Publishers have a tiny window of only six to eight weeks in which to establish a book's reputation, before it is dismissed by the media as no longer topical and swept off the bookshop shelves in order to make way for the next batch of titles, and before the publishers themselves have to move on to the next campaign.Timing can be all-important: a good first novel without the necessary "buzz" behind it doesn't stand a chance of being reviewed if it is published in the same fortnight as a large number of books by established authors. It will also get swamped in the bookshops by expensive display material lavished on less worthy books.The most important thing, though, is to get the book read by the people handling it. Sales managers who like a book will sell it with greater enthusiasm; journalists and literary editors can tell when a publicist means what she's saying. Fry felt so enthusiastic about Gitta Sereny's biography of Albert Speer that she printed 30,000 copies of the first chapter in a pamphlet and asked staff to leave one wherever they went, from people's loos to doctors' surgeries. If booksellers and people in the media hear a book recommended several times from different sources they are likely to do more than just glance at the cover when the early copy arrives.

When Waterstone's ran a promotion for The Alienist by Caleb Carr, they sold twice as many copies of the book at the Old Brompton Road branch in London in the week after the promotion as they had done in the whole of the previous month, because one staff member had read and loved it.Even though the window of opportunity is so small, a book occasionally gets a second lease of life, with dramatically different results. Robert James Waller's British publishers thought the title The Bridges of Madison County too American, so they first published it with the crashingly dull title of Love in Black and White. It sank without trace, even though it had reduced men at the Reed publishing empire to tears. As sales, publicity and public enthusiasm for the book in the States increased steadily, Heinemann rectified their mistakes by republishing the book with the American title and by using the story of their gaffe to market the book afresh. Their insert in The Bookseller read "We thought we'd got it right but we got it wrong"; Simon Hoggart wrote about the book in the Observer, the Daily Mail serialised it and the ball began to roll, with sales reaching 600,000 long before the arrival of the film.Publicity and marketing come into play at the end of the publishing process, and sometimes have to mount a rescue operation: "If the book's not as good as the editor thought it would be, the jacket's awful and the sell- in to the shops hasn't been good then it's up to publicity and marketing to try to get it right," says Minna Fry.Word-of-mouth among the public is equally important when the books are in the shops, and, even with a book that has had plenty of media coverage, it can cut both ways. "[Naomi Campbell's novel] Swan sold for two weeks and that was the end of it," says Martin Lee, marketing director of the Waterstone's chain.

"You can market a book by throwing money at it, but only until the word is out." It is reassuring to learn that taste does play a part in all this.There are now so many new books each month that only those categorised as "leads" and liable to respond to strenuous publicity and marketing spends will get a push. "There are very few books on any list that a publisher is able to give enough time to," says Nick McDowell of Orion, "probably only six titles or so. The trick is in identifying something odd or genuinely different about the book and bringing it to the public's attention." Those books which are not categorised as "leads" fall into the "mid-list", where a book has to survive on its own merits or face sudden death. Without those books, we would not have had such interesting and surprising bestsellers as Will Hutton's The State We're In.