http://ad-rag.com/109301.php Now, product placement goes on all the time in movies, and music videos and car commercials are becoming interchangeable. And even in less commercial fields, PR agencies often meet with playwrights and authors to get them to incorporate products into stories. But to actually get paid to insert advertising text into a novel? The sky isn't falling by any means, but this sucks immensely.
I've tried that link a few times and it isn't connecting. Uggggggggh! Product placement in a book? Who's the guilty party? It could only be somebody as big as Stephen King or John Grisham I'd have to think. Nobody's going to put something like that in some book of translated Bhutanese poetry.
I heard this on the BBC World News this morning. The first contract was for a "chick lit" (their words) novel in England. They read an excerpt from some twit writer's description of some twit character's twit automobile. It seems to be fairly genre specific at this point, and limited. I can't see it getting into anything I'd read. Though I can imagine David Foster Wallace or somebody like that doing it for the irony. While product placement takes this procedure to new depths, there was a line of books published 10-15 years back sold ads in the books -- in the middle and inside the dust covers. They were sort of middlebrow cultural criticism and current affairs things, but I can't remember the publisher... though I think that wanker who does Channel One may have had something to do with it. And pulp fiction has come with adverts for years... why hell, a fella can't hardly find old Louis L'Amour stories without it havin' a ad in it.
Now that you mention it, Wallace should sincerely take money for product placement in his next novel. It would be the most ironic gesture in the history of literature.
Right now, product placement in books is an outrage and a disgrace. However, if I can sell my manuscript when I finish it this summer, things may change. An entire chapter takes place at an MLS game from 1997.