For whatever reasons, it seems like the book publishing industry has been making some noise in the business press the past few months. And the message we’re hearing is that the book business is just like any other, with savvy marketers using every trick of the trade to move units.
In this morning’s New York Times, reporter Motoko Rich noted the increasing numbers of companies that are wangling appearances for their products in books, much as they do in movies. No need, though, to scour your “Everyman” books for sly product placements. So far, the culprits have been limited to the genres of teen-lit, and its slightly more cynical, if no more readable older sister, chick-lit.
Rich finds that near the end of an early galley of Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233, a young adult novel that will be published in September, the heroine talks about wearing a “killer coat of Clinique #11 ‘Black Violet’ lipstick.” But in the final edition of the book, that reference has been changed to “a killer coat of Lipslicks in ‘Daring.'”
“Lipslicks,” apparently, is the name of a lip gloss made by Cover Girl, which we discover has inked a deal with Running Press, the publisher of the novel. The beauty of the whole thing is that Cover Girl didn’t have to pay a dime to get their product name-checked in the book. Rather, in exchange for the shout-out, they plan to promote the book on Beinggirl.com, “a Web site directed at adolescent girls that has games, advice on handling puberty and, yes, makeup tips.”
All this shouldn’t necessarily be surprising, considering that the two guys who wrote the book, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, are co-founders of 42 Entertainment, an interactive marketing company.
But as the article points out, such deals, while still rare in the publishing industry, are hardly new. About four years ago, the British author Fay Weldon accepted a payment from the Italian jewelry maker Bulgari in order to write The Bulgari Connection, in which the Italian company was mentioned throughout the book. Similarly, as the BBC pointed out in March 2005, “British ‘chick lit’ writer Carole Matthews went further, signing a deal with Ford to mention its cars prominently in several of her works. No prizes for guessing the thrust of her forthcoming novel, You Drive Me Crazy.”
And really, these books-by-committee (i.e., marketing campaigns) seem to be a growing industry. Back in April, the sordid underbelly of the world of teen-lit and chick lit was exposed to be even more grotesque than previously believed when Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, was shown to contain several plagiarized passages.
What’s more — and here’s where the nasty business side comes in — the book had been “packaged” by Alloy Entertainment, Inc. In other words, the company coached Viswanathan through the writing process, editing and co-writing as she went, in addition to having helped her ink a deal with a publisher for her manuscript. Alloy Entertainment is a division of marketing and advertising company Alloy, which has also developed other teen bestsellers, including Gossip Girl, The A-List, The Clique and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
If “packaging” and product placement weren’t enough, USA Today has discovered yet another corporate taint of the literary world, noting in a story last Wednesday that “more and more, publishers are finding retail store partners where authors — particularly novelists who write about fashion-conscious young women — can mingle with the kinds of people who publishers think will buy their books.”
The paper then ran down a list of several “chick-lit” authors who are making in-store appearances at Chanel, Saks, Frederic Fekkai, Ferragamo and Oscar de la Renta stores around the country. Marleah Stout, an employee of publisher Harlequin, told USA Today her company chose these stores because their target readers like “hip clothes, cosmetics and shoes, and they may not go to bookstores.”
That pretty much says it all. Now, if only newspapers could get some promotional mileage out of all the free product placements that reporters give to their sources.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.