Book Promotion

 Advertising and Books

   Promoting a book is harder than publishing, or even writing one. According to Publishers Weekly, about four million of them were produced in 2025, which means that being an author is somewhat easier than becoming an astronaut. The hard part is getting a reader to choose your book from a pile of 4,000,000 of them.

   I thought of this while reading the March 2026 issue of The Atlantic, which I am pleased to promote. The articles in this issue are first-rate. Even the advertisements are good and are our subject for today. Some of them were full page promotions for books. 

One of These Ads Is Not Like the Others

   You may have been watching Sesame Street, rather than reading a book, and remember the song containing the words above. Your task is to look at the four book ads below and identify which one is different.

1.

2.

3.   

4. 

And The Answer Is?
   The most obvious answer is #3 since the ad is for six books rather than just one. The less obvious answer and the one I prefer is #4. 

   The book about Lincoln is published by W.W. Norton & Company. The Deserving is published by Bloomsbury. The six books in #3 are published by Princeton University Press.  It is usually the case that full page advertisements for books are paid for by publishing companies or university presses.

   The ad for Isabel, Anacaona & Columbus’s Demise: 1498–1502 Retold, by Andrew Rowen was likely paid for by Andrew Rowen. All Persons Press appears to be a publisher solely for Andrew Rowen publications. There is nothing wrong with this at all and I am glad to assist author Rowen by promoting the prequels to the work above: Encounters Unforeseen:1492 Retold and Columbus and Caonabó: 1493–1498 Retold.
   One of the reasons self-promotion is resorted to is, as I mentioned when I wrote about the Washington Post, that there are now few book reviewers around to go through the four million produced. I found very few reviews for the books of Mr. Rowen and know about them only because I read the full page advertisement in The Atlantic. 
   You now may be curious about the cost of a full page ad in a national magazine. That is difficult to determine and the rate provided for a person is likely less than the one quoted for a publisher. I will say, however, that the number is a big one.
   Mr. Rowen is apparently a Harvard Law graduate and a retiree from a New York city law firm. He seems to have had the means to spend a lot of time in the Caribbean doing research for his books and enough left over to promote them. He should not be blamed for that and I do hope he recovers his costs and carries on. 

Oddments (2) Year-End 2025

 For a definition of "oddments" see "Oddments (1) where you will also learn about the CASTRATI and how pickleball has contributed to noise pollution. 

Local Headline of the Year
   In "Survival of the Weakest" I suggest that there seems to be a surge in psychological issues (and the acronyms required to describe them), and that we are all increasingly mentally unstable. More proof is found in this headline: "LHSC Ending Unlimited Mental Health Benefits Saying Popularity Made It Too Expensive," Matthew Trevithick, CBC News, Dec. 5, 2025.
"London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) is getting rid of unlimited mental health benefits for staff, blaming ballooning costs and former administrators for implementing it without proper due diligence or oversight....Two years on, the man tasked with overhauling LHSC argues it was just one of several bad decisions made by those no longer in charge at southwestern Ontario's largest hospital network."
   Given that most of the headlines this year were depressing ones, here are some that are funny: HEADLINES. 

TV ADS
   

Those who don't believe in MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) are generally only those who have not seen, over and over, the Trivago ad in which that guy appears, or those who have not watched all the ads "ON BETTING."

New Technological Developments
   The year was not a total loss. There was this, whatever it is.

A Quote or Two
 "Nevertheless, a world in which all citizens are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, even if they hold views accurately deemed absurd and hateful by establishment elites, is better than one in which such elites control who can speak. Although it’s important not to downplay the dangers and harms associated with some of today’s most popular social media pundits—Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Tommy Robinson, Russell Brand, Nick Fuentes, and so on—we should not aim for a world in which they are prevented from advocating those views to audiences who want to hear them....Dan Williams in his cleverly named substack: Conspicuous Cognition. 

   "Reading Searle’s review, though, it struck me that very few of the many contemporary writings on the university concern its revitalization as a place to pursue excellence. We stress instead the avoidance of homogeneity, perhaps precisely because we no longer believe that we can teach people to think hard on their own. By Oliver Traldi, "John Searle's Campus War" in Fusion, Dec. 23, 2025.

    "The idea that in my discipline, philosophy, there are hundreds of fine-grained dogmas (many of them concerning “social justice”) that one must accept is entirely destructive. To do philosophy effectively, you’d better be ready to say what you believe to be true and can somehow substantiate. In my more than 30-year career, I saw many failures of this sort, for understandable reasons. If you did not recite the dogma, your kids could lose their health insurance.
   I think the period of my career (roughly 1990 to 2023) corresponded to a collapse in the quality of research and publication in philosophy and other humanities and social science disciplines. In 1980, there were big, distinctive and idiosyncratic philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, W.V.O. Quine, Arthur Danto and Judith Jarvis Thomson. By 2010, their voices had been muted, and perhaps no one as bold as they were could have survived grad school. My impression is that many practitioners of other disciplines feel roughly the same. Academic production is more homogenous, blander, safer and less sincere."
Fro: "As A Professor, I've Seen Woke and MAGA Censorship. Which Is Worse?", by Crispin Sartwell, The Washington Post, Oct. 13, 2025.

Wikipedia
  Recently I did a post relating to Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, which are two projects to be highly valued. Back in 2019, I did this post about Wikipedia, "Wikipedia - Happy Birthday" which you use daily and which should also be highly valued, even if you think only AI is important. 
  Today in the Globe and Mail, they re-published an article by Simon Garfield, who you are more likely to believe: "An Encyclopedia Like No Other: How Wikipedia Became One of the Greatest Achievements of the Modern Age," July 11, 2025. Here is just a bit from it. Make one of your year-end donations to WIKIPEDIA (I have no relationship to it, but, like you, I use it all the time and do donate when they ask for help, which is fairly rare, unlike most other entities, especially at this time of year.)

   "Wikipedia, which launched Jan. 15, 2001, has remained true to its original intention, the establishment of a volunteer-edited, free, live encyclopedia, a resource able to respond immediately and predominantly accurately to changing events. Exceptionally for such a popular resource, Wikipedia does not track you or sell any of your search information. It does not carry advertisements or monetize itself beyond regular appeals to users for small donations. It is fully accountable, with every keystroke credited and dated to a specific user. It is continually trying to improve its accuracy, reach, diversity of content and contributors. And beyond all this, it is a thing relentlessly and reliably useful.
  Being both intellectually rigorous and shamelessly trivial, it reflects the world as it sees itself. Its anniversary should be a cause for celebration, an overdue confirmation, I think (due perhaps even from its many early critics), that it has become one of the greatest things online, a rare representative of the internet for good. It is also, I suggest, one of the greatest inventions of our modern age."

HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Back To Books

    

   To push the post about movies down the page, here is one about books, a frequent subject. The picture below is from a two page advertisement in The New Yorker, Sept. 1&8, 2025. It is typical of many ads these days, in that, for me at least, it is not clear what is being sold. I suppose, however, that more fashionable readers will recognize, right away, that "BRUNELLO CUCINELLI" is not a bookseller, but a purveyor of very expensive apparel. To shop, click here. 

   

   According to the BC website, the marketing campaign behind the books and other of their ads is that: "The images and words that over the years have accompanied our company’s communication are inspired by our philosophy and the ethical values that are most important to us: the principles of Humanistic Capitalism and Human Sustainability, living in harmony with nature and all its creatures, the preservation and transmission of culture, the commitment to always respect human dignity." There is more. 
  You might think that is mere marketing hype, but Mr. Cucinelli, is actually a lover of books. This is what I found in: "A Day In the Life of Brunello Cucinelli," by Lauren McCarthy, in Harper's BAZAAR, Sept. 27, 2016:

"I like to sit on the couch, surrounded by all of my books. I have 5,000 books in my home, 1,000 of which I feel are close to my heart. They have always shown me the way. Books are my great passion; I could not live without them. If I were to pick a couple out of the 1,000, I would choose Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. That really showed me the way ahead, as has Plato's Symposium, which is a dialogue on love that was written in the fourth century B.C. in Athens. When my older daughter got married, I gave her my 1,000 favorite books, and I've prepared the same thing for my younger daughter. And now I am preparing 1,000 books for my granddaughter."
  The image above also contains this caption: "Books showed me the way of life." Emperor Hadrian. It does not indicate, however, where such an array of books can be found. 

First They Came For The Names

   My stance on the subject of name changing has been made clear - I am against it and have posted about it. The only reason I am bringing it up again is because the situation is about to get worse. The reasons why are provided at the bottom, as are links to my related remarks on this subject - if you wish to see how wrong-headed one can be. I turn now, however, to the subject of the next purge - OFFENSIVE ADVERTISEMENTS.

Next It Will Be The Advertisements

  I am not a fan of advertisements and 'tape' just about every TV program to avoid them. I stopped watching the U.S. evening news, mostly because of them. We also don't need to be encouraged to buy more things and I would be pleased if the one pictured above was never to be seen again. These are current ads, however, and about purging them I am ambivalent.  The ones I am concerned about, are the older ones, particularly those in print, which some fragile person might stumble upon, in what used to be the safe spaces provided by libraries. 

   It did not take me long to find ones that are no longer appropriate and it will not take long for the posses of the politically correct to ask that they be removed, or that huge WARNING signs be placed in periodical rooms. Here are a few and they don't even include the really offensive ones that do not have the right mixture of races, genders, etc. You read it here first and in a few months my minuscule audience will be praising me for my prescience in predicting the next purge. 

   That should be enough. It is perhaps a good thing that General Motors stopped making the Pontiac, because they would have had to change the name in any case.

Sources: 

  The reason I am focusing on this again is because the U.S. Department of the Interior, just issued this press release: Secretary Haaland Takes Action to Remove Derogatory Names From Federal Lands. Surely a giant eraser soon will be rubbing across the more northerly part of the continent. 

   For earlier pronouncements: Names on the Land. And, No More Name Changing. 

The Bonus:

  If you haven't done your Christmas shopping, you can buy this book AND it will convince you that toponymy should not be tampered with: Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, George R. Stewart.

  Those of you who are familiar with FIRST THEY CAME FOR.... will be aware of the totalitarian trends from earlier times. If you are not see here.