Marketing smarter (not more expensively)

For some time, Dennis Johnson at the energetic Brooklyn publisher Melville House has been asking this question about Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone.

“How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since?”

Here’s one of his most creative answers to that question. As I saw in my brief career as an assistant bookseller, publishers print and distribute thousands of copies of Advance Reader’s Copies or ARCs for forthcoming books. Yet although the purpose of these ARCs is to drum up attention and enthusiasm, they are generally very boring. Title, author, and publishing details are printed on a light blue paper cover, and that’s that.

Melville House has shown that you can grab the attention you need not by spending any more but just by being a little bit different. Of course, being different can be scary and involves some risk—the risk that you will annoy people who are used to getting their ARCs the same old way. But in this case it paid off.

Even better, to my mind, is that it paid off by using a testimonial. Seth Godin argues in Purple Cow and elsewhere that what’s needed to cut through the noise in today’s media is a genuine voice.

Real testimonials from real people (not testimonials cooked up by the marketing department) can do that—especially when they come from a voice as significant as Primo Levi’s.