Toronto set to drown in Joy Fielding novels

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By Scott MacDonald
March 27, 2009
1:18 PM

Filed under: Industry news, Doubleday, Joy Fielding, National Post

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This weekend, Doubleday Canada will be mounting one of the most elaborate – and crazy? – sounding book promotions we’ve ever heard of. According to a press release the company sent out today, it has partnered with the National Post to give away 10,000 copies of Joy Fielding’s new-to-mass-market 2008 thriller, Charley’s Web, by bundling it into subscriber copies of the paper in the Greater Toronto Area. The giveaway is intended to promote Fielding’s new novel, Still Life, which was released in hardcover earlier this week. From the press release:

“Our hope is to use this direct-to-consumer marketing campaign to encourage existing fans to read her latest work and revisit Fielding’s extensive backlist, while also building an even broader fan base for this wonderful author,” says Randy Chan, Director of Marketing at Random House of Canada.

We’re not sure what to think about this. Free books are swell and all, but 10,000 copies?! Who’ll be left to actually buy one in a bookstore? And not to get all finger-wagging, but think of the paper wastage! How many of those National Post subscribers will actually read the book? One in 10, at best?

And finally, what of the backs of all those poor newsboys?

Bronwyn Barrie

What I think it great is that the books are likely getting into hands and encouraging reading. Any time anyone can get behind that kind of project we should celebrate. It will surely lead to life long fans. Way to look outside of the book biz for marketing ideas. Do you think that all those free razors and yogurt bars we get at the corner of Bay and Bloor piss off grocery stores?
Jayne Ryan

I too applaud the National Post for coming up with more reasons for people to subscribe to their paper as well as Random House for encouraging more people to take a step back from their televisions and computers and actually read something!
http://oneyearbook.wordpress.com Cat

Interesting cross-promotion between the newspaper and the publisher … it’s nice to see at least someone giving thought to how newspapers can promote books other than simply through reviews. I’d certainly be excited to receive a free book with my newspaper and would probably at least begin to read it, although that certainly wouldn’t guarantee that I’d finish reading it and go on to buy another book from the same author.
10,000 is a lot, though. Doubleday must believe that there will be a rather large push to purchase because of this, or else they had a lot of extra copies of that one book lying around for some reason.
Paul

Paper wastage? Surely the biggest waste of paper is the printing of the National Post every day.
Venessa

C’mon Doubleday Canada you can do better than this. If you want to give out free books that will make people read, try some classic works. Take one or two great books and bundle them into the local papers,say every few months. When people read good literature and see that they haven’t wasted their time, they’ll become readers. But on another note: Shouldn’t newspapers readers already be readers?
Chuck

Got this in this weekend’s paper and will definitely read it on upcoming vacation but until I happened on this blog entry I was a little puzzled about the book’s inclusion in the newspaper. Still, my wife and I are new to Joy Fielding and if we enjoy this book we’ll certainly be looking for others by the author.

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