> In fairness, though, Charles, how do you market
Hard
> Case Crimes? I live in northern Massachusetts and
buy
> all my Hard Case books through Amazon. They're
simply
> not available in stores. I've never seen them in
a
> book store in this neck of the woods.
That *is* a fair question, and unfortunately it's a tough one
for me to answer with confidence, since the direct marketing
of our books to stores is done by the salesforces of
Dorchester Publishing and Ingram, and I don't oversee their
work myself. That said, I believe they do an awful lot of it
-- I've attended a few sales meetings, talked to the
salespeople, seen the selling materials they create, looked
at their travel schedules, and these guys (and women, no
gender bias intended) really do go up and down the country
(and Canada), meeting with hundreds of bookstores and stores
of other sorts, trying to get them to carry our books. And my
impression is that they're generally quite successful.
Certainly in the New York area I see our books in many
stores. I do hear some people say, as you're saying, that
they can't find our books where they live, but I also hear
from people in areas I'd consider fairly remote (i.e., not
only major urban centers) who write to tell me they saw our
books being sold at the local supermarket or drugstore. So
I'm guessing the coverage of the country is somewhat spotty,
but I don't think it's for lack of trying.
The other side of marketing, of course, is "awareness" or
brand marketing. We don't have the money to run ads (we did a
small amount of this when we launched, but that was 3 years
ago), but we benefit from a great deal of publicity, having
been written about in magazines and newspapers (and featured
on television programs) that reach literally tens of millions
of U.S. households. Parade and USA Weekend alone reach almost
every household in America, and they both wrote about us; the
New York Times and Reader's Digest and USA Today and Playboy
and Time magazine are each good for a few million readers
apiece (with some overlap, of course). All this coverage has
been spread over a 3-year period, and though the greatest
portion of it came at the time of our launch (that's when our
mere existence was newsworthy), there's been some more or
less every few months since.
That's a brief snapshot of how we market our books -- if you
have other questions about this, I'll be glad to give more
information.
(On the other hand, I don't want to bore everyone on the list
who'd much rather be fighting over the definition of 'noir'
than listening to all this business talk...)
> If you put them in wire, rotating racks in
stores
> where comics and magazines are sold, in
bus
> stations and airports, etc; if you put them
around
> like the old Dell Paperbacks, and Gold Medal,
and
> Ace, and Pyramid, you'd sell a lot more
copies.
Maybe -- maybe not. Alas, it looks like we'll never find out
because though we've pitched exactly this sort of thing to
numerous retailers
(in both cardboard "standing dump" form and wire "spinner
rack" form) almost no retailers have been willing to take us
up on it. They are just unwilling to devote the precious
floorspace to this sort of thing. They don't think they'll
make enough money, and who knows, maybe they're right.
> Right now, you have no impulse market, at
> least where I live. Maybe they're all over New
York
> City, but in the burbs, if you don't already
know
> about Hard Case Crime, you're not likely to
learn
> about these books
I do know that they're carried in most (not all) Barnes &
Noble and Borders stores -- so any suburb that has one of
those is likely to have our books in it. That said, those
stores have tens of thousands of other books in them, too,
mostly shelved spine-out -- so unless you go in specifically
looking for a given publisher's work (whether Hard Case
Crime, Harlequin, HarperCollins, or Harcourt), it's not
likely to leap to your attention.
--Charles
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