Then there are the daily papers. One or two of the best dailies in every large city are used by the publishers for announcements of new books. They cannot afford more--except in the case of those novels which may reach enormous editions. Given a novel that will sell 100,000 copies or more, and you have enough possible profit to warrant a good deal of advertising. But during this calendar year only two novels (perhaps three) have new editions of more than 100,000 copies. What is a publisher to do, then, who has a novel that will sell 10,000 copies, or 20,000 copies and no more? Can he make it sell 50,000 or 100,000 by spending a large sum in advertising it? Perhaps, once in ten times, or once in twenty times; but not oftener.
Five or six publishing houses spend more than $50,000 a year, each, in advertising. Two spend a good deal more than this sum; and one is reported as saying that he spends $250,000. These are not large sums when compared with the sums spent for advertising other wares. But an advertisement of a shoe published to-day will help to sell that shoe next year. The shoemaker gets a cumulative effect. But your novel advertised to-day will be dead next year. You get no cumulative effect. When I say, therefore, that no publisher has mastered the art of advertising books, I tell the literal truth. They all run against a dead wall; and they will all tell you so in frank moments.
The study of the problem of advertising books takes one far afield. What quality in a book makes it popular anyhow? Even if you are wise enough to know that (and you are very wise if you do know that) the question arises whether advertising is necessary. There have been as many popular books sold in large editions without advertising as with it. If your book is really popular it may sell anyhow. I could make a long list of such books, and a still longer list of books that extensive advertising did not sell--books which seemed to their publishers to have the quality of great popularity.
The question carries us further back still. Let us take the analogy of the shoemaker again. He has shoe stores within reach of the whole population. There is not a village in the land where there is not a store in which shoes are sold. The manufacturers’ salesmen find this distributing machinery ready to their hands. If a man in Arkansas or in Montana or in Florida wants a pair of shoes, he is within reach of a place where he may buy them. Not so with books. There are few bookstores. Two or three per cent. of the population (perhaps less) live within convenient reach of bookshops. True, a book may be ordered by mail. But so may a pair of shoes. But this is not a good substitute for a store, where a man may see the book. The mail-order business will always be secondary to direct sales. But, since bookstores are so few, the book-distributing machinery is wholly inadequate. The publisher has no effective way yet to reach his normal public with his wares.