Marketing folks and numbers crunchers alike at Houghton Mifflin have been praising the Lord for the past year. No, they haven't gotten religion, but one extremely hot 50-year-old backlist property, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Last year, Houghton's Tolkien books and related titles, as well as the mass market editions from Ballantine, had combined sales of 10.8 million copies, even though the first of the Peter Jackson trilogy of films, the Academy Award—winning The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, didn't hit movie screens until the second half of December (Bookselling, Mar. 18).
This year, Houghton is hoping to up the ante in conjunction with the December 18 release of the second film, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Clay Harper, Houghton's Tolkien projects director, told PW that in the first half of 2002, Houghton's Tolkien-related sales reached $21.5 million. As a baseline, he noted, "in 1998, Houghton sold 100,000 copies of Tolkien things. The one-volume paperback of The Lord of the Rings got up to 1.6 million copies gross from May 2001, when we released it, to now."
Part of Houghton's strategy for building Tolkien's audience includes capitalizing on the August 6 home-video release of the New Line Cinema film, the fifth top-grossing movie of all time. The DVD contains a 16-minute clip about Tolkien that Houghton originally prepared for 100 bookstores to show at Lord of the Rings events last November. It includes on-screen appearances by Harper, former trade & reference division head Wendy Strothman and the late British publisher Rayner Unwin, who wrote a reader's report on The Hobbit when he was 10 and went on to become Tolkien's editor and to introduce Houghton to The Hobbit in 1936. The coupon book packaged with the video contains a promotion for Brian Sibley's The Lord of the Rings Official Movie Guide, which was released late last year. A second extended "director's cut" DVD/VHS version of the film (which adds 30 minutes to the 178-minute film) will be released in mid-November.
This fall, Houghton is planning another round of authorless events. But, noted publicist Megan Wilson, "We're trying to reach a different audience this year." Festivities are planned for September 22, Frodo and Bilbo's birthday, at stores in 20 key college communities. "We will supply in-store events kits—trivia contests, maps and giveaways," explained Bridget Marmion, v-p/director of marketing, trade & reference division. "We're also going to be working with Decipher Trading Card Game and Roleplaying Game to do some contests." In addition, Houghton is planning outreach to high school teachers through sister educational publisher McDougal Littell. "This is just the beginning of talking to a new generation about Tolkien," Marmion told PW. "We don't plan to stop with the third movie in Christmas 2003; 2004 is the 50th anniversary of Fellowship of the Ring."
Earlier in July, New Line Cinema released the first of two new trailers for The Two Towers; the second is scheduled for September. Next month, New Line, Houghton and other Lord of the Rings licensees will share a Lord of the Rings pavilion at GenCon in Milwaukee and at several other fantasy conventions.
Then, to coincide with the November 6 laydown for a new batch of movie-related books, Houghton will launch a consumer contest through participating Book Sense stores. The contest involves identifying a Tolkien character and answering The Two Towers trivia questions to win prizes ranging from a full Tolkien library to a DVD/home entertainment package. Stores that request a contest easel are automatically entered into a drawing for, among other prizes, a trip for two to the U.S. screening of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
There are also three new dumps with standees from The Two Towers film—Legolas, Aragorn and Gandalf the White—designed to hold the new Tolkien releases. The first came out last month: Gary Russell's The Lord of the Rings: The Art of the Fellowship of the Ring, which include 500 pieces of art, from location images and creatures to full-color paintings. The one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, with new movie art, and a new edition of The Hobbit, rejacketed for younger readers, are both due out in August. The paperback of Tom Shippey's critical study, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, and a revised hardcover of The Annotated Hobbit by Douglas A. Anderson, former book buyer for The Book Bag in Valparaiso, Ind., are due out in September. Although those books will all have healthy first printings, Houghton is reserving its largest print runs for its November movie tie-ins. Brian Sibley's The Making of the Lord of the Rings will start off with 75,000 copies in hardcover and 325,000 in paperback. Similarly, Jude Fisher's hardcover The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Visual Companion will have a first printing of 325,000 copies.
If sales build as anticipated, this holiday season Houghton staffers may be singing "My Sweet Lord" instead of more traditional Christmas carols.
