Doin' Dune Duty

Back in 1999, Brian Herbert, son of Dune-meister Frank Herbert, collaborated with Kevin J. Anderson to extend the classic SF series that has sold millions of copies since the first book's 1965 publication. Each book in the resulting trilogy—Dune: House Atreides; Dune: House Harkonnen; and Dune: House Corrino—hit the national charts; the three spent a combined 17 weeks on PW's charts. Now Herbert and Anderson have launched a second trilogy, whose first book, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, debuts today at #7 on our fiction list. A month-long promotional junket, which began in Seattle on the book's September 17 pub date, concludes in an atypical tour stop—Burnaby, British Columbia. (H.B. Senn, Tor's Canadian distributor, recognized the tremendous Dune fandom throughout Canada and recommended an event at Burnaby's Chapters Bookstore.) Tor's marketing campaign includes TV advertising on CNN, the SciFi channel and A&E's Open Book; print ads have run in Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle. The publisher reports 135,000 copies in print.

With reporting by Dick Donahue