What makes a book a best seller? What makes a person pick up a book about wizards or hobbits and say ”Hmm, I think this sounds good”?

As marketers, we are constantly asking ourselves how to make a book a bestseller. We push our titles as hard as we can. We attend exhibits, pay for advertising, send out review copies, and produce online content. But is that enough? How do we push a title so far that it eventually breaks from the mold and takes off?

Everyone knows what Harry Potter is or has at least heard of it. The author of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling, is probably one of the best-known authors in the world. What some people may not know, though, is that Rowling’s popular series was originally rejected by twelve publishing houses. According to telegraph.co.uk, after the manuscript was rejected, a small publisher by the name of Bloomsbury finally picked it up with the promise of a small advance to the author. To everyone’s surprise, Harry Potter became the best-selling book series in history. The seventh installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, shattered records as the fastest-selling book ever. 

How did a book that no one wanted end up taking off so fast?

On August 12, 2007, The New York Times posted a round table discussion on its Sunday Book Review web page that asked one not-so-simple question: “So what, finally, was it about Harry Potter that captured so many readers' imaginations?”

There were a variety of responses to this question, most of which entailed a person having read Harry Potter because someone they knew had suggested it. A lot of the answers also mentioned that Harry Potter was an innovative book that captured not only children’s imaginations but also adults’ imaginations. The thing I found most interesting was that not one person mentioned the reviews they had read or the ads they had seen for the book.

In the UNP marketing department we started a small book club. Currently, we’re reading a book called The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. This book examines different case studies and situations and tries to give insight into what turns a fashion statement into a trend, an unfamiliar book into a bestseller, or a TV show into a hit. This book thrives on the idea that every product or trend has a tipping point; a point that makes that product or trend take off. Does the tipping point really exist? Did Harry Potter have a tipping point?

The book suggests that in order to achieve the tipping point, certain factors need to fall into place. One of those factors is called “the law of the few,” which states that word-of-mouth promotion can be an effective marketing tool, but only when the mouth itself is someone influential or someone the consumer trusts.

Studies conducted over the years have shown that consumers are more likely to take advice from another consumer when testing out new products. The reason: consumers trust their peers to give them honest advice.

According to a Nielsen consumer survey conducted in September 2013, “Word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family, often referred to as earned advertising, are still the most influential, as 84 percent of global respondents across 58 countries to the Nielsen online survey said this source was the most trustworthy.”

So what does this mean for marketers? Well, it just means that we need to rethink how we approach marketing.

Marketing a book is no longer about producing campaigns with a mass appeal. Marketing is now about targeting individuals and learning what that one person likes and wants from a product in the hope that the individual will then tell his or her friends about the product.

Like I mentioned above, in The New York Times round table discussion, most people said that they knew someone who had read Harry Potter before they did. This doesn’t mean that word-of-mouth was the only reason Harry Potter became a bestseller, but it’s just one of the many factors that helped the book reach its tipping point and become a worldwide sensation. 

-Emily