alt.books
a column by MJ Rose

They test market cereal, don't they?

Writing books may be an art, but selling them is a business. So why don't more publishers use the tools that marketing gurus have developed over the last half-century?

No, I'm not advocating that publishers employ market testing to change the endings of books (the way Hollywood uses screenings), or asking the public to decide whether literary books have merit. Rather, I'm suggesting they use testing to try out new authors and books they might otherwise consider too risky to buy and publish.

Test marketing is a simple concept: you have a product you want to introduce—say Hot Chili Pepper Cereal. Before you shell out the big bucks for production and advertising, you put Hot Chili Pepper Cereal on the supermarket shelves in Akron, Ohio, or Syracuse, New York, or Evansville, Indiana.Then you advertise and promote locally and watch what happens. If enough people buy Hot Chili Pepper Cereal, you know you should roll it out nationally. If it just collects dust in the A&P in Akron, you feed it to the birds in Mexico. Small risk, great possible rewards. Terrifically simple way to find out if something brand new and different has what it takes to make it.

Everything from cereal to perfume to haircolor to movies is test-marketed everything except books. The publishing industry doesn't test-market books, which severely limits the numbers of new authors who get a shot at being published. If you can't test a product to find out if it has potential you have to rely on what you already know. And you can only know about what has happened in the past.

So unless the plot is similar to one that's already been a hit or the author's name is as familiar as Kelloggs, its a guessing game. And there is only so much gambling a company can get away with when the parent company (who often isn't even in the book biz at all) is only looking at the bottom line.

And can you blame them? Publishers have to cough up about $100,000 per book in promotion, advertising, publicity and production costs, and we are not talking about the best sellers here. Just your average good book. Forget about what they spend on a King or Steele, or Harris.

And, and unlike the paper books are printed on, money doesn't grow on trees.

As a result, in a typical year the top publishers in the United States publish about 75-150 new fiction authors. That's out of about 10,000 submitted manuscripts, which comes out to a little more or a little less than one percent, depending on whether you see the glass as half full or half empty.

Rejected manuscripts are obviously a dime a thousand dozen. But that's how it works. It has to. They don't test-market novels.

But there is a viable solution to the ever-shrinking number of new novelists the industry can support. What if each publisher had a web site—most already do—and on that site offered a section of new, not yet published books. Have excerpts of chapters, and charge one dollar per customer to download the book to their own computer. Sure, that means the reader has to print out the book at home. But why not?

You only need about one thousand readers to mathematically project results. Good buzz takes about three to five months to get going. Within that time the publisher would know if a book should make it into print or not.

Where is the downside? Beats me. When I was shopping my novel Lip Service around, suppose a publisher had come to me and said, "We're not sure about your novel; we like it but it's different. We'd like to test-market it. No advance, but we'll pay you a royalty on each book we sell, and if we sell more than a thousand, we'll sit down and do a deal."

Would I have said no? Come on, it took me six months to research that book, a year and a half to write it. And then only six weeks for twelve publishing houses to all tell my agent how good it was, but how it didn't fit a category; how it wasn't quite like anything they'd read before and they didn't know if it could sell 25,000 books, which is the industry average. If they don't think a commercial fiction title can sell that number, major publishers won't buy it.

I would have said yes. But they didn't ask.

So I did it myself. I formed a company called Lady Chatterley's Library, put up a web site, and test-marketed my own novel. And I discovered there was an audience for my novel. Once the news got around that I was selling hundreds of books online, the big publishing houses took notice and my agent eventually sold Lip Service to a big publisher. I did their marketing for them, but I'm not bitter—my book has finally sold, and for an author that's the ultimate epilogue.

It just seems to me that a lot more authors would have a shot at a happy ending if there were publishers test-marketing books. Perhaps now is the time for me to use Lady Chatterley's Library to test-market other authors' novels that, like mine, almost got sold but were just a little too different.

Maybe I'm imagining things; perhaps it will be harder than I think. What if I build a Lady Chatterley's Library web site and no one comes? But writers are dreamers. And in my dream, writing fiction isn't the only art; marketing fiction is an art, too. Merely an undiscovered one.

MJ Rose is the author of Lip Service, now available from PocketBooks and as a Featured Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday BookClub.