Avon Interview @ All About Romance

by Avid Reader on May 21, 2009

in Avid Musings

Let me do my job quickly and direct you to this inter­view that Avon Edi­tor May Chen and VP/Executive Edi­tor Lucia Macro recently did at All About Romance. It is quite insight­ful. I espe­cially loved this part:

May Chen: In my opin­ion, the online world still doesn’t have much impact on sales as, anec­do­tally, I’ve seen books get hor­ri­ble online reviews but have done well. As far as I know, we still don’t include online reviews on our books, but that can cer­tainly change if we see them start mak­ing a dif­fer­ence. Right now, the best endorse­ments for us still seem to be from NYT best­selling authors and from major tra­di­tional print reviewers.

Lucia Macro: Do the con­sumers rec­og­nize the source of the quote? I’m not sure that the vast major­ity of read­ers rec­og­nize all the online sites. When check­ing their rank­ings I’m often sur­prised at how lit­tle traf­fic they really get. We are all very plugged in, but many casual read­ers are just pick­ing up a book at their local Wal­mart and barely have time to watch tv, much less wres­tle the com­puter away from their kids. So an author quote might carry more weight with them.

I actu­ally own an iPhone and pre­fer ebooks to paper but YMMV.

But as SarahT concluded:

I’m delighted Avon feel com­fort­able in per­pet­u­at­ing their out­dated mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Given Harper­Collins widely reported losses and lay­offs this year, it’s obvi­ously work­ing out for them.

Yes, why fix what isn’t broken?

Update: must attribute this link dis­cov­ery to @jane_l from Dea­r­Author. I left my com­ment at the AAR site.

For Fur­ther Reading

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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

SarahT May 22, 2009 at 12:50 pm

I’m repeat­ing what I said at Dear Author, but here goes:

The Avon inter­view is a PR dis­as­ter. Had they been more tact­ful in their replies, they could have said essen­tially the same thing but caused less offense.

ReplyReply
Avid Reader May 22, 2009 at 12:07 pm

Yes, I read PR @Avon response. It seems that there is a huge dis­con­nect between Avon’s PR peo­ple and their editors.

ReplyReply
SarahT May 22, 2009 at 3:56 am

Did you see that the head of PR at Avon, Pamela Jaf­fee, com­mented on Lynn’s blog piece? Sounds as though there’s a cer­tain lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between Avon edi­tors and the PR depart­ment. Also, what’s with all the Anon Avon Author com­ments? Say who you are, please.

ReplyReply
Bev Stephans May 21, 2009 at 10:05 pm

I think that Ms Chen needs to get her head out of the sand. It seems to be clog­ging up her thinking.

If I didn’t have inter­net access, I wouldn’t have a TBR pile the size of a small moun­tain. If I didn’t buy all of those books, those pub­lish­ers would lose my rev­enue. I think this holds true for many many other book purchasers.

In look­ing through some of my books, I couldn’t find any with the Avon imprint. Maybe they should start cater­ing to the online book com­mu­nity. But wait.….they said they were doing just fine, didn’t they!!

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