While much of the literary world mopes about sluggish trade book sales and a flat-lined readership, an industry group in Holland has jettisoned their melancholy and mounted a frontal assault on blasé book buying. Aggressively luring readers and making bestsellers in the bargain, this Dutch treat just might be a model for other nations in need of a literacy wake-up call.
Affectionately known as the Collective Propaganda for the Dutch Book (CPNB), and armed with an array of book events and publicity-sparking pitches, the Amsterdam-based group has helped hike sales of Dutch literature more than 40% over the last decade, to around $400 million — with the number of copies sold marching upward as well. That’s not bad for a nation of 16 million people. And it’s due in part to CPNB’s approach to riveting Holland’s attention on books. “The program is successful because there is no competition with other diversions,” CPNB Director Henk Kraima says about his eyeball-grabbing events. “It is the best way to fight the music and film industries.”
On the front lines of Kraima’s strategic campaign is a 10-day blowout called Book Week. Held every March, Book Week is chockablock with media magnets such as the Book Ball, a gala affair packed with authors, publishers, booksellers, and assorted debutantes that has become one of the nation’s best-known annual events. One year, sponsors were put out because they were only able to cram eight TV camera crews into the bash. (“The arrival of the authors has turned into an event comparable with the entry of gladiators into an arena,” according to Kraima, who is clearly tickled with the spectacle.) But Book Week’s stealth ingredient is a short novel commissioned from major authors such as Salman Rushdie, Cees Noteboom, and Anna Enquist. Each year a new novel, running to about 100 pages, is offered exclusively as a free gift to customers who spend at least €11.11 — around $11 — on a general book. In recent years print runs for these “gift books” have soared to 750,000 copies, each one of them guaranteeing the sale of a regular trade book — and ensuring that 750,000 customers have come through booksellers’ doors. (Retailers place orders for the gift book, which is sold to them at a nominal cost, and then the print run is determined.) Gift book authors dominate the nation’s bestseller list, and the Dutch boost can turn into major play elsewhere. Noteboom’s 1992 short novel The Following Story, for example, first appeared as a gift book and was subsequently translated into more than 15 languages, hitting the top ten in Germany. Moreover, each year highlights a different category or theme (this year’s was “Love in Literature,” while others have been “Latin America,” “Family Ties,” and “The Classical Age”), which helps publishers brush off their backlists and roll out special reprints or promotional campaigns.
Beyond Book Week, other CPNB programs target children’s books, travel writing, and the teen market (see www.cpnb.nl for more details). Then there’s Thriller Month, every June, for which CPNB has published a promotional newspaper with a print run of over a million copies, funded by ads from publishers. As with Book Week, a special short story is commissioned from name authors (Stephen King, Elizabeth George, and Robin Cook have all offered their wares) and given away with a purchase. Thrillers now account for about 18% of Dutch trade book sales.
Propaganda doesn’t come for free, of course, as the architects of the AAP’s consumer campaign, Get Caught Reading, are well aware. With a staff of 20, the CPNB collects a yearly contribution of about $370,000 each from booksellers, publishers, and libraries. (Each of these three groups also selects three of the nine CPNB board members.) On top of that, revenues from the sale of promotional materials and ads in CPNB publications rack up another $5 million each year — each campaign must generate its own revenue via point-of-sale materials — supporting an annual operating budget of up to $6 million. With this cash in hand, and a gladiatorial swagger or two, the group has apparently pushed reading into the heady upper precincts of Dutch glitterati. “Other branches of industry,” as the CPNB boasts, “look on the book trade with envy.”
