How a Book Marketing Ploy Almost Ruined Edgar Wallace, Literature’s “King of Thrillers”
Edgar Wallace had a brilliant idea that he thought would make him a household name.
In the future, the writer, then 30 years old, would become one of the most prolific authors of his time – he would even earn the title “The king of excitementHe participated in writing the screenplay in 1933 King Kong (His last writing project before his death in 1932). But at the beginning of the twentieth century, Wallace was working primarily as a journalist and war correspondent. He wrote novels on the side to try to make extra money. One of his stories, “Smithy,” was recently sold. About 30,000 copies For every shilling.
He later wrote: “Encouraged by this success, I sat down to turn the short story I had written, which had been rejected by every magazine in London, into a longer story.” His first novel became, The Four Just Menwhich was published by the London-based Thales Press in 1905. Instead of simply advertising his book in the traditional way, Wallace had something a little more unusual in mind.
“I was determined to make some kind of reputation as a story writer, even if doing so would break me,” he recalls. “He broke me good.”
In fact, instead of He wins His money, Wallace’s innovative marketing campaign for The Four Just Men It almost led to his financial ruin.
Marketing is a mystery
The “four just men” in Wallace’s novel are the guards Leon Gonzalez, George Manfred, Boeckart, and Terry. They take it upon themselves to bring justice to people who have faced no consequences for the wrongs they have committed.
The novel begins with the men gathering in a café in the Spanish city of Cádiz and exchanging stories about the different ways in which they served their form of justice for people who were not held accountable by the law. They then decided to kill the British government minister, Sir Philip Rammon, over his role in passing an unjust law that would leave people living in exile in the United Kingdom vulnerable to extradition to countries where they risked the death penalty for opposing dictators.
The book follows their pursuit of this plan – to a point. Unlike most murder mystery novels, The Four Just Men He did not conclude by explaining how the crime was committed. Instead, how the minister would meet his end in a locked room was left unresolved, and the reader was invited to write in their own guess to solve the mystery.
It was all part of Wallace’s grand marketing plan: out of his own pocket, he offered prizes worth £500 (the equivalent of £53,023.35, or more than $72,000, now); The first prize, £250 (£26,511.68 or roughly $36,000 today), was a huge sum in 1905. A competition for the spine of the book, between the names of author and publisher, was promoted. He reads “The Story of a £500 Prize” – and inside it was A Slip back for separation The reader can submit if he or she decides to submit a play for the award.
Wallace believed that the contest would encourage more people to buy the book, thus making money for him. He originally wanted the total prize money to be £1,000, but it was convinced To go with the bottom bowl by his teammates Daily Mail. This was fortunate for the author, because the marketing ploy ultimately backfired, disastrously.
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A disaster that cannot be mitigated
Wallace’s marketing conspiracy exploded for two main reasons. The first is that Wallace has dramatically underestimated the number of readers who will accurately guess the solution to the puzzle. But perhaps the biggest problem was that the competition’s wording did not specify a limit on the number of winners. This means that a large number of people took home a share of the prize money, significantly exceeding the actual prize pool of £500.
The author also spent his own money to pay for traditional promotion of the novel, including notices in newspapers and advertisements on buses, resulting in another financial loss.
“Even though I sold 38,000 copies, I lost £1,400!” Wallace later wrote about the disaster in his autobiography. “I’ve discovered that there is such a thing as too much advertising.” I finish Selling rights For future novels about the four just men to pay off his debts.
A lasting legacy
Once the dust is off The Four Just Men However, disaster settled in, and Wallace continued his writing. He eventually found lasting success, and continued writing More than 170 novels (not to mention plays and film scripts) in his career. New edition of The Four Just Men It was also published in 1906, and this time contains the solution to the mystery, which turns out to be less mysterious for many readers than Wallace had hoped.
In his later works, Wallace wrote a number of sequels featuring The Just Men, the last of which was published more than 20 years later, in 1928. By then, he was able to draw on his back catalog of work as part of the promotion of the novels. Never again would he attempt such a reckless stunt as the one that brought him to the brink of financial ruin.
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