It comes as no surprise—some would say it's about time—that one of the themes running through many of the discussions at the London Book Fair was the use of the Internet in the marketing of books.
It wasn't just at the panel PW hosted on the subject, at which a savvy British consultant named Tim Ireland exhorted publishers to "come down from their ivory towers" and deal directly, via the Web, with their readers—and, more importantly, with people they want to become their readers. It wasn't even the British journalist who opined on another panel that one publisher had simply "blown it" by producing a MySpace page that was little more than a replica of a print ad for one of its "big" books; she, too, suggested that Internet marketing works best when you engage potential readers with backstory about a character or topic in the book, not with information about the plot, publication, price or availability of the book itself. The most interesting and instructive story was the one about a new paperback original novel called The Average American Male, which HarperPerennial published in March.
The book is either "a brilliant send-up" (says Toby Young in a cover blurb) or a sensationalist, almost pornographic, look at the attitudes of contemporary young men toward sexual relationships. It's so bawdy and sometimes nasty and maybe even "dangerous" (another blurb) that even the obvious publicity suspects—FHM and Maxim magazines, for example—declined to touch it, for review or excerpt. It's a book, in other words, that could disappear in a week, which would not be a tragedy either for American letters (PW deemed it "dismal") or for its publisher, which paid a modest five-figure advance and printed an equally modest 18,000 copies. But then publisher Carrie Kania and editor David Roth-Ey and the author, Chad Kultgen, had an idea: with the help of a filmmaker friend of Kultgen's, they made three short video spots that re-created some of the book's more filmable scenes and posted them on MySpace.
Like all great ideas, this one was simple and obvious and inexpensive. (Cost: videos: a few hundred dollars; advertising, i.e., posting: $0). It worked to get people talking: Kania reports that in two weeks, the videos received four million hits, from mostly teen and 20-something males, who are not, to put it mildly, the most avid of bookbuyers. But how many of those "eyeballs" will morph into readers?
That, of course, is the question: just because you visit someone in their neighborhood doesn't mean they'll turn around and come to yours. According to Nielsen BookScan, The Average American Malehas sold 5,000 copies, but Kania says that, thanks to the buzz, more airport and college bookstores are placing orders and Harper will soon have 40,000 copies in print. Should it sell through, that's a 1% response rate—pretty standard, marketers will tell you, for the direct-mail approach. But what Kania and Co.'s creativity, nerve and pluck add up to is... priceless.
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