Book Marketing the Cyberdyne Way

I have truly enjoyed learning about the publishing business over the last year. It is an industry that has been utterly disrupted from top-to-bottom by the digital revolution. Amazon is the new 800-pound gorilla of the book world and self-publishing is a legitimate option that every serious author considers these days. As an economist, I see disruption everywhere on the supply and demand side of the book market.

I entered the book market as a self-publisher (“indie” if you want to sound more important). The steepest part of the learning curve for me has been in the area of marketing and promotion. I had to learn how to do “content marketing” on social media and how to design and launch ad campaigns on Amazon, among many other things. Online advertising is fairly easy to implement, but wow is it hard to do effectively, in the sense of getting a decent bang for your buck. Then a couple of months ago I heard about a brand-new start-up called Shimmr AI that was offering a new book marketing service based completely on artificial intelligence (AI). The idea of an “end-to-end” advertising service based on AI made sense to me.

So, I went to the Shimmr AI website and signed up for an initial call. I had a lovely conversation with the very nice people at Shimmr and decided to sign up Back to the Futures for their service for an initial four-month run (the minimum). How this service works is fascinating. You send a digital copy of the book to Shimmr and the “machine” (hence the Cyberdyne reference from Terminator 2) mines the text for key themes and subjects. As I understand it, this is heavily based on concepts from the psychology and marketing fields. Once this step is completed, the machine designs ad copy and ad images.

The initial four images completed for the Back to the Futures advertising campaign are shown below. I was blown away by the accuracy of the themes and how well the images represented the heart of the book. If you have read Back to the Futures, it will not surprise you that I like the go cart and snowmobile images the best! The final step is for the machine to run the ads (at the present time on the Google ecosystem with Facebook coming soon) and then use real-time data to figure out which ones are most effective. As an added benefit, Shimmr provides a very easy to use dashboard where you can track the data on impressions and clicks for each ad.

If it works, this approach to book marketing is heaven-sent as far as I am concerned. Once you hand over your book and approve the four images, the machine handles everything else. Completely automated and hands-off. An experienced advertising professional might be able to beat the machine (but I wonder about that as the machine learns over time), but the odds that I can do better all by my lonesome are incredibly low. I only have about a month’s worth of data so far, but the early returns are encouraging. I think I have seen the future of marketing and advertising in an AI world and it’s wild!

Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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