Does She? Doesn’t She? Only Her Publisher Knows

Hair color, so vital an element in romance novels that readers besiege publishers with angry letters if the shade of a character’s hair does not match the tint on the book cover, has become a major ingredient in a “cross-promotional tie-in” between Bantam Books and Clairol hair products.

Along with a “Frequent Readers Sweepstakes” modeled after airline mileage clubs and a gift-with-purchase offer patterned after the cosmetics business, the effort is part of a triple-pronged “drygoods-style” approach that Bantam calls “sophisticated” and “deep-penetrating,” but others in the publishing industry label “wild” and “anti-literary.”

For Carolyn Nichols, the Bantam associate publisher responsible for the Loveswept line of romance novels, the matchup with Clairol’s new Pazazz Sheer Color Wash seemed from the very first moment like “some sort of marriage.” So critical is hair color in the romance genre that Nichols had taken to supplying Bantam’s cover artists with Clairol color charts. Even then, however, crises arose.

“Darling, I don’t know how to tell the artist how to do plum wine hair,” Nichols said.

Marketing Formula

As it happens, “plum wine” is one of Clairol’s new Pazazz Sheer Color Wash hues.

So Nichols swiftly embraced the new marketing formula in which every copy of the individual titles of a Loveswept trilogy called “The Delaneys of Killaroo” will include a 50-cents-off coupon for Pazazz Sheer Color Wash. To provide further reader allure, each heroine in Kay Hooper’s “Adelaide, the Enchantress,” Iris Johansen’s “Matilda, the Adventuress” and Fayrene Preston’s “Sydney, the Temptress” (the three titles in the Australia-based series) has hair the color of one of the Pazazz Sheer Color Wash shades.

Bantam and Clairol are also co-issuing a 48-page paperback book sampler, featuring excerpts from the novels as well as beauty advice that, not surprisingly, focuses on trendy temporary hair coloring. Bantam is printing 750,000 copies of the sampler, to be distributed in September in 10,000 food, drug and retail outlets.

“At last we’re getting together,” Nichols exclaimed when she learned of the Clairol/Bantam plan she deemed “ingenious.” Reasoned Nichols, “One cannot sit back any longer and let the consumer come to the book. One has to go to the consumer more and more.”

That same logic apparently spurred Bantam to offer a free paperback copy of Doris Mortman’s “Circles” to every purchaser of “First Born,” Mortman’s first hard-cover novel.

An Uncharted Commodity

In addition to “increasing the perceived value” of the book purchased, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. vice president Stuart Applebaum said the paperback-bonus-book method helps enhance the hard-cover book’s chances of attaining best-seller status.

In these days of high-priced hard-covers, Applebaum said, “the consumer is ever-selective about how he is going to spend his hard-cover dollar.” For the publisher, Applebaum continued, “the greatest challenge is putting a novel by an unknown author on the hard-cover list, because it’s so brand-name-weighted.”

While the paperback edition of “Circles” sold more than 1 million copies when it was published in 1984, Mortman was still viewed as an uncharted commodity in the highly competitive hard-cover arena. By his own marketing research, Applebaum said that in the first seven months of this year, only four “first-timers” had made it to the hallowed circle of the New York Times hard-cover best-seller list.

But as evidence that the giveaway approach, for which Bantam printed 50,000 additional copies of “Circles,” had “worked, worked terrifically,” Applebaum noted that “First Born” made its debut in the No. 15 position on the July 31 hard-cover fiction best-seller list of Publishers Weekly magazine.

“Ultimately novels in particular work because of word-of-mouth,” Applebaum said. “This was our word-of-mouth builder.”

Reached by telephone at her home in Norwood, N.J., novelist and former advertising executive Mortman lauded what she called the “Estee Lauder theory” of book merchandising.

“I wasn’t sure at first,” Mortman said. “My first reaction was, ooh, are people going to think it isn’t going to sell without this?”

But soon Mortman was hailing the “natural encouragement” she said comes from offering a free paperback copy of her first book with the purchase of her first hard-cover novel.

“For the author, it builds an audience. It helps solidify, hopefully, a Doris Mortman reader. I feel it is giving the buyer a bonus. You’re giving the buyer something for nothing.”

‘Building Consumer Awareness’

Jack Hoeft, president of the Bantam Doubleday Dell sales and marketing division said his company had launched the new marketing strategies in an “attempt to build consumer awareness.” As proof of their success, Hoeft said the “summer spectacular,” as the Frequent Readers program is known, was “improving our business as high as 20% over last year.”

Every four weeks in the months of May through August, under that formula, Bantam puts out a group of three paperback titles that carry special entry blanks with the prospect of the grand-prize 1988 Cadillac Cimarron (to be awarded sometime after the contest closes Sept. 20) or less lavish individual prizes.

July’s promotion saw a promotional package that included supernatural thriller called “The Unwanted,” by John Saul; Mary Mackey’s “A Grand Passion,” described as “popular women’s fiction”; and “110 Shanghai Road,” a “generational historical novel” by the pseudonymous Monica Highland.

“It’s appealing to the lottery mentality,” said Kitty Kelley, whose paperback reprint of “His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra” is included in Bantam’s August Frequent Readers package.

Kelley, interviewed by telephone at her home in Washington, D.C., laughed to learn that one possible sweepstakes prize associated with her book was a compact disc player and a collection of Frank Sinatra compact discs. But, she commented, “Whatever brings people into the bookstores, I applaud. The more people who read, the better.”

Merchandising Jargon

For his part, Hoeft bristled when asked if such aggressive merchandising tactics might be seen as overcommercializing a field that has traditionally treasured a high-brow quality. In the vernacular of Bantam’s current efforts, for example, the word reader is used interchangeably with both buyer and consumer.

“To be a reader, you’ve got to buy a book or you’ve got to go to the library,” Hoeft said. “To me, someone who is buying something is also a consumer.”

That kind of merchandising jargon alarmed others in the publishing community.

“In a sense, it is like book people referring to things as ‘products,’ ” said a vice president of one major house.

“Yes, it does sort of cheapen book publishing,” she said. “But nobody is going to do this with Norman Mailer or E. L. Doctorow.” The new merchandising efforts represent “a mass market phenomenon,” she said, “and what’s wrong with treating it like any other mass market product? I think the pluses outweigh the minuses.”

Bantam conceded that the approach was not suitable for every book. “I’m not sure that if Bantam were to publish the new Saul Bellow novel in paperback, that we would be going after a men’s grooming care distributor to tie in with,” Applebaum said.