The protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, is a star-class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency who has been assigned the ad campaign which would attract colonists to Venus.

Whilst serving in the US Army Air Force during the Second World War, Pohl had been posted to Stornara, in south-eastern Italy, as a weather forecaster.

He chose to write about the advertising industry, thinking it to be the most interesting topic in the city, and patiently wrote "a long, complicated, and very bad novel" with the title of For Some We Loved.

Before rewriting it, he applied for advertising jobs to gain some background, and on 1 April 1946 joined a small Madison Avenue agency as their chief copywriter.

The following year, he began drafting a science fiction novel, loosely themed on advertising, under the name of Fall Campaign, and had reached twenty thousand words by the summer, working at weekends and in the evenings.

At this point, Pohl's old friend Cyril Kornbluth arrived, having quit his job in Chicago to freelance as a science fiction writer, and offered to look over the manuscript.

[5] Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, had read the draft before Kornbluth had become involved, and offered to print it when it was complete, tentatively scheduled to follow Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man.

[7] The book edition dropped the previously published concluding chapters, reportedly added for the magazine version at the request of Galaxy editor H.L.

The omnibus was part of a two-volume set of 1950s science fiction, the first LOA project to include an extensive online companion site.

[11] In his study of the pioneers of science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960), the novelist Kingsley Amis states that The Space Merchants "has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far.

"[9] Boucher and McComas praised it as "bitter, satiric, exciting [and] easily one of the major works of logical extrapolation in several years.... a sharp melodrama of power-conflict and revolt which manages... to explore all the implied developments of [its imagined] society.

"[14] P. Schuyler Miller compared the novel to Brave New World, finding it "not so brilliant, but more consistently worked out and suffering principally... from its concessions to melodrama.

The novel is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first recorded source for several new words, including "soyaburger", "moon suit", "tri-di" for "three-dimensional", "R and D" for "research and development", "sucker-trap" for a shop aimed at gullible tourists, and one of the first uses of "muzak" as a generic term.