Adventures in marketing bullshit
So I’ve caught a really strong whiff of the buzz that Doubleday, especially editor Jason Kaufman, is trying to drum up for its Next Big Thing. THE TRAVELER, the “debut thriller” by John Twelve Hawks, will hit bookstores at the end of this month with an alleged first print run of 180,000 copies.
And the louder Kaufman and the rest of the brass protests that this is not, they repeat, not, a publicity stunt, my bullshit detector goes just as far off the grid as the author allegedly claims to be.
First of all, “off the grid”? That’s so Matrix which is so, well, 1999. Second, Twelve Hawks’ agent, Joe Regal — who, btw, doesn’t even list Twelve Hawks as a client on his website — was quoted as saying that the “reclusive” author took his current nom de plume after “a major life-altering experience.”
Like, hmmm, being a hopelessly midlist writer who was blackballed by evil forces of low sales figures and found a creative, albeit annoying, way to resurrect his (or her) career with a super high-concept idea? Which of course, then sold for a boatload of cash?
I’m not even sure why this pisses me off as much as it does. After all, Elizabeth Kostova’s THE HISTORIAN is getting an almost equal marketing push and I not only loved the book, but felt it was worth all the hype. So what is it? Maybe it’s because I feel like the actual contents of the book got lost in the midst of all this marketing hubbub. Or maybe because when I tried reading a galley, all I could think of was that damn marketing campaign and the excess noise made me put the book down. Which didn’t bode well for judging the book’s contents.
Or maybe I just don’t like being manipulated, and everything to do with Twelve Hawks has as much spontanaiety as a relationship between Tom Cruise and any female.
But I have to hand it to the publishers, as they have devised quite an
ingenious marketing strategy that I can’t seem to get away from (hell,
there was an article in my soon-to-be-ex-local paper about it over the
weekend. That shows you how far the buzz carries) That said, how “underground” are the websites described if they are only reported after the fact as being related to the book instead of serving their original purpose, to drum up interest months in advance?
The full campaign, which Publishers Weekly wrote about in April, appears after the jump.
What’s a publisher to do when it bets big on a book it believes could be the next The Da Vinci Code —but the author refuses to promote the title and bookseller reaction is not all that could be hoped for?
Doubleday’s
answer is to look outside of publishing, to the aggressive tactics of
movie and record companies, for inspiration for a Web and
street-marketing campaign that will surround the June 28 publication of
The Traveler , a debut novel by John Twelve Hawks.
The Traveler
, which is projected to be the first book in a trilogy, came to
Doubleday editor Jason Kaufman in March 2004, a full year into the
amazing run of his book, The Da Vinci Code . At the time,
Kaufman was being deluged with pitches for authors who promised to be
the next Dan Brown. Behind every letter there lurked an ancient code or
a mysterious work of art. Although he did buy a quirky serial killer
novel (Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter ), Kaufman remained on the hunt for the next big thing.
Then independent literary agent Joe Regal, who was riding high with Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage), sent Kaufman The Traveler , a cinematic adventure novel by a recluse who had communicated with Regal only via a satellite phone with a voice scrambler.
The
novel is set in a familiar 21st-century consumer society dubbed “the
Vast Machine,” where most people live under the surveillance of
millions of closed-circuit cameras, distracted by trendy fashions and
high-tech gizmos from noticing that ATM and credit card transactions
record their every decision and movement. But under the surface,
there’s a centuries-old struggle between prophetic “Travelers,” who can
communicate with a civilization beyond the quantum divide and are
protected by a dying breed of warriors called “Harlequins,” and the
“Tabula,” a cabal of grim-lipped old white men.
In the house’s biggest gamble on an unknown author since publishing The Da Vinci Code , Kaufman struck a low seven-figure deal for world rights to the trilogy within a week. A few days later, The Traveler
set off a buying frenzy at the 2004 London Book Fair that rights
director Carol Lazare found extraordinary because she’d never before
made three-book deals for an untested author. A film deal with Steven
Spielberg directing for Universal, backed by the legendary production
team Kennedy/Marshall, soon followed.
With
publishing deals now in place in 18 countries, Doubleday has more than
doubled its initial investment in the book. That puts the company in a
strong position with the marketing budget—which is “right behind John
Grisham’s,” according to marketing director John Pitts. But there’s a
hitch: Twelve Hawks has refused to grant so much as an e-mail interview
to the media. He explained his decision to Regal by saying, “The
culture of celebrity has undermined the power of ideas,” making it
clear he preferred to let the book speak for itself.
A Show of Force on DVD
Doubleday, on the other hand, is not so reticent. In lieu of a pre-pub
tour, the house has taken the unusual step of creating 3,000
elaborately packaged DVDs with an original score as a sort of trailer
for the book. In it, a parade of Random House staffers earnestly
testify to the book’s appeal between passages from the novel narrated
by Twelve Hawks in a garbled baritone that makes him sound like Darth
Vader’s nephew, while trippy illustrations leak across the screen.
Packaged in a jewel-case that also includes a CD-ROM full of marketing
materials, the whole thing comes across as a money-drenched show of
force. Whether anyone in the trade or media will actually spend half an
hour watching it, let alone register the irony in such a slick
promotion for a novel that critiques the shiny distractions of our
consumer society, remains to be seen.
Despite a mailing of 9,000 galleys that began in February, early reaction from booksellers is not even close to what it was for The Da Vinci Code
. Still, many found it a well-crafted thriller. At Barnes & Noble,
mystery buyer James Killen found its focus on “conspiracies, the
control of power, privacy and information and a secret history of the
world” reminiscent of The Matrix , Highlander andThe X-Files
. It will be one of the summer’s biggest make-books at the chain.
Independent booksellers, too, are signing on, though some, like Karl
Pohrt, owner of Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Mich., hesitated to use the
word “original” to describe a book in which you can so clearly see the
actress “Jennifer Garner playing the lead, and Christopher Walken as
her father, with his hair pomped up like in Zoolander .”
Since
Doubleday is looking for a younger, more male market than it typically
attracts, playing up the cool factor with an aggressive street
promotion in college markets is also crucial. “We were thinking about
how to reach the people standing in line to watch movies like The Matrix
, or who go to rock concerts, with materials that would help drive
traffic to the Web sites,” said Pitts. So he decided to hire teams of
people who usually work for record labels to post “snipes” of the book
jacket, along with stickers and decals related to the book, in Ann
Arbor, Mich.; Madison, Wis.; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; and New York.
“That kind of approach worked well with Chuck Palahniuk, and we hope The Traveler has that same kind of audience,” he added.
A Web Game Worth 1,000 Words
The
riskiest and most inspired part of the campaign is Doubleday’s
multi-pronged Web strategy, which picks up where the house’s popular
campaign at www.davincicode.com
left off. That site tapped into the popularity of Web quests by
creating an online scavenger hunt that drew thousands of participants
after the launch of The Da Vinci Code in late spring 2003. As the book’s popularity grew, the house devised a second quest that was featured on _The_Today Show
and involved clues that Brown and Kaufman had hidden on the book cover
from the very beginning. After a total of 514,319 visits to the site
over two months in late 2003, 40,000 people solved the puzzle and
entered the contest for a trip to Paris—undoubtedly a benchmark for
that kind of online book promotion.
Since the quest motif worked so well for The Da Vinci Code , the house enlisted the same Web developer, Jeff Rabb, to create a game with a similar structure that will go live at www.traveler-book.com
in June. Playing on the surveillance theme, it will allow viewers to
track a character—via closed-circuit camera images or by following the
person’s credit-card transactions, for example—with the aim of
appealing to avid puzzle-solvers as well as Web surfers who are just
poking around.
But Doubleday isn’t
stopping there. For those who gravitate to blogs, it has also created a
home page for the book’s heroine (under her alias as an ordinary
citizen) at www.geocities. com/judithstrand/, which links to a blog at www.judithstrand.blogspot.com .
Even
more elaborate is the under-the-radar campaign aimed at the book’s core
audience: the community of gamers who make a sport of breaking into Web
sites, actively communicate via online forums and who are already
paranoid about the dangers of modern surveillance. For them, there’s a
challenge that involves hacking a Web site to find hidden dossiers on
the book’s characters and coverups indirectly related to the plot,
based on clues that can be found on two other sites.
Why
spend the entire year before publication creating games and content
that scrupulously avoid repeating the material in the book? “People
like to be challenged on the Web. They want something interactive—they
want an experience,” said Lauren Chinn, who worked at Miramax building
Web sites to market movies before she became Doubleday’s Internet
marketing manager.
Last spring, the
house enlisted Web site designer Sam Frank to begin building the site
for Judith Strand, in addition to three sites for the book’s hacker
audience. The additional sites are www.evergreen-foundation.com , the official site of the Tabula’s scientific research arm; www.resurrectionautoparts.com
, a front for a Harlequin forum; and hollismartialarts. com, which
hosts a blog by one of the book’s secondary characters. “For something
this elaborate, you need that much time to develop it, to give it the
sense that it’s been around,” said Chinn.
While
it remains to be seen how successful Doubleday’s various efforts to
connect with the gamers and to push the book into the mainsteam will
be, there’s no doubt their pioneering Web campaign will be regarded as
a bellwether. For now, Kaufman said, “My feeling about the DVD and Web
sites is that it’s amazing we produced them. How else are publishers
going to compete with other media in 2005? Besides, it wouldn’t be as
much fun to be an editor if there weren’t things like this every now
and then.”