Shinchosha scores hit after hit! - "A City on the Way" sees new life

Mr. Tatsuo Shimizu's "A City on the Way" (Shinchosha Bunko, published 1994) has been selling at an explosive rate since the implementation of last December's "Adult's Time Fair," Shinchosha's campaign to promote the rediscovery of previously published works. Even his recently published book, "Ao Ni Sourou" (Shinchosha) has seen reprints issued, thanks to the sales trend set in motion by the fair. Riding on the crest of this success, the company is considering working on expanding sales of other works by Mr. Shimizu in the hopes of triggering a Tatsuo Shimizu boom.

Every month, the fair attempts to grow sales at approximately 800 bookshops by changing the blurb bands wrapped around ten books chosen from the company's collection of publications. When Mr. Yoshifumi Kawai of the company's sales department arranged for the placement of the band with the blurb "Winner of the 1991 This Mystery is Great Awards!" around "A City on the Way" at the time the award was announced for it, shop after shop began to report that the book had sold out.

For some of the stores who proposed to "develop the campaign on a large scale" the following January, the company shipped reprints of the book with blurb bands that read this time, "Let's compare this with the recent winner of This Mystery is Great Awards." Consequently, the campaign caught on fire, generating hundreds of sales driven by major booksellers and a succession of bulk orders from chains. The campaign, in effect, has managed to grow sales for the product from a cumulative total of 125,000 copies to 206,000 copies in little less than three months.

According to Mr. Kawai, the book was no longer appearing on any rankings, and had seen reprints come out only once every two years recently. If it had continued in this way, it would most likely have been sold out without any plans for releasing its reprints.

It is believed that Mr. Shimizu has more readers who are men in their 30s and 40s who do not know him, rather than men in their 50s who read his works frequently. By reviving a past bestseller as "a major new work" with a mere change of the blurb band, Shinchosha seems to have set a promising precedent for other publishers aiming to promote the rediscovery of previously published works.


*Some of the book titles are tentative translations.
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