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.