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 and The 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 TheToday 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."
