Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I can't exactly afford the subscription for WSJ right now so I didn't get to read the whole article. But they apparently ran an article today telling readers to get ready for product placement in our published books.

What are your thoughts?

Me? I'd rather there be ads at the back of the book than pages littered with characters spouting brand names just because the company paid for the book to be printed and not because they like the product.

If this sort of product placement happens, I'd have to jump on the e-book bandwagon and start rooting for the demise of printed books. Which goes completely contrary to my nature.

It's nothing new.

I've got a paperback of THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER with a rip-out subscription card for TIME magazine smack in the middle. Must be forty-years old.

The end pages of most trade paperbacks exist to sell you other books.

I'd like to see Andrew Wylie cut his own ad deals for his authors.

stephmcgee wrote:If this sort of product placement happens, I'd have to jump on the e-book bandwagon and start rooting for the demise of printed books. Which goes completely contrary to my nature.

They could do that with ebooks, too. You get x% into the book and the ebook equivalent of an ad is embedded in the text or takes over the screen and cannot be closed for x seconds. If the other scenario happens, where authors get paid to have the MC drinking Coke instead of Pepsi, it will be the same text in all formats.

I hate the idea of product placement in the story details. Theoretical: Anita Blake doesn't just drink coffee anymore; now she drinks only Folgers. One of the worst things about this is how dated this can make the story, and that really takes something out of the reading experience for me.

I hadn't even thought about the fact that product placement will automatically make the story out of date. (Oh, not to mention the pain in the rear it'll become with advertisers pestering the publisher right to the date of release to change the product name because they've released version 5.7 of whatever the product is.)

I personally think it would be kind of cool to put book trailers to use and put them on e-books, kind of like movie trailers. I love movie trailers! Honestly I get more excited about them sometimes than the movies. And I've always thought book trailers were kind of neat but totally useless since there's no real good way to get them out in any marketable way unless they go viral.

Other sorts of ads? Eh. I think it would be terrible to see more, but books have had end pages that advertise other books, and mail order books, and magazines. It isn't new, but people don't tend to mail order their books anymore. By mail order I mean where you send in a little postcard with the boxes of the books you want checked, not Amazon mail order. Although, I can see there being a sort of end page check box mail order for Amazon on the digital books. "You like this vampire book? Try these other vampire books! Check the ones you want to order now and they'll be delivered immediately to your Kindle!"

Looking down the road a bit further I see us all micro-chipped and companies paying to have ads projected directly into our heads.

Quill wrote:Looking down the road a bit further I see us all micro-chipped and companies paying to have ads projected directly into our heads.

Now that's a scary thought. And makes me think of that awful movie adaptation of Minority Report. (Seriously, have you read the Philip K. Dick story that was based on? Sorry, different forum, I know.)