THE ADVERTISING OF BOOKS STILL EXPERIMENTAL
_Publishers Are Uncertain as to the Amount of Sales Made in That
Way--How the Book Business Differs from the Shoe Trade, for
Example--The Problem of How to Get the Books Before the People
Is at the Root of All Other Book Trade Questions--Why the Book
Canvasser Is Still Necessary--A Vast Field Waiting for Development._
About the advertising of books, nobody knows anything. The most that
can be said is that some publishers are making very interesting
experiments. But nobody has yet worked out a single general principle
that is of great value. The publishers themselves frankly confess that
they do not know how to advertise books--except a few publishers who
have had little experience.
The fundamental difficulty of course is that hardly any two books
present the same problem. Find a successful advertising plan for
one book--it will not be a good plan for another. This fundamental
difficulty marks the difference, for instance, between books and shoes.
When a shoe merchant finds out by experiment how to describe his
shoes and in what periodicals to print his description, his problem
is solved. Recently several publishers discovered a successful way to
advertise a novel. They tried the same plan with another novel and
another. But it’s hit or miss. I, for one, would give much to know how
often it has been “miss.”
The old-fashioned way was to insert a brief, simple, dignified
announcement of every book, as is still done in The Spectator, of
London, for example. Good; but such an announcement doesn’t go far.
A very few thousand persons see it. They wait until the books are
reviewed or till some friend or authority speaks about them. For this
perfectly good reason some publishers do not insert many advertisements
in those publications that go only to the literary class--they are to
a degree superfluous. Those that are inserted are inserted to give the
publishers and the books a certain “standing,” and to keep pleasant the
relations between the publishers and these journals.
Then come, of course, the monthly popular magazines. They reach a
very much wider class of readers, and to advertise books in them is a
logical procedure. But their advertising rates are almost prohibitory.
The margin of profit on books is very small. There is not money
enough in the business to warrant extensive and expensive magazine
advertising. The result is the publishers put their announcements
of perhaps a dozen new books on a single advertising page of the
magazines, and they cannot, in this restricted space, say enough about
any particular book to make the advertisement effective.
Then there are the daily papers. One or two of the best dailies in
every large city are used by the publishers for announcements of new
books. They cannot afford more--except in the case of those novels
which may reach enormous editions. Given a novel that will sell 100,000
copies or more, and you have enough possible profit to warrant a good
deal of advertising. But during this calendar year only two novels
(perhaps three) have new editions of more than 100,000 copies. What is
a publisher to do, then, who has a novel that will sell 10,000 copies,
or 20,000 copies and no more? Can he make it sell 50,000 or 100,000 by
spending a large sum in advertising it? Perhaps, once in ten times, or
once in twenty times; but not oftener.
Five or six publishing houses spend more than $50,000 a year, each,
in advertising. Two spend a good deal more than this sum; and one is
reported as saying that he spends $250,000. These are not large sums
when compared with the sums spent for advertising other wares. But
an advertisement of a shoe published to-day will help to sell that
shoe next year. The shoemaker gets a cumulative effect. But your
novel advertised to-day will be dead next year. You get no cumulative
effect. When I say, therefore, that no publisher has mastered the art
of advertising books, I tell the literal truth. They all run against a
dead wall; and they will all tell you so in frank moments.
The study of the problem of advertising books takes one far afield.
What quality in a book makes it popular anyhow? Even if you are wise
enough to know that (and you are very wise if you do know that) the
question arises whether advertising is necessary. There have been
as many popular books sold in large editions without advertising as
with it. If your book is really popular it may sell anyhow. I could
make a long list of such books, and a still longer list of books
that extensive advertising did not sell--books which seemed to their
publishers to have the quality of great popularity.
The question carries us further back still. Let us take the analogy
of the shoemaker again. He has shoe stores within reach of the whole
population. There is not a village in the land where there is not a
store in which shoes are sold. The manufacturers’ salesmen find this
distributing machinery ready to their hands. If a man in Arkansas or
in Montana or in Florida wants a pair of shoes, he is within reach
of a place where he may buy them. Not so with books. There are few
bookstores. Two or three per cent. of the population (perhaps less)
live within convenient reach of bookshops. True, a book may be ordered
by mail. But so may a pair of shoes. But this is not a good substitute
for a store, where a man may see the book. The mail-order business will
always be secondary to direct sales. But, since bookstores are so few,
the book-distributing machinery is wholly inadequate. The publisher has
no effective way yet to reach his normal public with his wares.
There is nobody to blame, perhaps. Surely, it would not be a profitable
undertaking for any man or woman to buy a stock of books and to open a
store in a small town. What is the remedy, then?
The simple truth is, here is one of the problems of distribution that
have not yet been solved. There are throughout the land another one
hundred thousand persons who would buy any novel of which one hundred
thousand have been sold, if they could see the book and hear about
it--if it were intelligently kept for sale where they would see it.
This is a self-evident proposition. But nobody has yet found a way thus
to distribute a book. And (this is the point) until better distributing
machinery is organized, it will not pay publishers to advertise with as
prodigal a hand as shoemakers and soapmakers use in making their wares
known.
It is this lack of proper distributing machinery that has made
possible the career of the book-agent. There are no shoe peddlers.
Almost all the publishing houses--all the important houses--employ
book peddlers. The business is generally regarded as a--nuisance, to
say the most for it. But, from the publisher’s point of view, it is a
necessity. And this is the crude way whereby it is sought to remedy the
radical deficiency of proper distributing machinery. Of course, the
book-agent method has its obvious disadvantages. It is not a dignified
occupation, as most agents practise it. The most dignified members of
the community, therefore, do not take it up. In every case it is not
even the trustworthy members of the community that take it up. Again,
the agent must be paid; and this is a very costly method (to the
purchaser) of buying books. The purchaser pays half his money for the
books; the other half for being persuaded to buy them.
And (to take a broad, economic view of the subject) the book peddler
surely cannot be considered the final solution of the problem of a
proper distribution of books. At some time in the future, when the
country is three or four times as densely settled as it now is, there
will be book stores in all towns. There may still be need for the
persuasiveness of the agent, for some of the most successful of them
now do their best work in cities within sight of good book shops. But
the point is, few book-agents sell new books, and few of them sell
single books: they usually sell books in sets. The problem, therefore,
of the proper distribution of the four or five really good books that
my publishing house has put out this fall still remains unsolved and,
though I advertised them in all magazines and newspapers, I should
not effectively reach the attention of one-fifth or one-tenth of the
possible buyers of them. I should simply spend in advertising the
profit that I may make on the copies that I sell with a reasonable
publicity through the regular channels. I do insert advertisements of
them for three or four reasons--with the hope of helping their sales;
to keep the public informed of the activity of our publishing house;
to please the press; and--to please the authors of the books. But I
know very well that I am working (as every publisher is working) in a
business that has not yet been developed, that is behind the economic
organization of other kinds of manufacturing and selling, that awaits
proper organization.
Figure it out yourself. Here is a book of which eighty thousand copies
have been sold through “the trade;” that is, through the book stores.
Our salesmen have visited every important bookseller from Portland,
Me., to Portland, Ore., and from Duluth to New Orleans. We have spent
quite a handsome sum in advertising it. Four-fifths of these eighty
thousand copies were sold in a few months after its publication. The
booksellers said that they could sell many more if we would advertise
it more. We did so. By this time our salesmen were making another trip.
No, they would not buy more, thank you; it is a little slow now. The
second effort at advertising did not cause it to “move” in the market.
The demand is slow yet. In other words, the demand for it that could
be supplied by the existing book stores was practically exhausted.
Our second advertising effort was a waste of money. We have frankly to
confess that we do not know how to sell more copies of this book until
the time comes when it may be put into a “set” and sold by book agents.
This is the same as to say that, the few existing book stores utilized,
there is no organized machinery for finding more buyers except the book
agent.
Yet it is obvious that a wholesome book (as this is) which eighty
thousand persons have bought would please eighty thousand other persons
of like minds and taste if we had any way to find these second eighty
thousand persons. They exist, of course. But they live out of easy
reach of the book stores. The book agents will find them several years
hence.
I have (I think) shown why there can never be a publishers’ trust,
or “combine,” because the relation of the publisher and the author
is a personal relation as intimate and personal as the relation of
a physician to his patient or of a lawyer and his client. But, after
a book has been sold and has become a commodity, the problem is a
different one. The booksellers have perceived this; and they have made
ineffective efforts to “combine.” They have failed because they have
not made plans to widen the existing market. An organization of those
that exist is not enough. The real problem is to extend their area, to
find book-buyers whom they do not now reach.
Perhaps all this is very dull--this trade talk. But a publisher who is
worthy of his calling regards himself as an educator of the public;
and he has trade reasons and higher reasons as well for wishing to
reach as many buyers of his good books as he possibly can. He knows
(and you know, if you know the American people) that the masses even of
intelligent folk have yet hardly fairly begun to buy books. Go where
you will among the people and you will find few books--pitifully few.
We are just coming into a period when book-buying is even beginning to
become general. The publishers of a generation hence will sell perhaps
ten times as many good books as are sold now--surely, if they find in
their day distributing machinery even half adequate.