There
are two dominant types of advertisements for cars. One tries to sell you on a brand or specific
car model. The other showcases prices at
car dealers. Could either approach work
to sell your book?
Authors
should never lead with price as the reason to buy their book. Even at free, no one wants to waste their
time on a book they believe won’t deliver whatever it is they are looking for. When it comes to cars, ironically, the price
is emphasized when, in fact, the price is relatively high.
Car
ads usually won’t highlight the total sticker price of a car. Instead, it’ll emphasize a low monthly
payment, bury the upfront and extra fee numbers, and hope you are seduced by
what is in big print. If you sell on
price, instead of saying your book is $14.95, say it’s 99c per chapter or 1c for
every 30 words.
The
brand ads for cars are closer to what you’d want to model, except these ads
often don’t emphasize substance such as mpg, safety ratings, and the things we
should judge a car by. Instead they
market an image that appeals to our personality or senses. Don’t you want the car driven by the
successful businessman or the one with a beautiful woman draped over it? Commercials emphasize speed, and yet, what roads
and traffic conditions – and laws – really allow you to race like a daredevil?
Should
your advertisement market to consumers with facts and reasoning about your
book, or should it sell the ideal, the fantasy, the psychological thrill?
Book
advertisements may not really have a model outside their industry, but they
could learn from the ads of other industries, including film, theater, and
sports.
Book
ads haven’t changed a lot over the years.
They still quote testimonials of famous people, pull from reviews and
highlight the author’s name if a known entity.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if those ads sold you on the anticipated
benefits of reading such a book, whether a novel or non-fiction?
Here’s
an example of an ad that falls short. A
two-page spread in the Feb. 22 NY Times Book Review for A Spool of Blue Thread
never gives a single line as to what the book is about. Knopf spent all of this money to say Anne
Tyler has a new book out. But there’s
the problem. If you are a fan, you don’t
need the ad to remind you. And even a
fan wants to know what the book is about.
For the vast majority of people who never read her books or even heard
of her, they won’t buy a book solely because she got nice blurbs. I think 85% of the ad is great but by not
using some real estate to scrawl a few descriptive sentences is a colossal
failure. But, to be fair, other
publishers take the same approach, hoping you’ll judge a book by its cover – or
title or blurbs. The following ads
lacked any descriptive copy: The Future of the Mind, Mightier than the Sword,
The Room, Redeployment – and that was just to page seven in that same NYT Book Review section.
Sometimes
the hope is that the merit of who gave the blurb will win you over – or that
the blurb will actually explain what the book is about.
Books
can’t be sold like cars or dresses.
Books represent experiences, ideas, emotions and dreams. The ad copy should tap into the core of the
human essence.
We
may be a visual society or one that attaches itself to brand names, but you
need to give me more than the Huffington Post saying the book is a “wonderful
read” or The Seattle Times saying it “couldn’t put this book down.” Tell me what the book is about!
Ads
should be like a back cover of a trade paperback – tell me who wrote the book,
toss in some blurbs, and give me a bulleted description of the book. Anything less is useless.
What
does it say about the intellectual process of reading if our reading decisions
are made based on skimpy ads that are so far removed substantively from the
craft it seeks to promote?
DON’T MISS: ALL NEW RESOURCE OF THE YEAR
2015 Book PR & Marketing Toolkit: All New
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