Are Book Ads Doing Their Job?

As advertisers, publishers relentlessly send out messages promoting their books to consumers, but they may be turning a deaf ear to the response. It's not a complicated message either: show us the plot.

According to Bethany Chamberlain, president and CEO of Spier New York, a publishing advertising firm that counts Doubleday/Broadway and Bantam Dell among its clients, consumer advisory councils reveal that book buyers seek that one vital piece of information above all others. "Not surprisingly, they want to know what the book is about," said Chamberlain.

Likewise, a Bookreporter.com survey conducted last January showed that, when asked what they would like to see in ads, 83.1% of respondents requested book synopses. In comparison, 10.2% said they'd like to see quotes from reviews, and only 1% of the group cared about endorsement blurbs.

But are publishers listening? If they are, they're not responding quickly or loudly enough to suit Carol Fitzgerald, co-founder and president of thebookreportnetwork.com, a network of seven sites, including Bookreporter.com. "I personally don't find this that difficult. If you cannot describe a book in a sentence or two, what the heck are you doing publishing it?" Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald sees the lack of response to the issue as symptomatic of stasis in book advertising as a whole. "Everyone in this business has been so conditioned to do what they do. It is the hardest thing to get people to think outside the box," she observed.

While publishers may not be innovative when it comes to design, they seem to be expanding their horizons as far as advertising placement goes. "Over the past several years, we've seen much less use of the New York Times Book Review," said Chamberlain.

HarperCollins has expanded into magazines as varied as Bust, Bomb, Bookmarks and the Weekly Standard. Knopf now buys space in Harper's and the Economist. Knopf is also experimenting with ads on political blogs, sites such as wonkette.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, bookslut.com and others. Associate publisher Patricia Johnson said the results of this experiment were more than satisfactory, citing close to 4,000 click-throughs and 5,000 page views for Robert Reich's Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America (May).

When pressed for examples of creative advertising, Martha Otis, senior v-p and director of advertising and promotion for the Time Warner Book Group, pointed to taxi-top ads in New York City for Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction (Sept.) and the paperback of Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? (Aug.). But taxi tops are hardly avant-garde, especially when compared to the guerrilla tactics and creative product placement at play in the rest of the advertising industry.

The average American has seen upward of a million ads by his or her 40th birthday. Only a small sliver is for books. Part of the reason it's so difficult for books to compete is that earnings potential for books is relatively small—as is the amount of money spent. Even the largest book advertising budgets look like chump change next to the $35 million dollars that constitute the average advertising budget for a movie. As a result, when it comes to book advertising, only authors who are already established are treated to major campaigns. In this no-risk scenario, the haves become the have-mores.

More and more publishers are hiring agencies rather than developing ads in-house. For the last year, about 90% of the ads for HarperCollins books have been outsourced. But Rockelle Henderson, director of advertising and promotion, was doubtful about the impact of ads, no matter who produces them and where they run. "How do you judge if an ad works?" she asked. "Have I had consumers call me up and say, 'That ad was great and I went out and bought the book?' No. We continue to do them to support the marketing campaign and to support the publicity. Do any of them sell books? It's hard to say."

In other words, book buyers aren't the only ones frustrated with book advertising. Sally Richardson, publisher of St. Martin's, said, "You can't throw a little money on a lot of titles. It doesn't help the titles you're throwing the money on, and it pulls dollars from the ones that need it most."