For those who are made uncomfortable by the increasing closeness of huge media conglomerates like News Corporation, AOL Time Warner and Pearson to the cultural continuum, there are some crumbs of comfort to be found, and perhaps the first and greatest of these is the following: that even with their huge resources and market share (the accountants KPMG found that of 15,000 publishers (1), fewer than 40 accounted for over 60% of total book sales),  their sophisticated retail tools and demographic samplings and focus groups, they’re still rubbish at predicting what will prove popular. So the good old blunderbuss approach of firing a huge number of titles at a wide audience and hoping some will hit the target is about as scientific as a general publisher’s going to get, no matter how big the company. The accountants no doubt wish the situation were different, but like it or not, success or failure hinges on the nous of the company’s Commissioning Editors - something you can’t measure, quantify or even necessarily teach. It’s that imprecise. So it’s actually in the publisher’s interest (unless it’s a niche company with a loyal audience) to cast their net as widely as possible.

But even the good Commissioning Editors tend to have a low strike rate: in 1998, for example, a mere 3% of titles accounted for 50% of the volume of retail sales. So the big players seem to be no wiser than the minnows on the issue of what will sell. As a website called www.ukpublishing-info tersely observes;

The book publishing business historically concentrated on pushing product out into the supply chain and has taken less account than it should of whether the books will sell. Typically 20% of a publisher’s titles will account for 80% of the revenues. Publishers seem divided over whether this is simply an inevitable consequence of the business – forecasting whether a particular title will sell is, after all, not like forecasting demand for nappies or baked beans – or something which publishers should be actively trying to change. Book publishing, especially on the fiction side, resembles the music and film business, where a few hits will be balanced by a large number of

failures.

Predicting readers’ responses is far from being a science. All the publisher can possibly know is the glaringly obvious fact that the book’s meaning - the essential bridge between the book and the reader - has to somehow reach as many people as possible. And, of course, there’s no way you can guarantee this is going to happen. One man’s meaning is another’s total crap. But meaning’s the thing to focus on, even at the most popular end of the market. The following quote is taken from one of the brashest (and so, by definition, American) “how to” book marketing publications I could find (for ‘content’ read ‘meaning’ - it seems we’re talking about the same thing).

Regardless of what kind of books you publish, the books must have some sort of content. Yes, it is possible to sell books with no content at all, but that is a limited market. Most publishers must give priority to content. And rightly so. Indeed, the reason most of us are in publishing is because of the content. We want to create books with lasting value, with significance, with substance.

Or, in other words, books that have legs. And legs are provided by value, significance, substance and meaning, call this property what you will.

But one of the glories of meaning is that it doesn’t  behave like baked beans -  and never will. The contents of no two tins is alike, even between two Mills and Boon formula romances. And once you’ve progressed beyond the ‘literature by numbers’ market, it’s more wayward still; who can account for the success of eccentric titles like Louis de Bernieres’s ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ or Yann Martel’s ‘The Life of Pi’? Or why ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ sold far fewer copies in the UK than the other books in the series, including its successor? Or why Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth’ took off like a rocket and the follow-up didn’t?  The most convincing argument our American marketeer can come up with is based on the capriciousness of the literary orgasm (which he calls “the chill factor”), and that’s no use to a multinational at all. So marketing books can be a nightmare for anyone who lives or dies by the balance sheet. (2) Which is, by a long way, the biggest understatement in this book so far.

And it’s not just the slipperiness of meaning you’ve got to take into account when you’re trying to flog books, or the utterly personal process that is reading - but the often cranky susceptibilities of your audience, bearing in mind the special aura surrounding books we looked at a few pages back.

Traditionally,  there’s a far greater emphasis on what certain marketing managers call “the whispering campaign” as opposed to the ‘in your face’ approach adopted by other media. And in the UK at least, this (mostly) refined bush telegraph works brilliantly -  to the tune of nearly 1.5 billion pounds spent in the UK on books in 2001. It’s a complex web of reviews and recommendations involving the broadsheets, the weekly literary magazines, book-oriented radio stations like BBC Radio 4 and Oneword, summer festivals and reading groups. Then there’s the book pages in publications as diverse as ‘Cosmopolitan’ and ‘Hornby Modeller’, the celebrity endorsements, not to mention the snatched glimpses over a fellow passenger’s shoulder on the Tube, train or bus at an eye-catching cover. Then there’s the book shop dump bins, the belly bands, and the panoply of marketing material that represents, as yet, only a mild flirtation with the vulgar. (3)

And books are marketed in this way for a reason: the love between a reader and a book is much more likely to take the form of a slow burn, growing slowly and steadily into a lasting loyalty over an extended period of time rather than a quick bunk-up. And it really is love, one that suffuses the entire army of people associated with this not-quite-sleeping giant we call literature. Why else would anyone work for the miniscule wages paid to the majority of staff in publishing and its associated retail industry? Why else do most assistants in bookshops tend to have degrees? You don’t get that in Tesco’s. Or indeed anywhere else. But it can be a fierce love, and, as we’ll discover in the rest of this section, often a jealous one too. All down to the mystique that is The Book. And whether you’re a multinational or not, you’d be a fool to ignore the fact that Meaning is Personal (Big Theme #10), as we’ll see in greater detail in the following section.

So you must bear the following in mind if you’re a publicist: best make sure you don’t get too populist, because if you do choose to mount a high-profile marketing campaign, any form of literary ballyhoo can put off as many readers as it attracts. Somehow making a big fuss about a book seems all rather vulgar, whether it’s a PLBOAMS or not. Take ‘Harry Potter’ as perhaps the best example of orchestrated book hype the world’s ever witnessed.

 At midnight on 21st June 2003, hundreds of  bookshops worldwide threw open their doors to accommodate the demand for ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’, which dictated an initial print run of 8.5 million copies in the US alone. Online retailer Amazon had more than one million advance orders, including 300,000 in Britain.  Borders came next with 700,000, followed by Barnes & Noble, who were offering the chance to win a holiday for four in ‘Harry Potter’s England’ as part of their build-up. Mark Lawson in ‘The Guardian’, offered this level-headed assessment:

[JK Rowling] . . . has created a world in which novels - like new cars, grouse, Beaujolais Nouveau and Star Wars movies - are mass-purchased on the first day of availability and in which book reviews are phoned in at half-time like a sports report. Newspapers and airwaves contained the first literary notices in which critics freely admitted that they had not had time to finish the book.

Selling literature like this is a risk. The only previous novel released to even a percentage of this hysteria, Thomas Harris's ‘Hannibal’ . . . suffered from critics taking revenge on the publicity [itals mine]. But while no writer could ever justify this hype, my view - backed, more importantly, by assistant critics from the target market - is that JK Rowling may survive it.

And so far she has. But this is a phenomenon that’s yet to be repeated with any other author, and no-one in publishing I’ve talked to reckons this is going to be the thin end of a very fat wedge. Or, indeed, any wedge at all. Many actively hope it isn’t, balancing their obvious distaste for all this uncharacteristic hoop-la by saying that JK Rowling’s legacy will not be the unprecedented amount of money she’s earned, but that almost single-handedly she introduced a whole new generation to the joys of reading, thereby saving them from the middle-class cultural hell represented by MTV and the computer game. So, by using a bit of intellectual sophistry, we can disassociate all that razzamattaz from literature and keep it safely at arms’ length.

Those who want to man the trenches between literature and commerce can rest easily in their beds, safe in the knowledge that it’s OK to like ‘Harry Potter’. It was a close shave, though.

So, as a publisher facing these obstacles, and in some case downright hostility that he’s not a charity for the promulgation of Culture and Knowledge, what can he do to bring his books and the reader together? If tastes, and therefore the way we ingest meaning, are as capricious as I’m making out, is there anything that can be done not so much to try and standardize readers’ responses, but perhaps to encourage them to be less partial? Or to put it another way, to cast their nets wider in the sea of books and forget about any artificial distinctions that may have been bred into them? Can they reconcile the mass market with the exalted status books continue to possess? And can they maintain that special aura while increasing demand? (that’s enough questions, Ed).

First off, they’ll have to DEMYSTIFY  the world of books, particularly for those whose patterns of consumption are sporadic and irregular (and let’s not forget that constitutes about three-quarters of the potential UK audience).

It’s often  overlooked that it can be genuinely daunting if you don’t know your way around literature - I’ve heard it likened to being hopelessly lost in the middle of a big city. Which is spot on. I heard a well-known DJ on the radio this morning who’s decided, age 44, that he isn’t going to start reading literary classics because he’s scared he’ll find out what he’s been missing all these years, and he’ll never manage to catch up having left it so late. How sad is that? And all because he had formed a baseless prejudice that literature “wasn’t for him”.

Footnotes:

1. Most of these publishers are absolutely tiny: in 2000, of these 15,000, only 2,305 were registered for VAT - so only 15% of the total number had a turnover exceeding the VAT threshold, which (then) was £51K

2. I once had lunch with the literary editor of a national newspaper who offered this useful rule of thumb: unless a book is the subject of a Hollywood movie deal; a thinly-disguised tissue of real-life gossip; written by someone who’s already famous for doing something far more exciting than writing; or who’s committed an indiscretion that‘s come to the attention of the police or a group of religious fundamentalists, or ‘Harry Potter’, don’t waste money on marketing.

3. My current favourite promotional technique is a daring new development found in bookshops, where the endorsement arrives in the form of a handwritten note (signed by a member of the branch’s staff, who’s acting the part of a kind of trusted friend or go-between), usually on recycled paper, gently inviting you to look in the book’s direction, as you might find a brief dalliance mildly enjoyable. It’s all very adult. And if you think that’s a peculiarly British way of under-selling something, it isn’t; these little billets-doux are exactly the same in both the US and Australia, where you might expect a bit more gush. It reminds me of ‘Brief Encounter’, where the beast in Trevor Howard’s subconscious is telling him to rip Celia Johnson’s clothes off, a desire he ruthlessly sublimates into the offer of a cup of tea.