From cars and condo developments to kids’ toys, consumers are often told it’s their “last chance to buy.” It’s a bit of threatening marketing that appeals to those who want to own something no one else can have in the future, or whatever audiences the marketing mavens are targeting with such slogans.

It’s often BS. Think about it: If that marketing campaign is successful, why wouldn’t they continue to sell the product? Twenty years ago we saw a Blue Man performance in Boston that was supposed to be their last one, but a few days ago I just saw an ad for a Blue Man performance. They’ve been going strong for twenty-plus years! (Like old rock groups and the cast of Hamilton, the Blue Men are probably no longer the original performers, of course.)

Ads and advertisers lie all the time—it’s not just the sign of the times; it’s in their DNA. The sign of the times is clear, from where an actor lies about a mugging and a noose to get publicity (I bet the KKK loved that!) to a president whose lies number in the thousands or one huge whopper from one: “I did not have sex with that woman!” (hmm, that was more than twenty years ago, come to think of it). Advertising and marketing mavens have a lot in common with politicians, I guess—if it’s the DNA, maybe it goes all the way back to Neanderthals breeding with Cro-Magnons?

One can write this off as morality waning around the world—religious groups lie all the time too, or support people who do! I wonder what chimpanzee tribes use to go to war with nearby tribes. They weren’t in the Garden with Eve and Adam and the snake, the precursor of snake oil salesmen, so they weren’t tainted by that original sin, lying.

But I digress. Lying is a reflection on human societies and particular groups in general and how inured we’ve become to people doing it through the ages. How it became part of business—advertising, in particular—is a phenomenon that sociologists probably can’t explain even if they tried. Oh, they might throw down a few ivory-tower theories—ask four sociologists why advertisers tend to lie and you’ll get four different answers, or five, if one expert is from Harvard (asking sociologists at least puts some science into it, although many schools have separate business and media schools).

In the book business, there are more liars out there who aren’t advertisers. (Don’t get me wrong. You can find good, honest marketing help. But you can also find many more marketing mavens who aren’t so good and are ready to steal your money.) Books and book publishers and retailers can also lie. As you browse through Amazon’s lists or bookstores’ shelves, you’re likely to see famous authors’ endorsements and statements like “If you liked Reacher, you’ll like X,” all misleading or lying to potential buyers. You’ll also see titles listed with descriptions beside the titles that are variations on the following: “X is a great, dark mystery with a lot of surprising twists”; or worse: “X is the best mystery you’ll ever read!” Add a bit more verbose BS and you’ll have a book blurb.

Is this false book advertising or just ad-speak? And is it a consequence of the prevalence of lying in our culture? Maybe like other lies and deceit, readers have become inured to these marketing lies. I can imagine readers and authors complaining about my calling them lies, so call it hype if you want. That marketing word takes some of the moral sting out, I guess. I could also call it BS. In any case, I ignore most of it in my book buying…or purchasing anything else, for that matter.

In a previous article, I discussed book critics. If anything, they lie by omission, unless there’s a critic around who reads every new book published. Most of them are just out to please Big Five publishers, so anything they write about a book is to be taken with a grain of salt. Publishers tell them to jump, and they jump. That’s a general phenomenon across all the arts now.

But back to those marketing mavens. Authors seek their services, so the mavens sell that more than they sell the books with those services, which are generally lame anyway. And unlike lawyers, some of which do pro bono work, marketing mavens want their money up front and will make special offers of packages with “last chance to buy” their special book promotion AKA spam packages of a hundred thousand tweets. They will also make promises something like “Turn your book into a bestseller.” The first is a lie; they keep offering those packages. The last is a lie too because it implies they have the silver bullet—they don’t because no one does. Forget about it! If you fall victim to one of these scams, I’m sorry. Watch out for those robocalls!

What can we do about lying in general or lying in advertising? Not much. It’s part of the culture now. Liars must think lying works for them, so maybe what we have to do is to prove them wrong by not believing their lies. That X-Files mantra applies: Trust no one. Or, at least, use this mantra: Trust but verify. You can usually uncover the underlying BS.

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Comments are always welcome.

“Writing Fiction.” Authors often have to do their own marketing, whether self- or traditionally published. They can do a lot of DIY and ignore the marketing mavens. Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, and Penny Sansevieri, CEO of AME, have many tips for doing that in their books–they’re often free (don’t spend your good money on marketing books). I also have a few tips in my short course “Writing Fiction,” which has a section on book marketing. That’s always free. It, and many other PDFs, including short fiction, can be downloaded for free. For a list, see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

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