Lethem's Leap
An indie bookseller favorite gets double the sell-in--and bestsellerdom--with his fifth book
Last month, Motherless Brooklyn debuted on the hardcover bestseller lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, confirming early signs of breakout success for Jonathan Lethem, author of four previous novels and a short story collection. Motherless Brooklyn, a literary homage to the detective novel featuring a private investigator with Tourette's syndrome and a colorful Brooklyn backdrop, is now has 25,000 copies in print after two printings.
Doubleday positioned the book for breakout early, with an increased marketing budget as well as particular communication to the booksellers who have been longtime Lethem advocates. The prepub push paid off with an initial sell-in of the book that was more than double the net sales of Lethem's last hardcover. At press time, New Line had optioned the book in a high-six-figure deal, with actor Ed Norton set to produce and star.
"When I read the manuscript, I knew this was the one," said Doubleday's Bill Thomas, who edited Lethem's two most recent novels, As She Climbed Across the Table and Girl in Landscape. While Lethem's work has drawn critical acclaim, his tendency to dip into a variety of genres--such as science fiction and westerns--had caused some difficulties in reaching more mainstream audiences. Motherless Brooklyn, Thomas said, has the fortune of being "both his most accessible book and his best one."
The novel also received a key early boost: it was one of the less usual suspects included in an August 30 fall book preview roundup in Newsweek. The book went on to receive starred reviews from PW, Library Journal and Kirkus. Time magazine and New York Times also have reviewed the book favorably.
Lethem, who lives in Brooklyn and is setting his next novel there as well, has been on a national tour that included a recent appearance at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association conference.
But indies across the board are embracing the book; it also was the top vote-getter on Book Sense's October recommended books list. The novel thus may be the first good test of whether the ABA's marketing initiative can "make" a book.
Doubleday believes the book is already well on its way. "What's amazing is that a lot of our promotions and merchandising for the book are only now going up," said Thomas. "It's all only just starting."
BEHIND THE BOOK
'All Century' Is All Rare Air
PRIOR TO GAME 1 of baseball's World Series, sportscaster Bob Costas introduced the top 30 ballplayers of the century as chosen by fans in balloting this summer. And although once again, there is no Chicago team in the Fall Classic, at least some Chicagoans are cheering. That's because the Chicago-based company Rare Air Media has the book tie-in to the stellar list--Major League Baseball's All Century Team. The book is the launch of a new initiative by this sports marketer/book packager, best known for creating Michael Jordan's Rare Air (Collins), For the Love of the Game (Crown) and NBA at 50 (Random House), to sell directly to the trade. And Rare Air got the plum license from Major League Baseball (MLB) because of an old baseball virtue: hustle.
"We had to compress six months of work into about 40 days," said president Mark Vancil. The 30 baseball greats were tabulated from the 35 million ballots made available to fans at major league stadiums, Kmarts and in TV Guide and Sports Illustrated. The balloting began at the All-Star game July 8 and ran through September 15, giving Rare Air a very short turnaround time if books were to be available by the World Series.
Vancil believes that his company's willingness to handle the extremely short schedule was what ultimately won him the licensing rights in a deal reportedly in the low six figures. Rare Air started the project in August, did research on anticipated picks and "luckily we didn't get any surprises" when votes were tallied. With good planning, Vancil said, high-end print quality--the $50 book uses a 22-color process--d sn't have to be sacrificed in the rush. "We even printed it domestically. It can be done, if you're willing to print more than 5000 copies," he said.
Rare Air is printing 200,000 copies of the book, not an ambitious number, according to Vancil, since "we don't live and die by trade sales." He believes he'll sell a lot of books through MLB stadiums as well as through special sales promotion and marketing plans with MLB sponsors.
One MLB sponsor, MasterCard, is providing some built-in consumer marketing for the book: its multimillion-dollar marketing program includes in-store sweepstakes displays at Kmart and other retailers, with autographed books as part of the prize package.
While it taps into many nontraditional channels to sell books, Rare Air has stepped up efforts to attract bookstores. Carol Scatorchio, who previously worked at Random House and Dorling Kindersley, is the company's new New York“based sales director. And the company just has committed Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, two greats who were shoo-ins to make the All Century team, to signings at Barnes & Noble in New York City and at Borders in Chicago and hopes to coordinate other signings after the full team roster is released.
Rare Air's book, however, is no rarity in these millennial roundup times. Two heavy competitors in this category being released around the same time are Hyperion's $40 ESPN SportsCentury and Sourcebooks' $49.95 And the Crowd G s Wild: Relive the Most Celebrated Sporting Events Ever Broadcast, a book and two-audio CD package that features Costas's narration.
PREPUB BUZZ
Alternative Views of AIDS
WiLDCAT PRESS AUTHOR Patricia Nell Warren decries both the lack of demand for AIDS titles and the dearth of big-publisher titles that challenge the conventional wisdom about AIDS. But the latter situation is about to change with Dutton's release of The Virus Within: A Coming Epidemic by Nicholas Regush in February. In his book, Regush, a ABC News journalist, discusses Human Herpes Virus 6 (HHV-6), which, the catalogue copy claims, "may be the key to understanding both AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome." Regush has already covered this topic for abcnews.com, and ABC News' Peter Jennings has did a special report on the topic.
Also hoping for a reinvigorated AIDS debate is year-old New York City“based Rubicon Media, which in January will publish a revised edition of America's Biggest Coverup: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Its Link to AIDS. The book, previously published in 1993, was written by Neenyah Ostrom, who covered these topics for the New York Native, a newspaper that folded in 1996 in part because it was boycotted by gay organizations uncomfortable with its less-than-positive and perhaps politically incorrect AIDS reporting. (Rubicon publisher Francis Sweeney is the domestic partner of Charles Ortleb, who had been publisher of the Native; Sweeney also has published Ortleb's novel Iron Peter and most recently, his collection of satiric short fiction, The Last Lovers on Earth.)
But Regush d sn't want readers to just wait for his own book; in a report now up on ABC News's Web site, abcnews. com, he recommends current books that provide what he believes is needed perspective on AIDS: University of California microbiologist Peter Duesberg's Inventing the AIDS Virus (Regnery, 1996) and Michigan State University scientist Robert Root-Bernstein's Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus (Free Press, 1993).
But the public's interest in alternative AIDS views hasn't been looking too promising lately. Little, Brown had embarg d its 1000-plus page September release The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS because author Edward Hooper, a former UN official and BBC correspondent, believed that his theory--that the roots of AIDS lie in a contaminated polio vaccine given to Africans in the 1950s--would be a significant newsbreak. So far the book hasn't attracted major consumer coverage here. An October 4 London Times review included a telling pull quote: "Nobody wants to talk about this."
