The Business of Publishing - New Fiction Table

Found his little tid-bit in Writer's Digest the other day. Yeah, I kind of figure this out for myself when the "new book" I was looking for was on the shelf and the one that I bought 6 months ago was still sitting "pretty as you please" on the New Fiction Table. But did you know that the supermarket book aisle that has #1, #2 and so on is also placed for payment? Hmmm.

Chains in the US and the UK allow publishers to pay for placement of a book -- it's called co-op advertising. This basically means that when you look on the New Fiction table at Barnes and Noble or Borders, a publisher has paid to have a book there for a week or a month -- it has little to do with how "new" it is.

Jodi Picoult, Writer's Digest, February 2007