The Bluemoose Challenge

I've thrown down the glove to the Marketing Director at Bantam Books. I have bet the marketing supremo that if they give me the marketing spend that they had for the promotion of Paul O'Grady's 'At My Mother's Knee' I can make more money from out next publication FALLING THROUGH CLOUDS, than they did with their celebrity autobiography. They sold over 600,000 copies of Mr O'Grady's book. It has an rrp of £18.99 but given that it was selling at £10 in most high street book stores and at some £8.99 .This means that the publisher must have received no more than £6 per book. The maths: total revenue of about £3.6 Million. Knock off a cool £1Million for the advance and that makes £2.6 million. Very few publishers make more than 10% profit and so give or take a few shekels they probably made a profit pf about £260,000. I don't know how much TV advertising costs but with print and TV monies I bet the marketing budget was about £100,000. Now I could sell a bucket load of books with that figure to promote Anna Chilvers new novel, and yes I would have had to shell out a few more discount points but once the profit rolled in, I'd pay Bantam their monies back, the public would have a brilliant new novel, and Bluemoose would invest the profits in publishing new writers and not in the second auotbiography of Paul O'Grady, however riveting that may be. Pick up that glove.Let that Bantam go. Go on, I dare you!