I’ll never forget my first piece of secondary school Maths homework. Our hapless teacher, fresh out of training college and anxious to be liked, instructed us to decorate the front page of our exercise books with the slogan: “Maths is Fun!”
Even the dimmest wits among us could see she was up to something. If Maths really were fun, then surely it could stand up for itself, without us copying out this patronising propaganda in felt-tip bubble writing. Instead, by starting off on the defensive, the well-intentioned Miss Purkiss ended up exposing her total lack of belief in her own subject. (I need hardly add that, out of a class of thirty, not one of us has gone on to become a Nobel mathematics laureate).
I’m reminded of “Maths is Fun!” every time a publicist sends me an email about a book trailer. Now if you don’t work in publishing you probably don’t know what one of these is, so let me explain. A book trailer is basically a film trailer, but for a book. They’ve been around for a few years but lately publishers seem to be churning them out like anything. They range from cutesy animations, like this one for Magnus Mills’ latest novel, to glorified PowerPoints, like this one for David by Mary Hoffman, to ones where the publishers have gone all out with actors, fake blood and corpses only to end up with a low budget remake of Waking the Dead.
The problem is, after watching one of these, the last thing you want to do is read a book. Instead, they whet your appetite for mindless visual excitement. Does this trailer for Rome for MC Scott make you want to rush out to Waterstone’s? No, it makes you want to watch Rome, the TV series.
I’m not against the idea of book trailers outright. This terrifying digital realm we’ve entered both needs and facilitates new ways of marketing, and it’s great that publishers are innovating (also known as thrashing around in a dark room for a lightswitch). And some trailers aren’t all that bad. This one for Richard Dawkins’ kids’ book The Magic of Reality actually works quite well: it’s got him talking in it, and it’s an effective way of getting across the book’s illustrations.
The reason book trailers make me uncomfortable is because they’re symptomatic of a worrying sickness in publishing: a lack of confidence in the actual product. Individual publicists and marketeers may well have strong feelings about what they’re promoting, but the impression you get from the industry as a whole is that books need to be jazzed up to be cool. You see this everywhere, from Twitter hashtags on dustjackets imploring us to “join the conversation”, to the bells and whistles of apps and enhanced ebooks, to giveaways like World Book Night, to the embracing of events like Literary Death Match. All of them begging and pleading with us that “Books are Fun!”
Publishers would argue that these things are a way of reaching out to new readers. But judging by the number of people watching these trailers, the number of people adopting Twitter hashtags, and the type of people who go to trendy literary events and take part in World Book Night, I doubt it.
You can understand, when an industry is in crisis, the temptation to throw buckets of money at marketing. But too much promotion, and the wrong type of promotion, can end up undermining what’s being sold. A lot of book publicity – the noisy videos, the persistent attempts to turn reading into a social activity – simply misses the point of what books are for.
When you get down to it, reading works best as a quiet, solitary pursuit. It can be fun, but – unless you’re a toddler chewing on a board book – it’s rarely “Fun!”. And that’s what’s so nice about it. In this mind-crushing cacophony of beeping phones and rolling news, books offer a chance to escape.
Instead of wasting money on trailers and apps and million-book-giveaways, publishers should club together and fund a massive advertising campaign to celebrate the joy of reading alone.
I’ve got it all storyboarded. You ask a bunch of celebrities: “Where do you like to do it (i.e. read)?” The camera would pan from Joanna Lumley in a bubble bath who looks up from her book and whispers “I like to do it in the bath” – to David Walliams reading by torchlight under his duvet (“I like to do it in bed”) – to Boris Johnson on the toilet… you get the idea.
It may sound silly, but is it as silly as this trailer for the latest Andy McNab?
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