A while back, author Sandra Scoppettone blogged about how the back cover of her THIS DAME FOR HIRE galley promised booksellers all kinds of advertising and promotion to support the book… which never happened. Why? Because they were lies and publishers assume booksellers won’t notice. Her editor even copped to it:
He said he knows it’s a problem and he’s talked about it at meetings. Not
just my book, but the whole process. He’s even said, “Why can’t we be honest?”
I’m surprised he wasn’t fired for that.
I’m surprised they think booksellers are that stupid.
We’ve talked about this before on this blog.
I still believe that the FTC would find it false and deceptive advertising and that booksellers could easily mount a class-action lawsuit for fraud.
I believe that historically, the covers of as much as three-quarters of all mass-market westerns have falsified the contents to conceal the true nature of the story. This involves misleading titles, art, and cover copy. I have seen covers featuring a badge-wearing lawman even though no such person is in the story; covers turning mining camp people into cowboys; covers with guns when there is no gunplay in the novel. This is all justified in terms of sales, but it has destroyed the western genre and is one of the major reasons most houses have abandoned their western lines. False packaging, more than any other factor, demolished the western genre. Readers never knew what they were buying and so quit buying. The one company that still prospers, Leisure, is the company that falsifies its western fiction the least.
The Almighty Power of BN
Tes Gerritsen reported:
For those of you who arent in the pub business, you may not realize that the front octagonal table in BN is actually PAID display space. (Otherwise known as paying for co-op.) Publishers pay for that…