The books they tried to ban

The marketing message “The one they tried to ban” is a potent one, not only exploited by the music business but by publishers also.  When ex-spymaster Peter Wright attempted to publish his memoirs in 1985 he came up against the might of the British government which went to court in an attempt to suppress publication (Norton-Taylor 1988).  

Image from Amazon.com

Despite the fact that there was little in the book that was not already in the public domain, the notoriety generated by the attempted gag on publication ensured the book's success (Zuckerman 1987).  It is not just governments and official censors that can boost the popularity of a book through exploiting its non-availability: Flaubert, DH Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, Nabokov and many other authors appear to have benefited from being denounced by moral guardians.  Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was hardly in need of a publicity boost ahead of being made into a film in 2005, but sales were not noticeably harmed when the world's press learned that the Vatican had appointed a Cardinal officially to debunk the heresies it saw in the book (see for example Pauli 2005).   

Similarly, sales of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books were buoyed by regular media reports that it was the most banned book in America (Capon and Scott 2013): Rowling’s publishers have also been adept at exploiting other aspects of psychological reactance theory -  in particular carefully withholding information from the media and giving the appearance that there would be restricted supplies of the books available (Brown 2001).


References

Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October
Capon, Felicity and Catherine Scott (2013), “Top 20 books they tried to ban”, The Daily Telegraph, 1 March
Norton-Taylor, Richard (1988), “Newspapers win Spycatcher battle”, The Guardian, 14 October
Pauli, Michelle (2005), “Vatican appoints official Da Vinci Code debunker”, The Guardian, 15 March
Zuckerman, Laurence (1987), “Press: how not to silence a spy”, Time Magazine, 17 August