This is a novel idea! A billboard to advertise a BOOK! Let’s hope the trend catches on… win/win for print!
Literary Novelist Is a Times Square Novelty
By Alexandra Alter
via Jeffrey Eugenides New Book The Marriage Plot on Times Square Billboard – Metropolis – WSJ.
Literary novelists — even those who’ve been anointed by Oprah and the Pulitzer Prize board — don’t usually get their faces splashed across billboards in Times Square.
Jeffrey Eugenides was surprised that his publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, decided to rent a Times Square billboard to advertise his highly anticipated new novel “The Marriage Plot.”
“I go back to the flinty Roger Straus days, when FSG wouldn’t run so much as an ad in the [New York Times] Book Review,” Eugenides said in an e-mail, in response to a request for comment. “So when they said they were putting up a billboard in Times Square, I figured I should keep my mouth shut.”
“The Marriage Plot” is Eugenides’s first major work since his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel “Middlesex,” which sold more than three million copies. Read an interview with the author on our sister blog, Speakeasy.
FSG bought the ad, located on Broadway between 43rd and 44th streets, after the account executive at their advertising agency mentioned the billboard had become available because an advertiser suddenly backed out, says Jeff Seroy, FSG’s senior vice president of marketing and publicity.
The yellow billboard shows a photograph of Eugenides walking towards the camera wearing a vest and button-down shirt, seemingly buffeted by a breeze and surrounded by positive blurbs about the new novel. The author’s wife, sculptor Karen Yamauchi, art-directed the photo shoot.
Seroy declined to say what the ad cost.“It was kind of serendipity meets opportunism,” says Seroy. “We have that great photo of Jeff, which looks like the Marlboro Man, a classic billboard image.”
Related articles
- What Is Jeffrey Eugenides Doing on a Billboard in Times Square? (adweek.com)
- A Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides…review… (mybookaddictionreviews.wordpress.com)
- Jeffrey Eugenides Talks About ‘The Marriage Plot’ (online.wsj.com)
- The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides – review (guardian.co.uk)
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (guardian.co.uk)
- The Marriage Plot, By Jeffrey Eugenides (independent.co.uk)
