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Closely scrutinizing the highly sophisticated marketing strategy deployed by its publisher, Seeker and Warburg, which included advertisements in the underground, posters, t-shirts, a well publicized author tour, proof mailing to booksellers, and most importantly, an eight side, full color A4 sales presenter (targeted specifically at booksellers, libraries and wholesalers), which explicitly asked retailers to recommend the book (a first prize of a holiday for two to Cephalonia was offered as an incentive), Squires comprehensively proves that the novel's spectacular success was caused by an 'induced word of mouth, a chain consciously catalyzed by the marketing department', and not simply the result of readers' own independent recommendations; 'the image of an unmarked book which received no assistance from booksellers or the media', she concludes,'is far from True Religion Jeans the truth'.
While Squires' solid focus on industry practices and consumer behavior in Britain has produced a highly coherent book, one cannot help wondering whether despite being an important new work in contemporary book history; Marketing Literature does not in fact limn an already superseded, twentieth-century historical encounter. In a consolidated publishing industry operating within an ever more interdependent globalised free market, the notion of a 'national' literary culture is increasingly tenuous. The Man Booker prize's construction of an Anglophone, Londoncentric British and Commonwealth 'national' literary culture is predicated upon the exclusion of American novelists (and by extension, the American market and its readership), but this has become increasingly anomalous in view of the target market, readership and sales of literary fiction across the globe. In this sense, the construction of literary fiction as a discernible (and marketable) genre (or even, brand) is an increasingly global phenomenon, and it might have been apposite for at least one comparative study of the marketing strategies for a contemporary bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic to have been included here. A more significant omission in the book is that the jacket covers of the four novels discussed in the chapter on 'Genre in the marketplace' Emlyn Rees' The Book of Authors (1998), Martyn Bedford's The Houdini Girl (2000), Rupert Thomson's The Book of Revelation (2000) and Toby Lilt's Corpsing (2000) have not been reproduced in the book (the appendix provides a reproduction of the textual material alone), despite the fact that their material presentation (format, graphic design, claims made on the jacket and so on) are central to Squires' original and entertaining analysis. While this situation no doubt came about because of the restrictions of copyright law, it might have been useful if the publisher in this case (Palgrave Macmillan) had negotiated special reproduction rights for the monograph, as Squires' argument could in no way be seen as hampering the sales or promotion of the said titles.
Marketing Literature is the first study to specifically address the marketing of the contemporary literary novel in Britain, and for this reason alone, it is worthy of attention, but this book does more than just break new ground. It intelligently contests a number of assumptions, made by book historians and literary critics alike, about the apparent dis-juncture between form and content, publishing and reader reception, and artistic merit and sales success, in assessing the environment for literary fiction in the last two decades. Throughout the book, Squires maintains a tone of equanimity and informed objectivity, articulately bringing together her personal experience of having worked in publishing with the sustained rigour of academic scholarship. Part expose of industry practice and part close analysis of a range of recent literary bestsellers, this is a Lee Jeans deftly argued, carefully researched, and comprehensively informative work that will be of great value to book historians, publishers, editors and booksellers alike.