Advertising in Books

Filed under Blog • 08-09-2010 •

Where do you stand on the issue of advertising in books? See my second post of the week for Futurismic:

Click here to read ‘Advertising In Books’

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3 comments on “Advertising in Books”

  1. Ben Cooper • September 9th, 2010 at 3:45 pm •

    Hmmm…it’s an interesting one. I don’t think I’d object to other titles being plugged in those blank pages at the end, but of course that doesn’t bring in revenue for the publisher.

    Here’s what I think given my time working on a commercial consumer magazine.

    The concern I’d have is that if it became standard you’d not only end up with increasingly more ads, but then it opens up a situation where it could be possible for advertisers to begin dictating elements of the book. For example the writer has the bad guy drinking a big name alcohol just before he detonates a bomb killing hundreds of innocents…well the company won’t like that, so they might ask for changes, the publisher then says to the author “well they are willing to spend £25k with us, but you need to completely re-write chapters 3, 12 and 16. Then they may say “well we’ll pay £xxxx for a few pages at the back but we want our product appearing x amount of times.” This kind of thing happens a lot in film and TV apparently.

    Personally I hate..*hate*.. product placement in films, especially when it is really blatant, some of the stuff in the first Transformers film was sickening and I’ve seen much worse. I understand it’s part of the deal but when it is blatant it really gets me.

    I wouldn’t like to see it. And the idea of ads in e-books could be even worse. I don’t read them, and doubt I ever will until they create a reader that is as easy on the eyes as paper, but I can’t imagine having ads on pages, pop-ups every twenty pages etc. which is what they’d want, I doubt they’d be happy with hyperlinks, too easy to ingore.

    And as you say advertisers want to maximise their audience – Coke or Nike would only advertise in Stephen King books, while smaller more niche companies might advertise in smaller books that they feel target their core audience but they won’t have much budget so the spend will be smaller.

    I would refuse to buy any book that featured adverts from a company other than the publishing house of the book in question.

    Well…that’s my two penneths worth anyway.

  2. Gareth L Powell • September 9th, 2010 at 6:10 pm •

    I’ve had a few replies to this on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the comments on the original Futurismic post, and everyone seems to feel much the same way: no ads!

  3. Ben Cooper • September 10th, 2010 at 1:34 pm •

    Not that surprised. Most people won’t even put up with ads on TV these days, hop to another channel for two minutes or if fastforward if it’s digitally recorded.

    The only way I could see it working would be if the book was free, like on-line websites, then I suppose you could just overlook it. But I’d still be against it.

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