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Beyond bestsellers

A very interesting discussion on the often dispiriting business of book promotion is running on Mad Max Perkins’s BookAngst 101 site. The discussion was instigated by a posting on Buzz, Balls & Hype, the blog of novelist M.J. Rose, who laments the way books are promoted to readers and booksellers. “No other product/commodity/thing spends a year in development and then gets three weeks on the shelf,” she writes. “Word of mouth takes at least 12-14 weeks to build. Yet, the publishing industry continues to give a book — at best — 3 to 4 weeks of promotion and co-op. What’s more, there is no pre-promotion of the book to the READERS.” Rose argues that the book business could learn a lot from the film industry, which advertises films to consumers and media for months prior to release. Perkins picks up Rose’s argument on his site, claiming that the type of promotion Rose is arguing for is actually applied to many publishers’ frontlist titles, but not to the books with more modest marketing budgets. This leads him to ask: “What is the model/mechanism whereby books published at a relatively modest scale can, nonetheless, be published (read: as a verb) instead of (as so often seems to be the case) simply tossed out there to fend for themselves (read: D.O.A.).”

Related links:
Read M.J. Rose’s posting on the Books, Balls & Hype site
Read Mad Max Perkins’s response on BookAngst 101

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