NetGalley + Enchantress Marketing: Mastering Perpetual Discovery for Backlist

Last week we had the pleasure of sponsoring the U.S. Book Show, where we attended many excellent panels focused on how data, modern discoverability, and emerging technologies are shifting the landscape and addressing industry-wide challenges. Topics ranged from shaping trends by leveraging data for strategic acquisitions to reacting to trends using social listening tools and surfacing backlist, and, of course, experimenting with AI to streamline workflows. It was within this context that we took the stage with our session: “Beyond Launch: Mastering Perpetual Discovery for Backlist.” 

Moderated by Darcy Piedmonte (Director, NetGalley + Booktrovert), and including Kristina Radke (SVP, NetGalley + Booktrovert) and Ashleigh Heaton (Founder, Enchantress Marketing), we focused in on ideas for how to maintain sales velocity once the initial launch budget is spent. Here are a few highlights and takeaways from our conversation:

1. Marketing is Applied Human Psychology 

Ashleigh said it beautifully, “Marketing is applied human psychology. It is both an art and a science.” As with all science, robust data is essential. Marketers often rely on intuition and emotional connection with a project to fuel campaign decisions, which should always be the throughline of that work. And rich audience data can confirm intuitions or point out potential internalized bias or assumptions.

To get at the data, social listening tools can help publishers identify social media influencers, understand the online conversation for a brand or book, highlight top-performing platforms/accounts, and offer a big-picture summary of an audience or trend. Ashleigh specifically mentioned Brandwatch or Meltwater for deep consumer insights. And other social scheduling tools that also offer social monitoring for your owned channels: Sprout, Metricool, Hootsuite.

2. Reviews as the Cornerstone

Overlapping with social listening, Ashleigh recommended digging into consumer reviews to understand consumer sentiment. These reviews are dynamic data that help publishers identify common themes, keywords, descriptors, tropes, tags, and comps. Kristina reinforced the idea that publishers should leverage data from reviews to ensure the best positioning for backlist titles. For instance, ensuring that a trending trope is explicitly mentioned in the book description, or adding new words, like “romantasy”, to your metadata. That is the type of information that may not have been relevant 10 years ago, but will ensure better discoverability today.

Sentiment has always been among the most important things that marketers need to understand about their readers, and now it also matters for online search and discovery. Sentiment signals are one way that AI search models (like the “AI Overview” in your Google search, now powered by Gemini) understand how to answer a particular question that readers ask. These AI models synthesize information from online sources, including book reviews, to learn how to talk about your book. Reviews give these tools a more nuanced understanding of which books to mention when someone asks for a “standalone romantasy book”, for instance.

3. Leveraging All Your Data

There were many sessions about AI throughout the conference, and Kristina called forth a number of points made in other sessions related to context, clarity, and intent (Cameron Lennon’s session on GEO) and the opportunity to use data across all parts of the publishing workflow to create “superdiscoverability” (Brooke Dobson & Keith Riegert’s lunchtime session). 

Kristina emphasized that AI now makes it possible to surface backlist in a more nuanced way than before. Where publishers once relied on institutional knowledge and keywords to search for backlist books that might match a hot trend, now they can connect data across title management, social listening, and consumer analytics tools to prompt a more specific search: “Look at books published 5 or more years ago, identify the top 10 titles to be included in a Pride Month marketing campaign, filter based on LGBTQ+ main characters and openly LGBTQ authors, with high lifetime sales that have slowed in the last 12 months, and focus on currently-trending themes like queer joy or found family.” 

This relies on publishers doing the work to connect these databases (ask your technologists about “Model Context Protocol”), and to fully understand what types of robust searches they want to do. Kristina encouraged managers to ask team members to deliver specific questions like the example above to share with technologists as an example of what they want to achieve.

In Conclusion

What this all points to is a future where data supercharges marketers’ intuition. By treating reviews as dynamic data and utilizing advanced search, publishers can move past the initial launch hype and establish an ongoing ROI for the true backbone of their business: the backlist.  The conversations we had both on and off the stage reminded us that while technology continues to change rapidly, our core mission as an industry – helping readers find the most relevant books for them, whether newly launched or deep in the backlist – remains the same. Beyond the excellent programming, the U.S. Book Show remains one of the best places to meet our clients and partners who share this dedication to driving discoverability. 

Want to dive deeper? Check out NetGalley’s article: Discoverability in the age of AI.