My holiday entertainment was watching an endless caravan of rain clouds cross the skies of a Breton peninsula. As an occasional diversion, I read a French guide book from 1909. Its pages were full of ads for grand hotels with casinos and spas where automobiles could be hired and fun could be had. All just five years before the Great War.
It wasn’t the hindsight that got me thinking though. It was the ads. Book sales are on the up. More people than ever are publishing books. Why no ads? If advertisers want to go where the audience is, why aren’t they nestling in the pages of Lemony Snicket or Ian McEwan?
I asked someone in the publishing biz. The integrity of the book, they said. The book as object. An advertising free space. Well, I can see that argument for the Lindisfarne Gospels, but for vacation reading?
Surely it has to come. Wouldn’t a couple of pages in a Harry Potter be worth something to someone? Don’t publishers talk to advertisers? Maybe you could offer cheap books with ads and expensive books without, and see which ones people preferred…maybe it’s already happening.
4 responses to “Why don’t books carry ads?”
Kid’s books – puffins in particular – used to carry endless pages at the back advertising other titles from the same publisher at great length – a full, page-length blurb and details. I can’t think of a single book I’ve read in the last few years that’s even done that. Surely that (if carefully targeted) would be better than the “DVD extras” (author interviews; lists of favourite CDS and the like) that Harper Collins started clogging up their paperbacks with a few years back?
I’ve often wondered the same – the possibilities are endless – condom adverts at the back of erotic novels, airline ads in travel novels, and possibly various psycho-analysts touting their wares on the fly pages of Alastair Campbell’s Diaries?
cheers
Charlie
lots of paperbacks have ads in the back for other books by the same author, or of the ‘if you liked that, you’ll like this’ variety. Plus an order form to buy them direct from the publishers.
But ads for other stuff – can’t think of anything except Rough Guides, which have ads scattered throughout. I always prefered Lonely Planet.
Actually, we have been advertising in our Frommer’s travel guides for a while, and you will soon begin seeing some advertising experiments in our technology titles.
Chris Webb
Executive Editor
John Wiley & Sons