The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style.
I've got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them.
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.
I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.
There's a lot of books that I've purchased simply because of the cover design. On the other hand, there's certain books that, even if I'm very curious about the content, I can't bring myself to buy if I really dislike the cover.
There are a lot of wonderful books out there that aren't marketed properly, and readers who might love them never even know they exist.
To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.
Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will 'fill a long-felt want,' and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the 'long-felt want.'
I think that some books are more successful than others to certain readers. People who read my books for the humor, they're going to love one book. People who read my books for the mystery, they might not like that book quite as much.
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.