HC Turning Sour Review into Ad Copy

by Rachel Deahl, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 1/19/2007

The phrase "written in a droning monotone" isn't one you'd expect to see in an ad for a book. But HarperCollins is hoping to turn sour words into singing ad copy by putting that blip from Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley in a full-page ad for Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. The ad, which ran in today's Washington Post, sets Yardley's scathing critique of Chandra's Indian mafia opus against a ringing endorsement from staffers at the Washington, D.C., indie, Politics & Prose, who say they "beg to differ" with the critic, and found the book "vastly entertaining."

The booksellers' sentiment, which was first expressed on Politics & Prose's Web site, struck a chord with HC's Jonathan Burnham and his co-workers. "We felt there were two very divergent points of view here, and that was noteworthy in itself," he said. That Chandra is en route to the nation's capital for a signing helped as well. (The ad closes with a tagline about Chandra appearing at Politics & Prose on Tuesday.) Burnham added that HC "also wanted to spread the word on behalf of the bookstore."