Death Of The Book Party
Authors debate the effectiveness of certain promo items like bookmarks, postcards and other handy little gadgets given out to booksellers and readers. The New York Times Sunday Book Review ran an article on a different promo item - book parties. The title was: The Party’s Over. Does that give you an idea if this one falls into the pro or con column?
Some thoughts from the article:
-”I think they’re practically passé, book parties, don’t you find?” said Nan Talese, the publisher of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, whose mellifluous voice itself seems to hark back to a more lustrous era.
-”In these cost-cutting days, the book party is no longer to be counted on as a well-earned prize,” [writer and editor James] Atlas lamented. For one, publishers see book parties as a waste of money. The marketing budget, they argue, is far better spent on advertising or placement in bookstores. Unless you’ve written a surefire best seller — something about, say, sex, Hollywood, God, dogs, dieting or Abraham Lincoln — publishers are hesitant to spring for more than a few bottles of wine and some snacks from Fairway.
-”It’s more helpful in getting attention city by city with influential people in the book world,” said the literary agent Ira Silverberg. “You could take over Yankee Stadium for Salman Rushdie and I don’t know if it’s going to matter to an independent bookseller in Pasadena.”
-”I often used to say, the more parties there were for a book, the worse the book was,” [Fran] Lebowitz said.
The good news here is that bookmarks are cheaper anyway. If you’re going to pick something, maybe go with one that doesn’t include buying booze and renting a room. Unless, of course, you go with Lebowitz’s theory:
“It’s like coal mining. The only people I feel sorrier for are coal miners. And they never have parties, they sometimes don’t live through the day. But I’m sure if you ask them each day when they come out of the mine if they think they’d want people passing around canapés, they’d say yes.”
Huh?
