G
Guest
Guest
Englishmen: Is this true? About the non-reading I mean. Hope some Lit. bloke gets a £1,000. - Perdita
-----------------
Getting men to read fiction is the holy grail of publishing. Can the British male be weaned off newspapers and books about the SAS? - Jonathan Heawood, June 6, 2004 - The Observer
On my way in to work on Friday morning, I did an extraordinary thing. I looked at the other people on the tube. There were eight men reading newspapers, four women reading novels, a couple of tourists looking at a map and one man mumbling into his beard. I got out my book and began to read.
According to new research commissioned by Penguin Books, men who are seen reading a book are more attractive to the opposite sex, and I was keen to see whether this was true in practice. At Victoria, the experiment was temporarily suspended when a troop of schoolchildren got on and began swinging from the rails above my head. When the carriage was clear, I tried again. The lady tourist looked at me with interest, but then she was French. As usual on the tube, all English eyes were averted. When I tried to catch the attention of the girl sitting opposite - holding my book prominently in front of my nose and looking over the top of it - she clung rather more tightly onto her handbag.
Perhaps my attempt would have been more successful if I'd been reading something more laddish than Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty - a novel featuring liberal amounts of gay sex. Penguin's 'Good Booking' campaign, to be launched tomorrow, offers a prize of £1,000 each month to any man caught reading one of Penguin's carefully selected titles.
July's book will be Doing It by Melvin Burgess, the teen sex novel which scandalised many parents, and has already been repackaged to appeal to adult males. Other authors in the promotion include Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby. The idea is to get more young men reading, thereby releasing a huge reservoir of marketing opportunities.
Teams of scouts will scour the UK and Ireland in search of men comfortable enough with their sexuality to be seen reading in public. The project will be promoted through a nationwide poster campaign featuring the slogan 'Are you good booking?', and backed up by a website, www.goodbooking.com, which will include a Readers' Wives section, showcasing the attractive partners of literate males. In the words of a Penguin source, this says to young men: 'Look at these guys who read: look at how pretty their girls are.' I don't know about this. I've been reading books in public for years with nothing to show for it except myopia.
Just to make sure their message is crystal clear, Penguin is offering £1,000 to any woman prepared to chat up a man reading one of the featured books. But isn't the risk of pulling a short-sighted nerd greater than the promise of £1,000? And what if a man chats up another man? What if, for instance, two men, both reading Doing It, catch each other's eye? Do they get to split the money? And how will men prove that they are really reading the book, and not just holding it open over a football programme, or a bag of crisps? Will there be questions?
Whatever the mechanics of the Good Booking initiative, there's a serious issue at stake. Why don't men read books? Despite the popular myth that women buy far more books than men, the overall sales figures for adult book are roughly equal. Of 216 million adult books sold last year, 99 million - almost half - were bought by men. Where women pull ahead of men is in fiction. According to research by Book Marketing Limited, only 44 per cent of men read fiction, compared to 77 per cent of women. If Penguin can make inroads into the 33 per cent of men whose wives and partners are reading, but who don't read themselves, they will pull off a miracle.
full article
-----------------
Getting men to read fiction is the holy grail of publishing. Can the British male be weaned off newspapers and books about the SAS? - Jonathan Heawood, June 6, 2004 - The Observer
On my way in to work on Friday morning, I did an extraordinary thing. I looked at the other people on the tube. There were eight men reading newspapers, four women reading novels, a couple of tourists looking at a map and one man mumbling into his beard. I got out my book and began to read.
According to new research commissioned by Penguin Books, men who are seen reading a book are more attractive to the opposite sex, and I was keen to see whether this was true in practice. At Victoria, the experiment was temporarily suspended when a troop of schoolchildren got on and began swinging from the rails above my head. When the carriage was clear, I tried again. The lady tourist looked at me with interest, but then she was French. As usual on the tube, all English eyes were averted. When I tried to catch the attention of the girl sitting opposite - holding my book prominently in front of my nose and looking over the top of it - she clung rather more tightly onto her handbag.
Perhaps my attempt would have been more successful if I'd been reading something more laddish than Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty - a novel featuring liberal amounts of gay sex. Penguin's 'Good Booking' campaign, to be launched tomorrow, offers a prize of £1,000 each month to any man caught reading one of Penguin's carefully selected titles.
July's book will be Doing It by Melvin Burgess, the teen sex novel which scandalised many parents, and has already been repackaged to appeal to adult males. Other authors in the promotion include Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby. The idea is to get more young men reading, thereby releasing a huge reservoir of marketing opportunities.
Teams of scouts will scour the UK and Ireland in search of men comfortable enough with their sexuality to be seen reading in public. The project will be promoted through a nationwide poster campaign featuring the slogan 'Are you good booking?', and backed up by a website, www.goodbooking.com, which will include a Readers' Wives section, showcasing the attractive partners of literate males. In the words of a Penguin source, this says to young men: 'Look at these guys who read: look at how pretty their girls are.' I don't know about this. I've been reading books in public for years with nothing to show for it except myopia.
Just to make sure their message is crystal clear, Penguin is offering £1,000 to any woman prepared to chat up a man reading one of the featured books. But isn't the risk of pulling a short-sighted nerd greater than the promise of £1,000? And what if a man chats up another man? What if, for instance, two men, both reading Doing It, catch each other's eye? Do they get to split the money? And how will men prove that they are really reading the book, and not just holding it open over a football programme, or a bag of crisps? Will there be questions?
Whatever the mechanics of the Good Booking initiative, there's a serious issue at stake. Why don't men read books? Despite the popular myth that women buy far more books than men, the overall sales figures for adult book are roughly equal. Of 216 million adult books sold last year, 99 million - almost half - were bought by men. Where women pull ahead of men is in fiction. According to research by Book Marketing Limited, only 44 per cent of men read fiction, compared to 77 per cent of women. If Penguin can make inroads into the 33 per cent of men whose wives and partners are reading, but who don't read themselves, they will pull off a miracle.
full article
Guys, whether UK or US, read a lot more fiction than just SAS stories. There's the Patrick O'Brien "Master & Commander" series of Napoleonic naval yarns, their army equivalent, the Sharp's Rifles series and all the W.E.B. Griffin USMC sagas. So there.
