5
Before we go on to a discussion of the internal factor of the best seller we want to stress once more, and constructively and suggestively, the postnatal attention it should receive. The first year and the second summer are fatal to far too many books as well as humans. And this is true despite the differences between the two. If 100,000 copies represent the 100 per cent. sale of a given volume you may declare that it makes no difference whether that sale is attained in six months or six years. From the business standpoint of a quick turnover six months is a dozen times better, you may argue; and if interest on invested money be thought of as compounding, the apparent difference in favor of the six-months’ sale is still more striking. This would perhaps be true if the author’s next book could invariably be ready at the end of the six-months’ period. Other ifs will occur to those with some knowledge of the publishing business and a moderate capacity for reflection.
Most books are wrongly advertised and inadequately advertised, and rather frequently advertised in the wrong places.
Of the current methods of advertising new fiction only one is unexceptionably good. This is the advertising which arrests the reader’s attention and baits his interest by a few vivid sentences outlining the crisis of the story, the dilemma that confronts the hero or heroine, the problem of whether the hero or heroine acted rightly; or paints in a few swift strokes some exciting episode of the action—ending with a question that will stick in the reader’s mind. Such an advertisement should always have a drawing or other illustration if possible. It should be displayed in a generous space and should be placed broadcast but with much discrimination as to where it is to appear.
A kind of advertisement somewhat allied to this, but not in use at all despite its assured selling power would consist of the simple reproduction of a photographed page of the book. The Detroit News has used such reproduced pages so effectively as illustrations that it seems strange no publisher (so far as we know) has followed suit. Striking pages, and pages containing not merely objective thrill but the flavor which makes the fascination of a particular book, can be found in most novels. The Detroit News selected a page of the highest effectiveness from so subtle a romance as Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold. This manner of advertising, telling from its complete restraint, is applicable to non-fiction. A page of a book of essays by Samuel Crothers would have to be poorly taken not to disclose, in its several hundred words, the charm and fun of his observations. Publishers of encyclopædias have long employed this “page-from-the-book” method of advertisement with the best results.
The ordinary advertisement of a book, making a few flat assertions of the book’s extraordinary merit, has become pretty hopelessly conventionalized. The punch is gone from it, we rather fear forever. In all conscience, it is psychologically defective in that it tries to coerce attention and credence instead of trying to attract, fascinate or arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not different, essentially, from the public speaker. The public speaker who aims to compel attention by mere thundering or by extraordinary assertions has no chance against the speaker who amuses, interests, or agreeably piques his audience, who stirs his auditors’ curiosity or kindles their collective imagination.
There is too little personality in the advertising of books, and when we say personality we mean, in most cases, the author’s personality. The bald and unconvincing recital of the opinion of the Westminster Gazette, that this is a book every Anglo-American should read, is as nothing compared with a few dozen words that could have been written of, or by, no man on earth except H. G. Wells.
The internal factor of H. G. Wells’s novel The Undying Fire is so big that it constitutes a sort of a least common multiple of the hopes, doubts and fears of hundreds of thousands of humans. A 100 per cent. sale of the book, under existing merchandising conditions, would be 400,000 copies, at the very least. It ought to be advertised in every national and religious weekly of 10,000 circulation or over in the United States, and in every periodical of that circulation reaching a rural audience. And it ought to be advertised, essentially, in this manner:
Shall Man Curse God and Die?
No! Job Answered
No! H. G. Wells Tells Stricken Europe
Read His New Short Novel, “The Undying Fire,”
in Which He Holds Out the Hope that Men
May Yet Unite to Organize the World and
Save Mankind from Extinction
Such an appeal to the hope, the aspiration, the unconquerable idealism of men everywhere, to the social instinct which has its roots in thousands of years of human history, cannot fail.