When performance marketing models collide with the radical uncertainty of the literary market
Picture a reader discovering a novel. Perhaps a friend mentioned it in passing, a review caught their eye in a magazine, a cover drew them in at a bookshop window — and three weeks later, they finally bought it online. Who, in that sequence, deserves credit for the sale? And more fundamentally: does that sequence even resemble what digital marketing has long theorised under the name of the customer journey?
This question sits at the heart of my master’s thesis, which examines how fiction publishing houses navigate an environment increasingly governed by performance marketing logic and conversion-based measurement systems. To explore it, I draw on one of the field’s most influential contributions: Lemon and Verhoef’s 2016 reconceptualisation of the customer journey — a framework that, I argue, both illuminates and strains under the specific pressures of the literary market.
A framework built for other markets
In their landmark Journal of Marketing article, Katherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef introduced a decisive insight: the purchase journey is not linear. Consumers do not advance obediently from one funnel stage to the next. They enter, exit, reconsider, and loop back — influenced at every moment by a constellation of signals, some controlled by the brand, many not.
“The customer journey is dynamic, non-linear, and shaped by multiple touchpoints, only some of which the firm controls.”
The authors organise the journey into three broad phases (pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase) and map the touchpoints across three ownership categories: brand-owned (advertising, newsletters, websites), partner-owned (retail platforms, review aggregators), and customer-owned (peer recommendations, word of mouth, social sharing). This tripartition is analytically powerful precisely because it acknowledges that value creation is co-produced, not unilaterally controlled.
The framework was developed and validated primarily in digital commerce and services contexts — environments rich in behavioural data, short purchase cycles, and measurable interactions. What happens, then, when we attempt to apply it to fiction publishing?
Three ways fiction publishing pushes back
The literary market exhibits several structural features that sit in direct tension with the assumptions embedded in customer journey models.
The first is radical demand uncertainty. Richard Caves, in his foundational analysis of creative industries, articulated what he called the nobody knows principle: no one — not the editor, not the author, not the bookseller — can reliably predict which title will succeed before it reaches readers. This structural unpredictability challenges the conversion framework’s core assumption that marketing effort and sales outcomes maintain a stable, modelable relationship. When demand is inherently volatile, even the most sophisticated attribution model is built on shifting ground.
The second is the symbolic nature of value. A book’s worth is not primarily constructed through advertising exposure. It is built through author reputation, the cultural prestige of the publishing imprint, critical discourse, literary prizes, and — most powerfully — social recommendation. These mechanisms correspond precisely to what Lemon and Verhoef call customer-owned touchpoints: the ones furthest from managerial control. In most digital commerce contexts, these touchpoints play a supporting role. In fiction publishing, they are often the decisive ones.
The third is the extended temporal horizon of literary products. A novel can remain in catalogue for decades, experiencing unexpected revivals sparked by a film adaptation, a prize shortlist, or a viral moment on social media. This temporal depth is fundamentally at odds with the short-term conversion optimisation logic that dominates performance marketing dashboards. When measuring a campaign’s effectiveness over a four-week window, how do you account for a book that finds its audience four years after publication?
When algorithms govern visibility
The challenge deepens when we consider the role of digital platforms. Amazon, recommendation engines, and content aggregators exercise a form of algorithmic governance over book discoverability that publishers can influence but not control. Search rankings, recommendation carousels, and review systems shape which titles reach readers in ways that are only partially transparent.
This platform intermediation — theorised by Srnicek (2017) as a defining feature of contemporary digital markets — directly complicates the attribution logic underlying conversion-based models. If a book sells well because an algorithm amplified its visibility at a critical moment, does that count as marketing performance? The conversion metric records the outcome; it cannot distinguish between managerial efficiency and algorithmic luck.
What gets measured is not always what creates value. And in publishing, the most consequential things often happen precisely where measurement cannot reach.
Lemon and Verhoef anticipated this tension. In environments heavily mediated by third-party platforms, they warn, firms lose narrative control over their own customer journey. That observation, stated as a general caveat in 2016, reads almost as a direct description of the contemporary publishing landscape.
A theoretical and managerial opportunity
My research does not conclude that performance marketing models are simply inapplicable to fiction publishing — that would be too blunt an answer. The goal is more precise: to identify the boundary conditions under which these models remain analytically useful, and those under which their implicit assumptions begin to fracture.
Empirically, this means interviewing the practitioners who live this tension daily — marketing directors at major publishing groups, digital marketing managers, CRM specialists, data analysts. How do they appropriate conversion frameworks? What adaptations do they make to render them compatible with the specificities of the book market? And crucially, where do they perceive the limits of these tools?
The stakes are both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, testing the portability of a framework like Lemon and Verhoef’s into a sector like fiction publishing enriches our understanding of when and why performance measurement models hold — and when they do not. Practically, it offers publishing professionals a more nuanced vocabulary for designing measurement systems that honour the complexity of their market, rather than forcing it into analytical templates borrowed from e-commerce.
Because at its core, this is not merely a technical question. It touches on what we mean by value in a cultural industry — a form of value that accumulates over time, through experience, through conversation, and through the slow, unpredictable alchemy of a book finding its reader. That process, however rich it may be, will never be fully captured by a click-through rate.