Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 1029

advertising and what not--with John Seargeant or Ken McCormick I do this--we can hardly keep straight faces because we all know the time-honored answers. I know what they are going to say, and they know what I'm going to answer. It's like a minuet. We go through this routine of my grumbling about something and their giving me the precise answer that I give my own authors. We usually end up by going to get a couple of drinks together. But it's always fun.

Q:

How much do you think.... I mean there's always a big debate on advertising of a book. Is there any set rule that you have at Random House about how much...?

Cerf:

Our average that we figure is ten per cent of the retail price of the book. If it's a five dollar book, you should spend fifty cents per copy for advertising it. In other words, if it sells 100,000, you'd spend fifty thousand dollars. Of course, as the sale gets bigger and bigger, that ratio goes down. You don't have to keep it up. On a failure, the ratio is correspondingly higher. Ten per cent of nothing....

Q:

Do you think that most publishers are the same way, that they usually spend....?

Cerf:

That's a generous yardstick. I'd say that it's the upper range. It's between seven and a half and twelve and





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help