Product Placement in Books: Unsafe at Any Speed

Posted on March 6, 2008

No matter where you go, it's hard to avoid product placements. They show up in films and television shows. And now, they're showing up in teen books.

With Cathy's Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233, a genre-bending mystery for young adults by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman that was published in 2006, the authors learned that product placement could be a touchy subject. After their publisher, Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books Group, revealed that the authors had agreed to have characters wear specific makeup lines made by Cover Girl in exchange for promotional ads for the book on beinggirl.com, a Web site aimed at adolescent girls and run by Procter & Gamble, Cover Girl's parent, the book came in for criticism. Ralph Nader's advocacy group, Commercial Alert, urged book review editors to boycott it, and the novelist Jane Smiley wrote a disapproving op-ed article for The Los Angeles Times; The New York Times wrote a critical editorial as well.

Now the novel - which features a series of clues that are given out in voice mail messages, Web sites, letters and other documents included with or referred to in the book - is set to come out in paperback on Monday, and all the references to Cover Girl�s products have been removed. A drawing in the hardcover edition, for instance, shows Cathy wearing "Cover Girl lipgloss 'Demure,' " and "Waterproof Mascara -- 'Very Black'," but it appears in the paperback version without any makeup noted. And at the end of the hardcover edition, Cathy talks about wearing "a killer coat of Lipslicks in 'Daring'"; in the paperback she just says, "a killer coat of lipstick."

"We did a whole bunch of pretty innovative things with that book," Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview. But, he said, the main topic of conversation, "instead of being about the other 18," was about the product placement.

When Ralph Nader is urging reviewers to boycott your book, you know you've crossed a line. Isn't Ralph running for president again? How is he going to save us from the evils of product placement in books if he's spending all his time trying to derail the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?



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