What is a book?

Iam always getting stuff through the door or on the phone trying to sell me advertising for the business. Little do they know that I come from a publishing background and do have some understanding of advertising.

An interesting twist has come my way which I feel the need to comment on. Small Print Publishing Ltd sent me some blurb enticing me to advertise in a book called "Start your own business". The book is bone-fide and published yearly even with an ISBN number but as long as I bought advertising space I could become a "Recommended Supplier". I understand magazine advertising and in such cases its always a playoff between editorial content and advertising: the more editorial content, the higher cover price, so a book generally does not contain advertising and has a high cover price. Free newspapers and magazines are at the other end of the scale with mostly advertising and very little content. This has always made me wonder about computer magazines because most cost £5 or more yet are stuffed full of adverts and those so called free software disks often contain paid for software advertising and free utilities you can download for free yourself from the internet.

I digress, so my question is how successful is this book. In newspapers and magazines you can give circulation figures, which by law you can not lie about; exaggerate a bit, say you print 5000 copies but you can say you have a 15,000 readership as up to three people may read that paper / magazine. You dont have to prove your readership and who is to say that your copies get distributed, just as long as that number of copies gets printed. With a book I have yet to see anyone who comes clean about how many they sell, they just use marketing blurb such as best-selling.

I went to the website www.smallprintpublishing.com and was disappointed as all it has was "website coming soon" but a nice piece of flash describing what they did and indeed they do small print runs of books. I have written software manuals for products and its so much easier to publish yourself, though most software manuals can be downloaded along with the programs these days.

I still come back to the advertising though. I know you get revised editions of books but have never seen one revised due to advertising. Just what is the content to advertising ratio? Does the book size depend on how much advertising they get? I was thinking about e-mailing them but wasnt that bothered. What I did find interesting was that I had received a direct mail marketing letter. If they had sent me a copy of the book I might have thought more about their offer. Oh there is also a print deadline at the end of the month just to get you to feel you will be misiing out on something - no surpise there.