Putting Reddit on the Radar: Expanding beyond Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads

While many publishers and authors are already using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads, Reddit should also be on your list of go-to social media platforms for connecting with enthusiastic readers.

Reddit, the self-described front page of the internet, is a website where members submit all sorts of content, from aggregated news to kitten videos. It operates by using subreddits. Subreddits are communities within Reddit for members to share information or discuss news and opinions related to that subreddit. Content is up-voted, and the most popular content makes it to r/all, which is one of the early places for content to appear before it goes viral.

There are subreddits for everything, for birds with human arms, goats defying gravity, and just about anything else you can think of. But, there are also subreddits for the hundreds of thousands of book-loving Redditors, too: Books, YA Lit, Fantasy, and audiobooks to name a few of the most popular ones.

Reddit’s most vibrant book conversations happen around personal recommendations. Subreddits like r/SuggestMeABook concentrate explicitly on personal recommendations rather than formal reviews (although a recommendation is, in part, a review). Book clubs are also a strong organizing principle for book talk on Reddit. Some subreddits are specifically designed as book clubs (like r/The Betterment Book Club) and some have a book club component (like r/Urban Fantasy).

https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/b88890/game_of_thrones_season_8_finally_starts_on_the/

Unlike many other popular social media platforms, including the ones with the strongest bookish presences, Reddit skews male. According to Pew, approximately 67% of Redditors are male.

For more demographic insight, the subreddit moderators for r/Fantasy have been running a census of their members for the past few years. You can see census results here. Included are self-reports from Reddit fantasy readers about where they buy books, how much they spend on books annually, plus other genres they read in.

Like any other reading community, the moderators on Reddit want to learn more about their communities so that they can provide content that their community will be most excited for. For r/Fantasy, some of this content takes the form of AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”), Writer of the Day, Group Reads, and Book Bingo. All subreddit moderators are listed on the right-hand side of a subreddit’s homescreen.

NetGalley member and moderator of r/Fantasy, MikeOfThePalace describes the origins of r/Fantasy’s Writer of the Day program. “The self-publishing boom is one of the best things to happen to publishing in decades, and finding those hidden gems is always amazing (plus hipster bragging rights for reading someone before they were cool, of course). [So] we have our Writer of the Day program specifically for the not-yet-famous. The community knows that Writer of the Day is someone they won’t have heard of, and generally approach them with an attitude of looking for something new and supporting aspiring authors.”

MikeOfThePalace told NetGalley Insights that he and his fellow moderators are already being pitched new authors and titles from publicists across sci-fi publishing to increase visibility for their newest books.

While engaging with Redditors is a bit more convoluted than simply asking for a review, Reddit engagement has the capacity to reach new audiences and to filter up to a much broader audience through up-voting. Publishers could consider submitting their authors for an AMA, sending relevant subreddit mods a NetGalley widget or collaborating on unique ways to boost visibility for their titles for an eager audience.

We hope more publishers will keep Reddit on their radar in the future for social media influencer outreach.

For more on industry best practices, subscribe to our weekly newsletter. And, stay tuned for more Reddit coverage. We’ll be talking about the most powerful tool for publishers and authors on Reddit, the AMA.

Beyond the Book with Women’s Media Group

How Authors, Publishers and Agents are Developing New Revenue Streams

To help their authors make a splash and to stay financially viable, publishers are on the hunt for additional revenue streams. They’re launching ad-supported podcasts with authors as experts, teaching online courses, partnering with brands, and more. And last week in Penguin Random House’s Maya Angelou Auditorium, Women’s Media Group gathered several heavy hitters who have track records helping authors in this arena. The panelists discussed developing content that audiences want while maintaining an authentic feeling of connection. Here’s a taste of what they covered:

Pay attention to your audience at all stages

Christy Fletcher, founder of Fletcher & Company, described her approach to creating new revenue streams for her author clients as creating a “noisy, robust launch while listening closely to the audience.” This means paying attention to what platforms they are using, what questions they are asking, and what other media they are consuming. Then, she is better able to amplify the work her authors are already doing and give that audience new material that they will enjoy.

Kathy Doyle, VP of Podcasts at Macmillan rigorously researches before committing seriously to a new venture. Before she started working with Ellen Hendricksen on what would become The Savvy Psychologist, Doyle and her team had already conducted a study to determine that psychology was of interest to their pre-existing audience. With that audience insight in place, she was able to confidently launch a new project with the assurance that there was an audience waiting for that content.

But the research doesn’t stop there. Doyle advised the audience to keep track of podcast appearances or online tutorials in a marketing and publicity calendar so that when publishers see a spike of interest, they can better trace it back to specific timing and strategy and replicate it in future efforts.

Scaling intimacy

During the Q&A, audience member Leah Siepel, founder of Leah Siepel Courses asked the panel about scaling intimacy with larger online courses. She told the audience that in her own work building online courses for clients, courses with higher degrees of contact between the educator and the audience led to higher course completion rates. She wanted to know how to build bigger audiences without sacrificing the personal attention that leads to greater end-user satisfaction. The panelists all agreed that this is a challenge when growing audiences, and that successful online courses must be more engaging than a video of someone talking for 30 minutes.

Christy Fletcher described how she and Gretchen Rubin tackled this issue for The Happiness Project Experience, an immensely popular year-long course with a waiting list. They created smaller groups of participants within the wider course, using a cohort-based model with monthly modules and live call-ins to help members feel more connected to each other and to Rubin. Moderator Stephanie Bowen suggested filming lessons in front of a live audience to help viewers feel more like a part of an active learning community. Bowes suggested working with a company like Creative Live. Joan O’Neil, Vice President at Skillsoft Books, incorporates visuals to give online courses more of a Ted Talk feel. With options like live call-ins, production companies creating live lessons, and more, it’s possible to create truly dynamic and engaging online courses that resonate with viewers.

Podcast revenue model changes

Kathy Doyle described the changes that are happening in podcast advertising. Currently, most podcasts use live-read ads where hosts read ad copy for a product. This method capitalizes on the intimacy that podcast listeners feel when they hear a host speaking directly into their ears. Ads read by hosts feel like recommendations from a friend. However, as Doyle noted, the process of matching podcasts to products to create natural-sounding ads is both highly manual and highly time-consuming. Plus, podcast listeners are quick to recognize when an ad doesn’t sound natural or doesn’t fit with the host’s brand. Podcasts are beginning to go the way of digital advertising more broadly, which is to say programmatic. Increasingly, brands will be able to buy podcast audiences rather than listeners to a specific show. Programmatic advertising is show-agnostic, meaning that it will be able to, for example, target young urban parents who are likely to purchase a meal kit subscription rather than all listeners of The Racist Sandwich.

With any effort to build in new revenue streams or platforms for authors, the key is to listen to what their audience wants and to provide an engaging and authentic experience.

Speakers

Kathy Doyle, Vice President, Podcasts, Macmillan Publishers
Christy Fletcher, Founder and CEO, Fletcher & Company
Joan O’Neil, Vice President, Skillsoft Books
Moderator: Stephanie Bowen, Senior Manager, Publishing Development & Author Platforms, Penguin Random House

Women’s Media Group, founded in 1973, is a New York-based nonprofit association of women who have achieved prominence in many fields of media. Their 250-plus members, drawn from book, magazine, and newspaper publishing; film, television, online and other digital media, meet, collaborate, inform and support one another as well as mentor young women interested in publishing careers. They seek to advance the position of all women through the power of communication and media. Find out about their upcoming events here.

How To Pitch: Sarah Miniaci, Senior Account Executive at Smith Publicity

Finding placement in relevant media channels is integral to a book’s success. After all, nobody will read or buy a book if they’ve never heard of it! Securing those crucial placements requires pitching. In our How to Pitch series, we hear from some of the publicists who use NetGalley to learn more about their strategies and successes.

We’re thrilled to kick off this series with Sarah Miniaci, Senior Account Executive at Smith Publicity.

We know that pitching books to important media is just one part of what you do. How do crafting the right message, finding the right person to contact, and other pitching-related projects this fit into your workflow?

You’re absolutely right that pitching books to important media is just one of the many initiatives a book publicist undertakes – but, it’s an incredibly important one, and it is the effort we spend the most time on by far in any given week. The many factors we take into account in crafting a pitch – and then identifying the right contact to send it to – include but aren’t limited to: the book’s plot, themes, timely topics, geographic tie-in’s, and key messages, the author’s background, talking points in relation to the book, local market hooks, and past media credentials and/or existing media relationships, what’s going on in the news, what’s trending in the entertainment publishing industry (and/or genre landscape) at large, and what changes are afoot in the media (from contact role updates to new outlets opening to other outlets shuttering their doors or changing focus, establishing new sections, etc.). So, it’s a lot of work – a full-time job, truly! – but work that is very much worth it when it results in the right coverage placement for the right book at the right time.

How do you determine the right people to pitch? Do you have certain contacts that you send every book to, or is the decision really based on each particular book?

As full-time book publicists we have a great benefit when it comes to developing our pitch lists, which is that we spend all day every day immersed in the literary media landscape – and so we are able to develop a strong gauge on which books are suitable for (and appealing to) which contacts. That said, there is no single contact to whom I would send each and every book. A self-published romance novel is not going to be relevant to the same media contacts to whom we pitch high-profile business non-fiction. For that matter, there can be great discrepancies even within the same genre landscape – two separate thrillers novels, both with October 2018 publication dates, can and will usually have very different publicity plans. To establish our pitch targets, we’re really looking in-depth at the book and author, and from there determining how and who we’re going to present them to as a good candidate for coverage. Does the book have a complex female protagonist or is the narrator a young African-American man? Is it set in modern-day New York City or rural Missouri at the turn of the century? Is the author’s voice gritty and hyper-realistic or breezy and family-friendly? Every pitch list we create for every book we work on is painstakingly crafted and highly personalized, taking all of these factors and more into account.

What strategies do you use to make your pitch emails stand out?

Every publicist has their own quirks and executes their pitching a little differently, but the majority of pitching these days is conducted over email – at least as a first point of contact, and for print and online media almost exclusively. Some contacts for broadcast outlets, like radio and television, still like a good phone pitch. As professional publicists, it’s our job to know who likes to be pitched in what ways and act accordingly. Some contacts also like being pitched over social media – but, I will warn, most do not, and certainly not over Facebook (it’s a very personal platform and faux pas to get in touch this way unless otherwise explicitly stated!).

In terms of standing out with your pitch, it’s my sincere belief that if you’ve taken the time to identify the right contact to pitch, you won’t find it hard to stand out and get a response. You need to be confident that this kind of book from this kind of author is precisely the kind of thing that this contact has a demonstrated interest and solid background of editorial coverage in. It’s really important to be cognizant of the fact that the media and reviewers you are pitching don’t actually want to say “no” to the pitches they’re receiving. They love nothing better than a good pitch they can actually do something with. The more thoughtful, targeted, and helpful you can be to the media, the much better your chances of success become. Remember: media contacts and reviewers have jobs to do, too – be of value and you’ll find a lot of open doors and great relationships await!

What resources do you use to sharpen your skills for crafting just the right message in your pitch?

It may sound obvious, but the very best way to sharpen one’s pitching skills is, in my view, by reading and consuming media! To keep up with the magazine landscape, I personally love the Texture app. Twitter is a great way to stay engaged with outlets and media contacts and get a feel for what they’re covering. With newspapers, Twitter can also be helpful (you can follow not only publications but in many cases specific sections, too, such as @nytimesbooks, @globebooks, @latimesbooks, and the list goes on). I also like subscribing to the weekend editions of a couple of print newspapers. Not only is it a nice way to spend a Sunday morning with a little breakfast and pot of coffee, it’s also valuable in gaining a genuine understanding of the media coverage landscape for books. I’m a public radio junkie (as a Canadian, I can’t get enough of the CBC, but I love and often live-stream NPR and the BBC at my desk, too!) and love following #Bookstagram influencers and other media contacts I interact with a lot on Instagram. It really all goes back to the idea of getting to know the people and outlets you’re pitching. Once you get that, everything else really does fall into place.

What do you do if you don’t get a response?

In this day and age, we all have over-stuffed inboxes and it is completely understandable that not every email you send out is going to receive – or even warrant – an immediate response. That said, if I’m reaching out to a contact with a book that I genuinely believe is going to be a perfect fit for them, I don’t hesitate to follow up about a week after my initial pitch send – it’s always possible that they were on vacation, on deadline, or just otherwise distracted when the first one came through, but interested and grateful for the follow-up! Otherwise, if you’ve done your research and are confident that this contact should, in fact, be receiving your pitch (I keep stressing this because it really is the most important part), keep following up with new angles, story ideas, subject lines. Media contacts often get back to us weeks, months, and sometimes even years after the initial pitch was sent!

Give us your top tip for publicists!

Do your homework, read/listen to/watch media voraciously, and always remember: the person you’re pitching doesn’t want to have to say no, so make it easy for them to say yes!

NetGalley Insights tip: Authors, whether or not they are working with publicists, should also be thinking about these strategies. Authors can help their publicist, or use these strategies to pitch their own titles. Authors should be thinking about how to tie their books to media outlets, influencers, regional opportunities, and more. Authors should be consuming relevant media to learn more about how titles are being positioned, and who is talking about what.

Sarah Miniaci is a Senior Account Executive and Business Development Associate at Smith Publicity – one of the leading book publicity agencies in the world, with offices in Toronto and New Jersey. Founded in 1997, Smith Publicity has worked with more than 3,000 authors and publishers, from New York Times bestsellers to first time, self-published authors.

To connect with Sarah or another publicist at Smith Publicity, contact them at www.SmithPublicity.com or find them on social media @SmithPublicity on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

*Interviews have been edited for clarity and length.