All the marketing and advertising sells the book as what it is and hopes that the book will be displayed so that your readers can find it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.
I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.
What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style.
If there is going to be any meaningful sales, it's going to be through word of mouth and people recommending it to their book club and then a thousand more book clubs do it, and then you get into real sales numbers.
A lot of the ways of advertising a book - the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore - those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.
I've got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them.
When a new book comes out or becomes accessible in whatever form, I get it and I read it.
There's a difference between publicity and marketing. A lot of writers don't realize how much marketing goes on beyond the scenes, with sales reps and advanced reading copies, all that stuff that happens months before a book is published.
Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.