Actually, what I took from Eszter’s post is that OUP doesn’t do that kind of marketing for any book that they publish. So the question at #23 is sorta like asking why Manchester United doesn’t have any good fastball pitchers.

The title communicates some of the appeal to us non-mathematical philistines; the subtitle undercuts it. Perhaps what we need is some help from Richard Sherman [http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0048605] to jazz it up. If this were FARK we’d already have ten photoshopped covers (of dubious quality).

Second, as I recall the rest of the joke from the Erdos book, when asked “Why Hungarians?”, the aliens answered “Because they have the prettiest women.”

What struck me as slightly counterproductive was that you employed a bit of negative marketing to promote your father’s book, both in the general tone of your post decrying the power of marketing and especially in depicting Kati Marton as an establishment figure relying on her connections (why should we care who she has been / is married to?). And while I’m not denying that there might be a grain of truth in all that, I don’t think this approach is the best way to promote a book.
[b]
While negative marketing works well for some select products, it is actually used quite rarely and from the top of my head I can’t think of any example of it having been used by PR departments in the book publishing industry. Granted, as a guerilla marketing strategy to the select audience we have here it might actually work, but in order to reach a wider audience – which is your expressed aim – I don’t think this is the best way to go.

Cheers

Local independent bookstores may be willing to provide books for any event. (Their willingness will largely be a function of the personnel they have, how many events they generally do, and OUP’s returns policy.) Politics and Prose in Washington would be a great candidate to work with, say, the Kossuth House and/or the JCC.

Getting reviews in regional metro dailies (i.e., not WaPo, NYT) will probably involve finding a local angle for one or more of the Martians: taught there, did significant work there, retired there, etc. Because the space that newspapers devote to books has shrunk so drastically, it might make more sense to approach features editors instead. That your dad actually knew some of the people in question makes him a good source for an interview, and the promotion of the book becomes a soft sell, rather than a hard sell. As for time hooks, their personal anniversaries (birth, death, major achievement, etc) are good for features editors who generally need some sort of temporal connection to run an article.

Regionally, I would guess that northeast and some parts of the midwest are going to be the best places for Jewish and Hungarian groups, while out west there may be receptive groups on the scientific side. Anything in Roswell, New Mexico might be willing to bite on the “representatives of an advanced civilization” angle, which in turn could be used as a lure for other publications.

Piggybacking on Marton’s publicity machine as much as possible is surely advisable; “if you liked such and such, here’s another way of looking at it, from someone who actually knew several of the people.” Maybe your dad can even talk with Marton; if they hit it off, joint appearances are certainly a possibility. She’s also likely getting more requests than she can handle and might welcome the ability to say, well I can’t do X but I know someone who can. (She might not, of course; but I always found the very best authors and top public personalities were generous about that sort of thing.) Her publicity people will likely not see it that way, so the trick will be to talk with her directly.

All of these ideas, of course, depend on how much additional work your dad wants to put in to publicity and such. Marketing departments have advantages in resources and pre-existing contacts, but disadvantages in that they are trying to sell the whole catalog, and individual publicists within a department will have many books on their plate at once. Savvy authors have advantages in passion and directness.

The business has changed a lot in the decade I’ve been out of it, but I’ll bet there’s still room in the system for an energetic author with a good story.

Ah, another thought: Technical universities, and university science departments in general. Another type of place to do talks, where Marton probably won’t go, and the university book stores will be experienced in dealing with OUP. Probably long lead-times on the event schedules, but still worth doing.

Which in this case is no small feat itself.

one point of information I can add re 24:
I have an okayseller book on Amazon (by OUP as it happens), and I can tell you that they very definitely do update the sales figures several times a day, even down in the 100,000 range.

I can watch it bounce down into the low five-figures when someone buys a copy, and then drift gradually into the six figures by the following day, and it gets updated several times in between (how many times? Well, I have never checked back dozens of times in a day. But I have probably checked three or four, and it changes each time).

Of course there may be a lag, in that they may be telling me on Tuesday about a sale on Monday. But they recalculate many times on Tuesday, and I suspect they are not just recalculating with day-old numbers.

I also have some other books that don’t sell often. But once you get down into the million-plus region, your rate of fall slows. Even in the 100,000 range, there is a noticeable slowing, as one would expect. You get jostled from e.g. #30,000 down to #100,000 in less than a day; then it takes about a day to fall into the 200k range, a day and a half to fall into the 300k range, and so on.

Try it yourself—next time you buy a mid-list book, check the sales figures before you buy, and see how long it takes them to update, and then how long it takes it to decay. With titles in the 100k-million range, single sales make a very observable difference.

Doug, yes, the Budapest location doesn’t help. However, my father will be in the US January-May and is planning on giving some talks so that could help a bit.

And the Martian quip is not so obscure; Richard Rhodes used it in his blurb of the Marton book.

Further to publicity, a little Googling shows that Marton has been doing lots of speaking gigs related to the book. Part of that is the advantage of being based in NYC, further parts come from existing media connections and the publisher’s arrangement of such events. All harder to duplicate from Budapest and without a marketing department.

My mother tongue is Hungarian, but I had no doubt that I should write this book in English. For my audience, I envisioned my future grandchildren who, at the time of writing these lines, do not yet exist. With our children most probably settling in the United States, they should find it convenient to read this book in their own language. While my grandchildren are an abstraction for the time being, my children are the most tangible reality, although they hardly figure in this book; my wife Magdi does not either, to any great degree. They are the greatest gift in my life and I am writing this book for them, for Magdi, Balázs, and Eszter. But it is to the memory of my mother, whose example taught me perseverance and tolerance, defiance and social solidarity, that I dedicate this book.

As we see in #34, Novakant has a knack for injecting the maximum pointless unpleasantness into what would otherwise be rather low-intensity communications.

I have gotten some book recommendations from folks offline. Also, I think people make some very good points about the title and other issues.

I don’t know if the book was published in the trade or academic end of OUP. I do know that some academic presses push a few titles more broadly, but this isn’t one of them.