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How has the 100 per cent. sale for the Harold Bell Wright books been brought within hailing distance?
Before us lies a circular which must have been mailed to most booksellers in the United States early in the spring of 1919. It is headed: “First Publicity Advertisement of Our $100,000 Campaign.” Below this legend is an advertisement of The Re-Creation of Brian Kent. Below that is a statement that the advertisement will appear, simultaneously with the book’s publication, in “magazines and national and religious weeklies having millions upon millions of circulation. In addition to this our newspaper advertising will cover all of the larger cities of the United States.” Then follows a list of “magazines, national and religious weeklies covered by our signed advertising contracts.”
There are 132 of them. The range is from the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic to Vanity Fair and Town Topics in one slant; from System and Physical Culture to Zion’s Herald and the Catholic News; from Life to Needlecraft; from the Photoplay World to the Girl’s Companion; from the Outlook to the Lookout—and to and fro and back and forth in a web covering all America between the two Portlands.
There are about 140,000,000 persons in the United States and Great Britain together. Over 100,000,000 of them, we are told, have read a Harold Bell Wright book or seen a Harold Bell Wright movie.
The secret of the sale of Mr. Wright’s books, so far as the external factor is concerned, resides in the fact that his stories have been brought to the attention of thousands upon thousands who, from one year’s end to the other, never have a new book of fiction thrust upon their attention by advertising or by sight of the book itself.