E-reading on a tablet. Image – Getty: Oleg Elkov
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
An Intenational Angle: ‘Both Sides of the Atlantic’
According to a statement from Open Road Integrated Media executive chair and CEO David Steinberger, 2024 was a year of “unprecedented growth” for the company.
The “Ignition” program, which markets backlist ebooks for some 100 publishers, Steinberger says in his annual letter, started last year with one of the Big Five houses among its clients, and ended the year with four of the Big Five in the program.
Titles marketed in the Ignition program grew by 44 percent, which Steinberger says is the largest annual title increase in the company’s history. Revenue for titles in the program, he says, doubled.
Titles enrolled in the program seven years ago when the approach was started “continue to sell at double their historic rates of sale,” Steinberger says, through the program. “Star ratings also steadily improved,” during those seven years, Steinberger reports. “Enabling a book’s discovery by reaching the right readers drives both sales and star ratings higher.”
Related article: Open Road Offers Geo-Targeting To Open Banned Books. Image – Getty, Wako Magumi
The “Activation” paid marketing program, based in D2C newsletters, each focused on a genre area, “continues to help publishers find and expand the audience for books in all formats and at all stages of a book’s lifecycle,” Steinberger says in his letter. The program was able to accommodate launch campaigns for New York Times bestsellers, he says, as well as debut authors, plus “highly successful giveaways supporting house authors and brands,” as well as themed promotions ranging from banned books to holidays.
Another branded offering, the “Re-Lit” had highlights from 2024, Steinberger says, including the re-publication of six titles by horror author Stephen Graham Jones. “We re-published Stinger by New York Times-bestselling author Robert McCammon, the basis for Teacup, streaming on Peacock,” a service from NBCUniversal. “And Re-Lit closed the year” he writes, “by bringing back the book that inspired the “Gladiator” film franchise: The Way of the Gladiator by Daniel Mannix.
Discoverability in Two Countries
Some subscribers in our decidedly internationalist readership here at Publishing Perspectives tend to look at Open Road and wonder where the offshore angle is.
David Steinberger
As you might remember, in July 2021, the States-based Open Road acquired a British publisher called Bloodhoud Books, an ebook producer seated in Cambridge. Later, the Stateside outfit Dreamscape set up a first-look audiobook agreement with Bloodhound,
As Steinberger now writes in his annual letter, “Our entrepreneurial ebook-first UK publisher of crime fiction, is working in concert with the Open Road marketing team to enable discovery on both sides of the Atlantic. Key frontlist in 2024,” he writes, “included The Arsenic Eater’s Wife by Tonya Mitchell and “The Deadly Dozen” series by Peter Berry.”
Steinberger mentions the company’s “proprietary marketing technology,” loosely describing it as “incorporating vast book and author data and interactions with our first-party audience of ‘power readers,’ collected daily for more than a decade, with data science, machine learning, and automation, refined constantly.”
One notable point missing perhaps in the annual letter is a mention of the geo-targeting banned-books offer the company made in the States in the late summer of 2024. Announced before Banned Books Week, the idea was described as “a new marketing service to fight book bans and enable challenged works to be discovered and purchased by readers everywhere.”
In a future letter, it might be of interest to report on what has happened in that effort’s regard. Unfortunately, it appears that book bannings are hardly behind us.
More from Publishing Perspectives on Open Road Integrated Media is here, and more on marketing is here. More on the United Kingdom’s market is here, more on the United States Market is here, and more from us on mergers and acquisitions is here.
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