In the good old days, in this context meaning BA – Before Amazon – publishing a book followed a tried and tested routine, followed at a sedate and gentlemanly pace.
An author would submit a manuscript to a publishing house, ideally through a literary agent. In due course it would, hopefully, be accepted, then edited and prepared for publication, the entire process taking at least six months and in some cases well over a year. As a personal example, Macmillan took eighteen months between accepting my first book – Overkill – and its first publication.
Then the novel would be cautiously published as a hardback and, perhaps a year later, as a mass-market paperback. The only real variation on that theme was the option of additionally releasing a trade paperback.
For those of you not familiar with the distinction, trade paperbacks are the larger volumes normally sold airside, in places like W H Smith in the departure lounge at Gatwick or Heathrow, where they have a captive audience desperately seeking any kind of distraction while they wait for their aircraft to arrive from Iceland or wherever it’s been delayed. Mass-market paperbacks are the regular sized books you’ll find in any high street retailer.
Transworld went this route with the fourth ‘James Becker’ book I wrote – The Nosferatu Scroll – and the trade paperback sold reasonably well, despite the absence of any promotions or special offers. Which brings me neatly to the real subject of this blog post: just how effective are marketing and promotional campaigns?
Whenever you travel by rail or underground, you’ll frequently find yourself staring at some poster depicting a book which you may or may not have heard about, written by an author that you probably know. You may even have wondered why you rarely see posters extolling the literary efforts of lesser-known writers, and the answer to that, in simple terms, is money. Or, to be absolutely accurate and to use a bit of marketing-speak, it’s ROI, the return on investment.
If a publishing house decides that they have a budget of, say, £50k to throw at one of two authors, and they assume that the campaign will generate roughly 10% of additional sales, the choice of which author to select is comparatively easy. If Author A sells an average of 100,000 books a year, and Author B sells an average of 10,000 books a year, the advertising campaign will generate additional sales of either 10,000 books or 1,000 books. So which do you think they’ll choose?
That’s why you’ll often see the latest offerings from Jilly Cooper and Lee Child, to pick two writers from opposite ends of the spectrum, prominently displayed on posters, and why you’ll almost never see any promotions for first novels or for writers who haven’t yet hit the big time. And this, of course, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and inevitably results in a few bestselling writers selling even more books, and everybody else selling a hell of a lot less.
And while talking, albeit obliquely, about Lee Child, you’ll be aware that some of his books are being turned into films, which should be good news for those of us who enjoy his novels, but the actor Hollywood has chosen for the lead role is a man who is so completely unsuited for the part that it’s simply laughable. Lee Child’s hero is a man named Jack Reacher, well over six feet tall, massively built and a former military policeman. In every book Reacher solves whatever problems he faces by, basically, bashing heads together and generally beating the hell out of anybody who gets in his way. It’s all physical, hand-to-hand combat that works because Reacher is so big and so tough and takes no crap from anyone.
So the actor Hollywood thought was ideal to play this ultimate macho man-mountain was Tom Cruise. Five feet tall and eight stone dripping wet. Presumably they thought he was going to be able to beat up the bad guys standing on a box, which was always going to be somewhat limiting. Either that or there would have to be some really impressive trick photography.
But back to the plot. So do advertising campaigns work? The general perception in the industry seems to be that they don’t.
I know of at least one writer who was poached from his original publishing house by another publisher, allegedly for far too much money, and whose next book received massive, almost blanket, coverage in London. Despite this, the book didn’t sell – I didn’t read it, but I did try some of his earlier efforts, which were so bad as to fully justify the epithet ‘unreadable’ – and since that campaign neither the author nor his works have been much in evidence. He’s still writing – I suppose his new publisher is still trying to recoup some of the money they spent – and his reviews on Amazon have been at best, shall we say, ‘mixed’.
The best advertising is probably still word-of-mouth, and a good many bestsellers in recent years have risen to the top of the charts mainly because people read them, enjoyed them, and told their friends about them. That was certainly the case with Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James, which began life as a self-published book Down Under.
Mind you, one of my friends in Andorra told me that The Da Vinci Code was the best book he’d ever read, which caused me to revise my opinion of his intellect and judgement fairly drastically.
But word-of-mouth works, there’s no doubt about that, as long as the book itself is worth reading.
