“In a saturated marketplace, there’s not that much new white space – it’s really about being smarter, working faster, and looking for opportunities. Companies that have the most appetite for exploration are doing the best right now.”
Interview with Kristen McLean, NPD Books
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Email | Download
From America’s Test Kitchen to American Girl, Stephen King to Captain Underpants, and The Handmaid’s Tale to The Babysitters’ Club, the license market means big business in book publishing. According to a new NPD BookScan report, license and branded titles account for 14% of total US book market sales. In the children’s book segment alone, the share is nearly one-third.
In today’s saturated media market, a familiar character or title on a shelf or in a thumbnail is a proven strategy to get the sale, says Kristen McLean, Executive Director of Business Development in the NPD Books practice, the team behind NPD BookScan. Licensed and branded titles include properties that started as books and went elsewhere, as well as books based on properties from outside the book world, such as Lego, Minecraft, and Disney’s Frozen movie franchise.
“The current entertainment ecosystem is so diverse – I call it a content multiverse, actually – that all of the rules that we used to have for how things got to market, how we chose our projects, how we licensed our projects, and on what time frame, all of that is really out the window. We’re having to really reinvent the process. And an important part of that is finding the consumers, listening to consumers. It’s almost like we have to be cultural anthropologists on some level.
“The publishers that we see growing right now are publishers that are very good at drilling down and finding opportunities for themselves in this really crowded marketplace. Because in a saturated marketplace, there’s not that much new white space – it’s really about being smarter, working faster, and also looking for opportunities to take share from other companies, from other authors, from other publishers. We really think that the companies that have the most appetite for exploration are the companies that are doing the best right now in terms of finding those opportunities for themselves.”
