Being a California publisher and lucky to be living a California lifestyle means that we see things differently,” said Tyrrell Mahoney, president of Chronicle Books in San Francisco. “The downside is that because we are outside the New York publishing bubble, we have had to travel a lot more and work harder to surface our brand and connect with customers. That changed with the pandemic, for the obvious reason that no one could travel.”
The industry’s shift to virtual work and Zoom meetings meant staffers at Chronicle had to rethink their workflow. For Mahoney that meant less time on planes, though early morning calls remain the norm. For the editorial and production teams, the shift was more significant, as it meant producing and selling books they might not ever have a chance to work with physically.
“We are a publishing company that is very focused on the design of the book as an object,” Mahoney said. “So it has been very odd to see a book out in the market that you have never touched, never put your hands on.”
For marketing, Chronicle’s team worked on its digital assets and focused on finding ways to bring some of the visual appeal of its titles into the digital space. One change was the decision to stop printing catalogs and just go digital.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Mahoney said that Chronicle had “an exceptional year.” Sales were driven in large part by a handful of bestsellers, led on the frontlist by Songteller by Dolly Parton, which sold 200,000 copies, and on the backlist by From Crook to Cook by Snoop Dogg, which was originally published in 2018 and sold 205,000 in 2020. Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown by John Lithgow, a book of satirical doggerel poetry, sold 100,000 copies.
“We are not a blockbuster, celebrity-driven publisher as a rule,” Mahoney said, “and typically our books need to be browsed in a story to appreciate them, but these you could appreciate immediately without having to ‘discover’ them.”
With the onset of the pandemic, booksellers thinned their inventory, and Mahoney noted that many frontlist titles were difficult to break out. “We just couldn’t get booksellers to take a chance on something new,” she said. The second-best-performing frontlist title, after Songteller, was 100 Cookies by food blogger Sarah Kieffer, which sold 75,000 copies in six months. Card decks, especially tarot and occult-themed decks, also did very well for the company, as did games and puzzles.
Mahoney said that despite the strong year, she still has her concerns—primarily related to the impact of three seasons of slow frontlist sales on feeding the backlist. “My worry as a publisher is that this will catch up to us if we don’t see improvement in getting books out into stores,” she added.
Berkeley’s North Atlantic Books, which publishes health and wellness titles, also saw strong backlist sales last year. “Part of this has to do with the kinds of books that we publish: herbalism, trauma, social justice, and other healing genres that were sorely needed in 2020,” said publisher Tim McKee. And like Chronicle, the company opted to focus on enhancing its digital assets and metadata, as well as doing targeted keyword-based advertising to enhance discoverability online. The result was a 9% sales increase over 2019.
“We had a difficult run for a few months right when the pandemic hit, but we recovered well,” McKee said. “In fact, five of our top 10 sales months in our organization’s history came in 2020.”
A new focus on direct-to-consumer sales through North Atlantic’s website helped, as did increased discounts. “We also dovetailed our own product pages more proactively with authors’ events and marketing efforts,” McKee said. “The result was that we more than doubled our online sales in 2020 compared to 2019.”
The gains offset declines from indie bookstores generally. “We definitely saw an increase in both audio and e-books sales, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of our total sales,” McKee said. “In recent years, we were accustomed to audio and e-book making up about 15%–16% of our total sales. In 2020, this reached 20%. Audio sales themselves went up 52% from 2019, and e-book sales increased 22% from the previous year.”
The shift to a virtual marketplace helped break down geographic barriers for North Atlantic. “In the before times, we typically worked with bookstores that were in an author’s hometown,” said Bevin Donahue, associate director of marketing and communications at North Atlantic. “But with bookstores pivoting to online events, we’re able to reach out across the country to find and forge relationships with those booksellers whose communities we knew would really love the content our authors had to offer, regardless of an author’s geographic location.”
Unable to travel to conferences, the acquisition process has changed for North Atlantic as well, and the team is now focused on attending more specialized online events in search of authors, as well as using Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as sources for talent.
Looking ahead, McKee said that finding and promoting BIPOC writers and healers is a priority for North Atlantic and gave several examples of forthcoming books, including Postcolonial Astrology by Alice Sparkly Kat, coming in May, which offers a radical retelling of the planets. My Heart Flies Open by Omileye Achikeobi-Lewis, which focuses on the joy of a Black child, publishes in September.
“The key for us—and hopefully the larger society—is understanding that many of our systems are unhealthy in large part because of how they embody white supremacy,” McKee said. “With it so dominant, like monoculture in agriculture, the larger ecosystem can’t be well. And so it is more urgent than ever for us at North Atlantic Books to amplify the BIPOC writers and healers who have been at this work for a long time, whether the larger zeitgeist has noticed or not. We’re on notice to take notice.”
