plugging you did for BookNet products, but we love it. I’m just going to remind people, you can put your questions in the Q&A panel and there’s quite a few. It’s hard to know where to start here, but I think maybe we’ll go back to influencers. So one of our attendees is asking, is it really worthwhile trying to create relationships with influencers? They’re saying that their return with influencers most of the time is a single photo of their book placed in a nicely curated setting. They’re wondering, does that do much for them?
Ariel: So I think that when it comes to influencer resource, again, we need to be very engaged with what their metrics are. If someone is asking to be an influencer for you, or if you’re reaching out because you know, like they read books of that thing, how many comments happen on the posts that they’re doing recently? Like again, ignore follower count. I’ve seen plenty of people who have tens of thousands of followers and five comments. And then I see a lot of people who have like 1,200 followers, but they have like 60 comments. What’s the quality of those comments that’s happening?
For people who aren’t doing publicity for their books, so people who aren’t reaching out to media, who aren’t getting a lot of media, who don’t expect a lot of media, influencers can be a great way to get media for your books, but it’s always got to be data-backed, right? So if you’re just kind of like, yeah, I’m reaching out to a bunch of influencers. Do you have an agreement in place with that influencer? What is the nature of the coverage that they’re offering? When we were doing influencer marketing packages, we would ask people to submit, what is your idea for coverage for this particular book? So it’s a little bit more in terms of building that relationship. It’s also like, let’s set the playing field and everyone have the same expectations so that no one is disappointed on either side.
Ainsley: So you can ask a bit more of them and expect them to return something that you’ve all agreed on. Smart. So is there a specific method or tool that you use to identify influencers or is it just scrolling?
Ariel: So there are a number of tools. Facebook actually has an influencer channel on Facebook, not Instagram, where you can go to an Instagram marketplace and be like, “I want to work with this influencer and arrange pricing and all of that.” We still do the old-fashioned organic approach. We want to find people on various platforms. Just recently, we were doing some influencer outreach for an event, so we had to find a bunch of influencers that were local to that space and also readers or people who just wanted to feel like readers, like, you know, kind of go to those spaces. So you can use tools. There’s a whole bunch of agencies that will connect you with influencers. Actually, kind of going back to that podcast episode, Naomi Bacon at Tandem does fantastic influencer engagement with like read-alongs but it’s really going to depend on the book.
Influencers are not right for every book, I’ll say that. And similarly, finding influencers can be a pretty time-intensive process, especially if you’re starting from scratch because it’s a new book. What I often recommend is connect with your authors because if they’re in those spaces, if they expect influencers to be engaging with this book, they probably have a good idea of which accounts to start with. And from there, you can look at who are those accounts engaging with? Who are they following? The bigger the account, the fewer followings they have. So it’s pretty easy to find kind of like pod friends who are doing influencer in the same circle.
Ainsley: Thank you. Yeah, that sounds smart. Changing gears a little bit here. We have a question about a company that publishes a range of materials, poetry, regional non-fiction, fiction. And they’re saying when they have a disparate list like that, it’s harder to gain an audience and engagement. And they’re wondering if you have any suggestions about how to approach it.
Ariel: When you have a really disparate list, unless there’s kind of, like, a unifying curatorial reason to have all of them, what I can often recommend is for the organic marketing, so social media, go with the stuff that’s easier to get out there. So like poetry can actually be kind of hard to do organically, unless you’ve built relationships with that community already. Non-fiction, there’s a lot of keywords in there. It’s really easy to build natural engagement with that type of content. And so save your ad money for the stuff that’s harder to push on your list. So, almost like triaging which marketing channels get which promotions.
But again, going back to the mailing list, just ask people on your mailing list what are the genres you care about? And then you’re only sending them books that they have opted in to receive, and you’ll get higher engagement, higher purchases hopefully. And the same can happen with your advertising campaign. So you run a campaign like, “Oh, we don’t have a lot of people that have marked poetry as an interest on our mailing list because we have this user data now. So let’s run an ad campaign that’s just for our poetry books and make sure that when they sign up they get tagged as a poetry reader.”
And then you are building your list kind of over time. And again, as I mentioned, it’s intensive building this from the beginning, but it pays dividends pretty quickly. So thinking just like, even if you have that disparate list, what’s the majority of that list, right? Like, what are two things that can kind of live in concert with each other? That’s your social media strategy. And then everything else is influencer, advertising, publicity, like all those kinds of pieces.
Ainsley: So it’s kind of like you’ve got a menu of options and you can choose the ones that really kind of fit best with the content. So, there’s another question here about leaving social media. And you mentioned leaving social media that’s not showing returns. Do you have any recommendations for how to best leave platforms that we don’t want to use anymore? There’s lots of reasons.
Ariel: We’ve been fielding this question a lot. Here’s what I’ll say. If there’s an ethical reason that you are wanting to leave the platform, there’s enough overlap with other platforms to be able to do that and not miss out too much. But the caveat is you don’t get to choose where your readers are, right? So if your readers are on Facebook or Instagram or X for whatever reason, you kind of have to be there, but maybe you don’t have to be there as a social media user. You just have the account so that you can run ads.
So, I find that it’s helpful, even if it’s like a parked domain kind of thing, a situation like having the platform, keeping the platform is helpful if you plan to run ads, because for instance, you can’t run Facebook ads unless you have a Facebook page. You can’t run Reddit ads unless you have a Reddit account, right? So keeping those there for the authority and the ease of being able to do that particular piece of marketing is important. But there are so many options that if you’re finding like, “Why are we on this social media platform? It doesn’t work for us.” Absolutely be ruthless. Get rid of it. I am never going to be somebody that tells you you’ve got to be on all the platforms. You’ve got to be everywhere that a book reader is. No, you only have to be there in some capacity if your readership is there, and that’s the only rule. So everything else is flexible.
Ainsley: Great. I think we have time for maybe one more question. Oh, this is tough. Maybe, what do you think is the highest impact platform for bricks-and-mortar or online bookstores?
Ariel: Oh, for bookstores, definitely Instagram. Instagram because it has geotargeting organically. So basically, if you’re like you’re tagging your location and things like that, you’re going to appear in local users’ feeds. Bookstores are highly visual. So there’s plenty to do and enjoy in that space. But you don’t necessarily have to be super active. But having a decent presence is good.
Ainsley: Maybe we have time to squeeze one more in. Are there any digital book marketing platforms that you think are going to surge forward? Is there going to be one big platform?
Ariel: I don’t know if there’s going to be one big platform ever again. I think things are trending towards smaller, more niche spaces, which means we need to just be smarter. What I will say is that book engine discovery is changing a little bit. So like, for instance, five years ago, we were like, there’s only Goodreads, maybe LibraryThing kind of thing. But StoryGraph is on the rise. If you haven’t heard of StoryGraph, it’s the Goodreads competitor. It uses AI in a very interesting way. But I won’t get into it here for time. But we need to know where the book discovery platforms are and make sure that we’re there. But otherwise, it’s really about making sure you’re keeping on top of how discovery happens, which is the words we use to talk about things. So yeah.
Ainsley: Well, thanks again, Ariel. That was really a great presentation. I feel like I learned a lot, like that the average person is on six and a half channels. Seems high, but I don’t doubt your sources.
Ariel: It’s also because we consider more things social media than we used to. I don’t really consider…
Ainsley: Yeah, I started adding up the ones I’m on. I was like, “Oh, yeah, that tracks.”
Ariel: Well, thank you so much for the invitation. It was really lovely to be here. Very excited to hopefully get some questions by email if I didn’t get to your question. And I hope everyone has a great day.
Ainsley: Thank you. So before we go, we’d love it if the attendees could provide some feedback on this session. We’ll drop a link to the survey in the chat. Please take a couple of minutes to fill it out. We’ll also be posting a recording of this session, and we’ll be emailing you a link to it as soon as it’s available. We also invite you to keep an eye on the Tech Forum website, bnctechforum.ca, where during the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing BookNet’s yearly product presentations, where we share insights into the latest updates and plans for the future, which is equally useful for current and potential users of our products. And lastly, we’d like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their support through the Canada Book Fund. And thanks to everyone for attending.
Ariel: Wonderful. Thanks so much, everybody.