Yesterday’s post about last weekend’s Watchmen boost, as a trailer for the forthcoming motion picture spurred sales of the book at Amazon.com (and elsewhere?) met with a response from M.J. Rose, who cites the uptick as proof that “the solution to book sales is exposure.” In other words, “when you expose millions of people to an ad, hundreds of thousands of people will respond to it… What the message is matters of course—but not as much as simply getting it out there.”
“The problem with book sales isn’t that there aren’t enough great books,” Rose claims, “it’s that there isn’t enough money to let enough people know about many of those books. It’s not that there aren’t good trailers; it’s how to get them in front of the captive audience in that movie theater.” I disagree. The problem isn’t when publishers and authors don’t spend enough to promote books—it’s when they don’t spend effectively enough. For most books, marketing isn’t about casting a net wide and praying for a big catch, it’s about dangling your hooks in the sweet spots.
The point of yesterday’s post was never that if you showed enough people the Watchmen trailer, they’d want to buy the book. It was that when you showed Dark Knight fans the trailer, they (perhaps unexpectedly) became interested in the book as well as the movie… I’m guessing, in part, because many in the audience were too young to have read Watchmen when it came out, or weren’t even comic book fans but just wanted to see Batman and got a strong dose of something that looks awfully similar.
We’ve already seen what happens when big publishing houses throw a bunch of money around trying to acquire books. Following that up by throwing around even more money trying to market those books to as many people as possible is, it seems to me, a recipe for underperformance and unmet expectations at the broadest levels, no matter how many lucky strikes it might generate along the way. (And Rose seems to get that, recognizing that there are other forms of “exposure” to pursue.)
(Duly noted: In the comments below, Rose says she was talking about targeted advertising all along.)