Haruki Murakami and the marketing madness of publishers

Murakami's new book will come with a free sticker set so (adult) readers can decorate the novel. Can you come up with a better – or worse idea?

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Not a Wind-Up … some of the stickers being given away with the new Haruki Murakami

The honour for the most ludicrous marketing initiative of all time has to belong to the Stranglers' record company. It cooked up a plan to boost the profile of the band's famous hymn to heroin abuse, Golden Brown, with a giveaway of Breville Snack'n'Sandwich toasters. But publishing has provided some competition.

The latest contender comes in plans to herald the coming of the newHaruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. First editions of the novel, it was announced at midnight, will include a special sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators (shown above). 

A press release informs us that Tsukuru means "to make" or "to build" in Japanese. Hence – obviously – the stickers, which will "encourage the reader to decorate the novel themselves".

Publisher Harvill Secker's creative director Suzanne Dean said: "My young son's delight in using stickers everywhere started me thinking about this. I had seen stickers used on Royal Mail stamps, on CDs and, of course, in children's books, but I didn't think they had been incorporated into adult fiction." What an oversight. I'm sure a fair number of readers' young children, anyway, will appreciate the idea. And eBay's appetite for ephemera that has been kept away from grubby-pawed infants is, of course, boundless.

Similarly envelope-pushing inspiration came to comic novelist Jennifer Belle. She decided to make some noise for her book The Seven-Year Bitch by hiring actresses to laugh publicly while reading the book on the New York subway. A Portuguese publisher's flash of invention was to hire a boy to yell 'Extra! Extra!' and trail the murders in a new crime novel. Some maintain that one of the most successful books in history, Guinness World Records, began as a marketing gimmick for Guinness itself before taking on its own very strange life.

Silly ideas of course, but the press coverage they garner – as witness this blogpost – can sometimes lead to more conventional marketing success. So, I wonder which books that have not received much attention by conventional means – or whose sales are drooping – could benefit from such tactics.

A free Cornetto with every edition of Wallace Stevens' Harmonium? Vouchers for eyebrow-threading with Tess of the D'Urbervilles? Or perhaps a bucket and spade with copies of the script for Beckett's Happy Days.

But I'm sure you can do better. Come on folks, let's blue-sky this baby.