“We were anticipating the book would be very big, but it has exceeded our expectations,” Steve Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, told Jeff Trachtenberg. “As booksellers, we’re thrilled.” Little, Brown, too, thought ECLIPSE might sell 40,000 copies in its first week based on past success of TWILIGHT and NEW MOON. “I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Megan Tingley, the imprint’s publisher. So they’ve gone back to press, Meyer continues to pack in thousands at signings and it should be interesting to see what the reception will be when the fourth and final volume comes out next year.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

These initiatives raise a question in Trachtenberg’s mind: Could this go further, where advertisers are targeting readers of a particular author? So far, the country’s biggest-selling writers have steered clear of ads. James Patterson, the former ad executive turned novelist, offers all sorts of free content on his Web site, including brief excerpts of some of his novels. But the site hasn’t solicited advertising, concerned that ads for other businesses could turn off Patterson fans and hurt book sales. “We’re considering side businesses but we have to put them through the filter of whether it advances the value of the Web to our readers,” says Steve Bowen, president of James Patterson Entertainment. “It’s a hollow victory if you end up undermining your core business.”

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Random House says its move into the film business isn’t mainly about increasing profits via movie tickets and DVDs. Rather, it’s about selling books. “We’re doing this primarily to sell more books as movie tie-ins,” says Peter Olson, CEO of Random House. “If the movies do well at the box office and as DVDs, that’s an additional bonus.” A strategy which worked in a big way with the tie-in to PERFUME (sales jumped to more than 100,000 copies sold from 13,000 copies annually for Patrick Suskind‘s novel) and which offers high hopes for Schwartz, now betting that movie will also give a boost to his next novel, THE COMMONER, published in January by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. “My hope is that it will catch some of the wind from the movie promotion,” he says.

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But that flurry will eventually slow as time passes. “We’ll probably see fewer titles. The energy that comes from a release of a new book in the series will be over,” says Roger Scholl, the editorial director of Bertelsmann AG’s Currency/Doubleday business imprint, who edited Tom Morris‘s IF HARRY POTTER RAN GENERAL ELECTRIC. Still, some caution against underestimating the passion of Harry Potter readers. John Granger, an English teacher at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa., says academics will attempt to fix Rowling’s place in the cultural firmament, much as they continue to do so for such writers as Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie. “I’m fairly certain Potter-mania will not go the way of disco and the hula-hoop,” says Granger, who is currently working on HARRY MEETS HAMLET AND SCROOGE that will explore Harry’s literary antecedents.

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“Readers have long hungered for greater contact and more information about authors,” said Sue Fleming, Vice President, Online and Consumer Marketing for the Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. “Now readers will have a way to view and share compelling content about our authors, available on a 24/7 basis. Bookvideos.tv will allow readers to easily use the internet to replicate, for the digital age, the critical and time tested word of mouth excitement that comes from talking about a good read. Working with TurnHere to tap this huge potential audience is an exciting new way of marketing for us, and we expect to find legions of new readers while at the same time giving a new experience to dedicated fans of our authors.”

The WSJ’s Jeff Trachtenberg has more on the story along with a telling observation from The Book Report’s Carol Fitzgerald: most readers don’t know which publishers actually publish their favorite authors. “They could say, ‘Why don’t you have John Grisham?’”, even though he’s published by Doubleday.

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But some are skeptical that Brown will find success, considering a number of books – let’s not forget Paul Burrell‘s “embargoed” account – didn’t live up to sales expectations. “It’s a gamble for us,” said Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan. “Will there be new information and pictures people haven’t seen before? And will there be so much news coverage that people won’t have to read the book?” Jennings says she has ordered 20 copies of THE DIANA CHRONICLES because those who are interested will want to buy the book immediately. “We can’t miss a sale,” she said. the Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, Ill., has ordered only two copies, based on weak sales of recent Diana-related titles. “Publicity could save [it] but there isn’t a lot of enthusiasm in the heartland,” said owner Roberta Rubin. One potential bright sign: a customer has already reserved a copy. “Somebody has gotten word, so I’ll buy a few more,” said Rubin.

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Which is all well and good, and there certainly is an unfortunate stigma to being published as a young adult writer (even as the market share increases, as does the overall quality) but Doyle’s nose-in-the-air attitude about YA fiction grates after a while. “If TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or THE CATCHER IN THE RYE were published today, they’d almost certainly be young-adult titles,” he says. “But then they wouldn’t become classics, except in the sense that Judy Blume books are classics.” Something tells me this is a case of Doyle speaking without thinking (YA and middle grade classics off the top of my head: THE YEARLING, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES) but then I suspect if a double-blind copy of M.T. Anderson‘s OCTAVIAN NOTHING was pressed into his hands, he wouldn’t recognize it as one of those oh-so-pesky YA books….

UPDATE: Larry Doyle writes in to clarify some of the things in this post, as well as the original article. “I have no disdain for children’s literature, or literature read by young adults. I was wary of the prepackaged marketing of same, as a genre with specific conventions, then sold into a narrow channel of readership. That’s why I brought up MOCKING BIRD and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. They are
both clearly children’s and young adult books, but both were published as general fiction. As was A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. It was
an adult best-seller and shipped routinely to servicemen.”

As for why KING DORK was included in the piece, Doyle said he brought the book up “as an example of a book that I thought deserved wider recognition but didn’t get it because of the marketing label. The movie will probably change that. I also, for what it’s worth, went out of my way to say that I didn’t think my book was a classic by any measure. I went with Ecco because of Lee, and because Harper-Collins convinced me I could reach a wider audience (including teenagers) by publishing there.”

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This and two similar videos were uploaded to YouTube and have since spread elsewhere on the Internet, including MySpace. Now THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE has gone back for a third printing and the videos have become a Web sensation, with more than one million verified views in the past two weeks. “We needed to go where the average American male readership would be: online, passing around funny quirky videos,” said David Roth-Ey, editorial director of HarperPerennial, adding that he is talking about men under the age of 40. “If we were going to find them, it wouldn’t be by advertising in the New Yorker.” Still, the limits of the strategy are clear. Only a fraction of the million views has so far turned into sales, likely because the people watching the videos aren’t frequent book buyers. As Kultgen said, “Now we’ll see if the views translate into book sales.”

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“People can’t get enough of Barack Obama,” said Bruce Lubin, vice president of book development at Barnes & Noble, who expressed interest in a title if the book could be crashed – the quicker, the better. “We think there’s an audience.” Lubin declined to say how many books Barnes & Noble has ordered, but described the chain’s commitment as “strong.” The 128-page book, printed in a magazine-style size and full of photographs of its subject, is being offered in prime front-of-the-store locations and on current-events tables. The book’s publisher, J.P. Leventhal, said that altogether he has invested a bit less than $200,000 in the entire project. “It’s a gamble,” he says. “We will know in two weeks or so if it’s a success.” Because if not, that’s a hell of an investment to make and not get much out of it…

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“It’s a natural extension of what we’ve been doing the last few years,” said David Steinberger, Perseus’s chief executive. Steinberger said it will cost an estimated $20 million to pay PGW clients for their claims. That money could be paid out in a matter of weeks, if the court approves the deal. But Soft Skull‘s Richard Nash is one publisher who is worried about his prospects for survival in the wake of bankruptcy. That’s because Soft Skull is owed $110,000 by PGW and anticipates big bills as booksellers send back unsold copies from the holiday season. Soft Skull is debited for the wholesale price of each returned book and so far, those returns total $20,000 this month. Nash is also $250,000 in debt, including $40,000 from family members that he considers a personal loan.

If Perseus is successful, it will have an estimated 250 independent book-publishing distribution clients. And that’s where it becomes tricky. Because if every one of PGW’s clients signs on with Perseus, it gives the distribution company a tremendous amount of power. Aside from their in-house imprints, they are also responsible for distributing books under the CDS and Consortium arms, totaling approximately 120 separate publishers. Add in PGW’s approximately 150 publishers and suddenly, the vast majority of independent publishers owe their abilities to get their books into bookstores to a single company. And if the AMS mess has proved one thing, it’s that the perceived autonomy PGW had ended up amounting to very little. Which is why, as Radio Free PGW points out, it’s a good idea to look at those prospective contracts very, very closely.

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