Expanding Marketing (Press/Publicity tab) Functionality Within Title Management
Answered
Area Impacted:
Title Manager --> Marketing --> Press/Publicity
Request Summary:
We’d like to request an increase of functionality in the Marketing > Publicity/Press tab (in Title Management). While it’s already possible to track some marketing campaign information (including bookshop copies/review copies/ARCs/press kits), there are some ways to this could be expanded to be more useful and allow small to mid-size presses superior reporting.
1) Auto population of delivery information from Organization/Contacts. For example, if 1 PB copy of a title is added under Bookshop Copies and an Organization/Contact is selected from the dropdown menu, it would save time and prevent errors if the recipient’s address and email could auto populate using the data stored in their Contact information.
2) Exportable reports of data from Title Management > Marketing > Publicity/Press. It would be ideal if entries under the categories of Bookshop Copies, Review Copies, ARCs, and Press Kits (for all titles) could be exported to a spreadsheet. This would include addresses, emails, titles, and copies sent.
Description/Use Cases:
This exported data (including addresses and emails) could be used at the planning stages of the marketing campaigns and could support distributor and admin staff efforts to carry out the mailing of ARCs, Bookseller Copies, and Review Copies.
The addition of an email field in Title Management > Marketing > Publicity/Press as well as the ability to export that information after mailing is complete would allow me to create a straightforward follow-up list. This could be used by internal marketing staff, external contractors who may not have Stison access, or sales/PR/marketing interns who also may not have access due to the sensitive information housed in Stison.
Impact of limitation or missing feature:
The missing feature means that I will have to continue to generate PR lists/ARC mailing lists/Review Copy lists/Bookseller copy lists in isolated spreadsheets for our distributor and/or admin to use for mailing. After that, I’ll need to then manually add copies sent one by one into Title Management > Marketing to avail myself of the tracking and report generating functions that Stison offers for each title.
If there were fields for addresses and emails under Contacts and if this data auto populated into Title Management > Marketing, and if this data was exportable, the Press/Publicity tab would become a more functional tool that would be updated at key points throughout a book’s marketing campaign.
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Official comment
Hi Madeleine Maillet,
Thank you for raising this request. The team have taken a look at what we have available at the moment as well as your request, and unfortunately this is not an area of Stison that we are prioritising for development at present.
As such, we will not be developing these functionalities within our standard development programme. Nonetheless, we can offer this as a costed development project. This would involve some more consultation on what exactly you would like Stison to be able to do for you. If you would like me to provide you a quote for this work, do let me know.
Best wishes,
Sophie
Comment actions -
Hi Sophie,
In terms of the functions we would like to prioritize for potential costed development, there are two subheadings under the marketing tab that we would like to inquire about, “Reviews” and “Advanced Review Copies.”
The two things that would be most needed:
1) Auto population of delivery information from Organization/Contacts. For example, if 1 PB copy of a title is added under ARCs/Review Copies and an Organization/Contact is selected from the dropdown menu, it would save time and prevent errors if the recipient’s address and email could auto populate using the data stored in their Contact information (this would add additional fields).
2) Exportable reports of data from Title Management > Books > Marketing > Publicity/Press. It would be ideal if entries under the categories of Review Copies and ARCs could be exported to a spreadsheet. This would include addresses, emails, titles, and copies to be sent.
Thanks for looking into this and getting us a quote, let me know if you want to talk about this on the phone or have any other follow-up questions.
All the best,
Madeleine
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Just to explain our reasoning a bit further:
The other subheadings like author copies we don’t expect to make a big difference in terms of sales, but those long lead ARCs and review copies ideally drive sales, so we would love to run them through STISON from the get go and not shared spreadsheets as we do now to have greater reporting capability.
Right now, bookshop copies/BLADs are sent ad hoc for non-lead titles, and not to a long list of booksellers in a pre-launch campaign, so while we would use those functions under that heading for a couple titles per season, it’s not as important for that to be exportable at the moment. That said, as we move into new markets (graphic novels, art books, etc..) and specialty accounts become more important the same auto populating and export functionalities for bookshop copies could become something we would want to pay for …
Thanks for being so responsive to this request! It’s been great to work with you and learn the platform so far.
All the best,
Madeleine
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