Running Advertisements in Novels

What if Madame Bovary sold readers her favorite fabric softener?

Last year editor Tom Engelhardt wondered why books never utilized advertising, writing: “The ad, after all, has colonized everything in our world from gas pumps to urinals, bars to doctor’s offices, taxis to your sneakers and cell phone, not to speak of every imaginable printed form, including the cereal box and the back of your supermarket receipt, and yet, strangely enough, it never successfully colonized the book.”

Now DailyLit, the book-serialization website with 150,000 subscribers, has brought ads to books. According to an AdAge article, a jewelry company and a greeting card company have sponsored serialized digital books on the literary site.

An excerpt from the subscription-required article: “DailyLit helps match advertisers with books and negotiates the duration of the sponsorship. For a determined window of time, all installments for the sponsored book feature the sponsor’s logo as well as a hyperlink to its website in the right-hand corner.” (Via Booksquare.)

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