FINALISTS
28 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
Andrea
DeWerd
Marketing director
Currency, Convergent, Crown Forum, and
Image, New York CityF
or an ordinary marketer, making a
switch from working on books such
as My Name Is Lucy Barton, Educated,
The Girls, and Born a Crime to lists
that focus on business, progressive
Christian publishing, conservative
politics, and Catholic thought
could be daunting—or even unwelcome. But DeWerd was
excited when the opportunity to make such a move arose
with the merging of the Crown and Random House pub-
lishing groups. She moved over from working on Doubleday,
Dial, and Spiegel & Grau titles to the four Crown imprints.
“Andrea is a true marketing dynamo,” says Theresa Zoro,
executive creative director of marketing and publicity, to
whom DeWerd reports. “Her extensive marketing acumen,
her attention to detail, and her ability to think strategically,
analytically, and creatively have made her an invaluable part
of our Random House marketing team.” The 72 bestsellers
to which DeWerd has proffered her marketing moxie are
hard evidence that the high praise is deserved.
DeWerd began her career in marketing and editorial for
Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books, Gallery, and Threshold
divisions, where she worked on books by Chris Jenner and
Snookie, as well as lots of vampire romance. Moving to the
S&S flagship imprint, she worked on such literary fiction as
We Are Not Ourselves and brand authors such as Mary Higgins
Clark. When she jumped to the Random House marketing
team for Doubleday, Dial, and Spiegel & Grau, her experi-
ence on more commercial properties was helpful in her cam-
paign for The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library by
“The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” during which she had a
“pie in the sky moment.” At a meeting at Comedy Central’s
offices in the Viacom building in Times Square, DeWerd
jokingly asked if they could get a billboard for the book. The
team looked around and said, “Yeah, we can do that.” She
learned, she says, to “always ask.”
“I like learning new things,” she says, so she welcomed the
change the new imprints give her. “One of my favorite things
as a marketer has always been the variety. When this oppor-
tunity came up, I thought, great, I’m going to learn the
Christian publishing market, something new and different.”DeWerd also saw the move
as an excellent opportunity to
grow. At this year’s BookExpo,
she attended a presentation
hosted by BookScan, where she
learned that the sales of reli-
gion and spiritual books were
up 18% from March 2018 to
March 2019. “That’s a huge
change in the marketplace, and
it’s exciting to be a part of that
and figure out what’s next.”
Figuring out what’s next is at
the core of her job, whether
she’s creating campaigns for
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the
late Charles Krauthammer,
Supreme Court Justice Neil
Gorsuch, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, or a progressive
Christian pastor. DeWerd looks at marketing strategy from
top to bottom and asks the question, What does every single
book need to make the largest impact?
She not only crafts campaigns for upcoming books but
analyzes the success or failure of previous marketing strate-
gies. “A lot of my job is stepping back and looking at the
correlation of marketing activity to books sales. Should we
still be doing something that we’ve done for years that may
not make sense anymore? I ask my team to think about how
they’re spending their time. Are they working on things that
are the most important to book sales? Building author web-
sites is something that I’m trying to get away from. I don’t
know if people buy books based on authors’ websites.”
Beyond the variety that overseeing the marketing for these
four varied imprints allows, DeWerd also likes the fact that
these imprints and books have clearly defined audiences. “A
book cannot be for everybody,” she says emphatically. “Maybe
once in a blue moon, a book comes along like Educated, but
thinking that a book is for everybody is not a marketing
strategy. What is a strategy is asking, Who is the best audi-
ence for the book, and how are we going to reach them?”
DeWerd is quick to say that she is always learning from
her authors—particularly when they are thought leaders in
their fields, such as Benioff, with whom she is working for
the October 15 publication of his book Trailblazer. “It’s
exciting to work with such a big company and their CMO
and marketing team.” She points out that at Salesforce, there
is a very big emphasis on repeated texting in multiple itera-
tions. For Trailblazer, the Salesforce team has been testing
the approach months in advance of the book. As she talks
about it, one can practically hear the gears in her brain reg-
istering the knowledge and analyzing the strategy for use in
other book campaigns.©^
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