If it’s wasteful, it is stupid, and IIRC, Random House has finally said “enough” and isn’t going to be doing it any more. NPR did an interview with an exec from Random (or whatever major publishing house it is that’s doing this) and according them it was something which started during the Great Depression and just never went away.
Disney had a similar marketing ploy – and I believe they still do it. Commercials would talk about some characters in a movie, and now they are action figures, collect the whole set. They were talked about in a way that if you don’t already have some of the action figures, you were terribly unhip, because all your friends already had them. I could give a damn about Disney, and I felt culturally out of it. The thing was, though, that the characters were in a movie that was a good 2-4 months from release. No one had heard of it.
Very clever – and sleazy – marketing.
Trailer Park Boys is a great comedy series that not many people I know are familiar with.
There was an article a week or so ago in Parade magazine about Jonny Lee Miller, who stars in a show called “Eli Stone”. In the same article they referred to him as starring in “the new ABC hit comedy, ‘Eli Stone’” ~and~ ask him how he’ll feel if the series is not picked up next season. Yes, it’s such a hit it might well be cancelled. Apparently entertainment journalists love logical anomalies.
FWIW this was a mid-season replacement.