Thank you so much for reading and I absolutely agree with you Al that marketing plays a major role, but I feel delivery and overall quality is important as well. For example, take Stadia, a new gaming platform that I’ve been personally following. It’s a platform that Google has recently created to jump into the gaming arena with Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. It’s been hyped up heavily with plenty of ads showing up on YouTube and other platforms. It talks big about being able to stream anywhere, game anywhere and more. However, it’s been recently announced that a lot of the other features that were promised at launch are not going to be made available at launch. By all accounts, the marketing is great, but the product itself is cumbersome (streaming and even playing is limited to people who order a specific Chromebook that comes out at launch with Stadia from what I remember) and less than desirable with many people saying they won’t try this new platform out at all despite the huge marketing efforts.

By no means is a book remotely close to a game, but I feel marketing is a major part but not the only thing that keeps it alive. There are other elements to consider that make a book something people will talk about and want to pass the book along to others. At the time, I was reflecting more on those sorts of themes.