Co-op advertising – Authors beware!
Today I was reading through a well known writing magazine and noticed a publishing 
company advertising a number of their authors books. The publishing company is a publishing provider (like us) which is fine but as I was looking at their cover thumbnails of the author books I was thinking how much did the author have to pay to have their book in here?
When I took a look online I was alarmed to find the amount of money that some publishing providers charge the author to have their book printed in a co-op add. A co-op ad is an ad (usually a full page ad) that contains many author books – each author pays to have their book featured in the ad. Usually the page will contain around 10-15 books.
One publishing provider was charging around £200 for the author’s book to be featured in the magazine co-op add. It made me think how many copies of that author’s book would have to be purchased (from people seeing that ad) for the author to re-coup their advertising cost of £200?
Yes the magazine might have a wide circulation but when you have your book surrounded by other titles I do wonder if it is worth the author’s expense.
Of course in the larger well-know magazines getting your own add may be impossible because of the high advertising costs but I feel with some magazines it may be worthwhile for the author to approach the magazine directly and see what type of size of ad they could get themselves for £200.
Extra note: Be careful which magazines you advertise in. Target your audience. e.g. If your book is a science fiction then target science fiction readers. If your book has issues for older people then target a magazine for older people.
Image by: Mannobhai