Back to The Future

After last year's spectacular debuts, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins take on new quests this winter, as do their publishers and booksellers, who must find a way to maintain excitement about the same old titles. Unlike traditional movie sequels that spawn novelizations or new tie-ins, all of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books are already deeply established in the marketplace. Still, publishers have a few new twists on the old titles and Hollywood promises to put on the mother of all marketing efforts... until next year, when it begins all over again.

The current schedule is impossibly overcrowded as studios begin their biannual game of chicken— inevitably, somebody will blink and shift their release date. In addition to the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings sequels, there will be a new high-octane animated film from Disney, Treasure Planet. Meanwhile, Pinocchio will be played out by flesh-and-blood actors, courtesy of human cartoon Roberto Benigni. Adults looking for a thrill can feast on Hannibal Lecter's return in Red Dragon, drill to the center of the earth in The Core or go where no man has gone before in Star Trek: Nemesis. Leonardo DiCaprio will go head to head against himself on Christmas Day in Catch Me if You Can and the long-awaited Gangs of New York. Meanwhile, highbrow movies like The Hours, About Schmidt, The Antwone Fisher Story and The Pianist will vie for Oscars. And the world's favorite spy, James Bond, returns with his latest title, Die Another Day .

For booksellers, the major question of the season is how many more books Harry and Frodo can sell. After all, there are already more than 70 million copies of the existing Harry Potter titles in the hands of American readers. "With Sorcerer's Stone the perceived wisdom was, 'what rock would somebody have to be under not to have heard of Harry Potter?' " said Scholastic senior v-p Michael Jacobs. "But we learned that the reach of the movie can still bring new people into the market." Jacobs was careful to add that there's no certainty there will be as impressive a bump with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, while stressing film's power to spark book-buying interest: "We sold over 100,000 Scooby-Doo novelizations on a property that already had very high awareness."

The holiday release, of course, allows Scholastic to take advantage of the gift-buying season. Last year, the company sold several hundred thousand Harry Potter hardcover box sets. This year, all four books will be available for the first time in a softcover gift set. Scholastic is also releasing a mass market edition of Chamber of Secrets, as it did with Sorcerer's Stone last year. "It gets us distribution into new places," explained Jacobs. That edition will feature new cover art designed to appeal to a slightly older audience. "It's a little less playful. More of a mystery," Jacobs said.

Del Rey is taking a similar approach, with a Tolkien box set and rack-size edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. To freshen up the mass market box set (750,000 were sold last year), Del Rey has created cover art based on the new film, and will ship 250,000 more this year. In addition, one million mass market copies of The Two Towers will hit the stores, along with half a million each for books one and three. The price of each single edition will rise a buck, to $7.99, though the box set will sell at a discount.

Houghton Mifflin, meanwhile, will print 250,000 re-covered trade paperback gift sets this season, after having sold 350,000 of them last year. The house will also produce 700,000 copies of its one-volume trade edition containing all three stories (collectively titled The Lord of the Rings), putting greater emphasis on the tie-in by featuring Ian McKellen as Gandalf on the cover. The omnibus sold 1.7 million copies last year after 13 printings.

Sales of the Rings trilogy have remained surprisingly robust in the seven months since the first film came out. "Box sets typically sell during the holidays," said Ballantine's v-p director of sales and marketing Anthony Ziccardi, "but right up to Father's Day our accounts were giving it prominent placement." While sales of The Fellowship of the Ring were strong leading up to the film's release last year, soon afterward it was The Two Towers that got a spike. "They've seen the movie, so now they want to read ahead to the next one," said Ziccardi. "We expect a similar spike for Return of the King after Two Towers comes out." Overall, sales of Fellowship of the Ring have dropped only 20% since the film's release.

Total 2001 sales for Tolkien-related publishing (including all Houghton Mifflin and Del Rey titles and ancillaries such as companion guides) surpassed 11 million copies before the first film came out. For 2002, year-to-date unit sales for the Houghton Mifflin titles alone total more than two million, even before the promotional run up to the next film. Clay Harper, Houghton Mifflin's director of Tolkien projects, believes the house has a chance to equal 2001 sales figures across formats: "Far more than with any property I've ever seen, people will read the paperback of Lord of the Rings and then trade up to the hardcover." Additionally, the DVD of Fellowship came out August 6, offering another opportunity to generate book-buying interest.

Harper believes the LOTR trilogy, which is now approaching its 50th anniversary, has endured in part because "you can reflect on the history of your own time in the characters. The Hobbits realize the world is larger and more frightening than they wanted to know, but they have to engage with it." That might speak to an American audience still wrestling with a new sense of vulnerability.

Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have allowed and, in fact, demanded that publishers nurture a deeper relationship with the books' audience. Beyond simple demographics, this evolution requires a greater sensitivity to audience needs. "The secret to marketing Harry Potter," said Scholastic's Jacobs, "is not to get in the way of the connection kids have to Rowling and Harry Potter's world. They have spoken very loudly that Rowling's vision and their own imagination is where the magic continues to happen." To that end, Scholastic created a Harry Potter area on its Web site that encourages creative responses from kids. The "Discussion Chamber" posts daily questions such as, "How would you use a Time Turner?" Answers from all over the world and across a surprisingly broad age range are posted the next day so participants can see their words broadcast on the Net.

Lord of the Rings Web sites are legion, most of them unofficial. Rather than shut down the hitchhikers, however, New Line reached out to more than 400 fan sites and capitalized on the free viral-marketing buzz. The official New Line site, meanwhile, invites viewers to "Join the Fellowship" and connect with "generations of more than 100 million people around the globe, in 40 different languages."

Inevitably, these sites become portals for merchandise. www.lordoftherings.net has an online store and links to other merchants. The Harry Potter home page (www.scholastic.com/harrypotter) announces upcoming editions and suggests other books as well. "Can't wait for Book 5?" one blurb asks, before suggesting four other titles to consider. As the release of Chamber of Secrets draws near and site traffic increases, the hope is to push sales across the board. "We want to keep that enthusiasm alive when the kids' imagination is wide open," Jacobs said. "There's a whole world of literature out there—new and old. A lot of classics have begun to sell better than ever."

Arriving well before the holiday rush, Thomas Harris's Red Dragon will be highly visible. In his third outing as Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins should breathe new life into an older title. (The first film version, 1986's Manhunter, was a commercial disappointment that didn't do much for the previous tie-in.) The best source of new readers may be "people who were in their teens when Silence of the Lambs came out," said Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of Bantam Dell. Over one million mass market tie-ins will be in stores to greet them.

There will be plenty of boyish adventure this season. Bond is back again in Die Another Day, which features a timely "axis-of-evil" villain from North Korea and an appearance by Madonna as a fencing instructor. As with the last few films, this adventure was written directly for the screen, so the novelization is entirely the product of the film. While the printing has not yet been set, past Bond novelizations have averaged 375,000 copies, according to Tom Colgan, executive editor at Berkley. Colgan also said that the release of a new Bond film also tends to spur an uptick in sales of the classic Bond books by Ian Fleming. Meanwhile, Abrams has a splashy coffee-table volume, The James Bond Legacy, which covers the 40-year history of the franchise.

Disney continues its trend toward Y-chromosome appeal with Treasure Planet, which has a trailer that looks as if it were shot by George Lucas. There are no musical numbers, though Goo Goo Dolls vocalist John Rzeznik lends a song. Alison Root, until recently publicity assistant for Random House Children's Books, said the tie-ins appeal across gender: "We see them in terms of other Disney animated films; they're family crowd-pleasers."

The Star Trek: Next Generation team makes their reported last outing in the 10th film of the long-running franchise: Star Trek: Nemesis. By all accounts, the crew is going out with a whiz-bang production and, for what it's worth, even-numbered sequels have always fared better. Star Trek/ Pocket Books will put out 50,000 copies of the novelization and hope that George Clooney doesn't burn up the Enterprise with release-date rival Solaris on December 13.

The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize– winning homage to Mrs. Dalloway, will undoubtedly receive a big push from Paramount when it appears in a limited release for Oscar consideration. Meanwhile, Picador is pushing out another 200,000 copies. "We think the movie will certainly expand the book's readership," said Christine Preston, Picador's director of publicity, "especially a movie with Oscar buzz and high-profile stars like Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep."

For the similarly star-laden adaptation of Janet Fitch's bestselling Oprah Book Club pick, White Oleander, Little, Brown and Back Bay Books worked with corporate sibling Warner Brothers to reach out to booksellers. When the studio took the same approach with The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (HarperPerennial), the book became a #1 bestseller when the film came out. The publisher will run off 245,000 copies to start. Little, Brown will also reissue 175,000 copies of Anita Shreve's The Weight of Water to accompany the screen version, which the author reportedly thinks is wonderful.

Leonardo DiCaprio, swoon of teenage girls the world 'round, makes his first screen appearance in two years, with two films scheduled for Christmas Day: Catch Me if You Can and the long-awaited Gangs of New York. Catch seems likely to spark not only because of Leo, co-star Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg, but because of its entertainingly inflammatory real-life subject, Frank Abagnale. Known as the youngest man ever to make the FBI's most-wanted list, con man Abagnale co-piloted a Pan Am jet, practiced law without a license and cashed more than $2.5 million in forged checks, all before he was 21. Today, Abagnale runs a successful business consulting with the feds (among others) on document fraud. Barbara Walters plans a one-hour special during fall sweeps, half on Abagnale and half on the film. "Frank is going to be the John Nash of 2002," said Charlie Conrad, executive editor at Broadway Books, which is publishing 150,000 tie-in editions of Abagnale's memoir. "Plus, DiCaprio should get us into the teenage market—teenagers love the spirit of this book."

The tie-in for the film version of oft-rescheduled Gangs of New York came out last October and has sold 75,000 copies. Thunder's Mouth Press expects to put out another 75,000 to coincide with the film's belated release. "The book has been a cult classic since it was first published in 1928 and the anticipation of the film has helped tremendously," said publisher Neil Ortenberg. The question is whether or not interest in one Leo movie will synergistically drive teen viewers to the next—a reaction that will be crucial if the period epic is to garner a large audience, since it will face steep competition from easier-to-digest titles.

Denzel Washington makes his directorial debut with The Antwone Fisher Story, the moving true account of a young man who comes to terms with his anger via the help of a Navy psychiatrist. HarperCollins has ordered up 75,000 tie-ins. Actor George Clooney also makes his directorial debut with the bizarre fictional story of real-life Gong Show host Chuck Barris's adventures as a CIA assassin in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It's anyone's guess if this one will fly, but with a cast that includes Clooney and Julia Roberts and a script by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), it's certainly possible. Talk Miramax will venture 75,000 copies to start.

Jack Nicholson is already generating Oscar buzz for his star turn in About Schmidt, Alexander Payne's (Election) adaptation of Louis Begley's novel of a man in his 60s who suddenly finds himself adrift. Certainly, Nicholson knows how to nail this role. It's also worth noting that legendary director Roman Polanski's adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist will arrive just after Christmas, though it may be a long shot for box-office success. The film took the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year and Picador will put out 50,000 new editions.

If this heterogeneous mix of titles holds a heartening message, it may be that a good number are driven by the unique voice of an author or protagonist. After a typically deafening summer movie season, the holidays just might bear gifts after all.