Have Joystick, Will Read?

A discussion about reeling in new readers inevitably starts with a lament: there's a lot more competition for a consumer's time these days than ever before. Younger people in particular have a range of recreational temptations besides books, from video games to DVDs to instant messaging.

Some publishers have a deceptively simple solution: instead of waiting for the mountain to come to us, they say, we should be incorporating the appetites for other media into our publishing programs. To some, it is a compromise, a surrendering of the staunch principles that publishing allegedly requires. But to those practicing it, this could be the best hope for keeping people reading.

Perhaps the most ambitious of these programs within mainstream publishing is a line launched by Del Rey executive editor Steve Saffel. Saffel's idea is to take the videogames and action figures that fantasy fans love and meld them with traditional publishing methods.

In a partnership with Microsoft's Xbox, the company is producing a number of titles that tie in to and appeal to the players of these wildly popular games. Gamers, of course, traditionally gobble up strategy guides and anything else that will help them bump up their scores. But these books are a different breed—they are meant for game players but have little to do with actually playing the game. The Ballantine imprint works closely with developers to first locate and then develop a backstory that will complement the game. It's a tricky goal—incorporate the game too much, and gamers will grow impatient (why read about characters when you can shoot them?); but stray too far, and gamers will wonder why they need to read a book about it (why read about characters when you can shoot them?).

But Saffel is optimistic about the line's potential with a whole new class of customers. "Moviegoers are the most likely profile to cross over with book readers," he admits. "With the game, you're more narrowly focused—but you're more narrowly focused to a million people." So far, the company has published four Xbox titles—two for the bestselling survival game Halo, and one each for Brute Force and Crimson Skies.

Saffel thinks that the imagined worlds of video games and literature go hand-in-hand. He believes that what the two have in common is richness of story, not slickness of format. Enter Mage Knight, a fantasy game that uses action figures (in which "the Black Powder Rebels began a bloody revolution using dwarven-forged weapons"). Even though the game is joystick-free, it is highly popular among younger customers, and Del Rey has signed up no fewer than five Mage-related books.

The risk with projects like these is that sometimes you're dealing with forces much larger than publishing, forces whose schedules may not be particularly sensitive to yours. In other words, sometimes you're dealing with Microsoft. While the novelizations for Crimson Skies and Brute Force are already out, the games have been delayed until 2003. Said Saffel, "Halo came out almost simultaneously. So it will be an interesting experiment to see if it works."

That such programs exists within Random House speaks loudly about the urgency mainstream publishing feels about bringing in younger readers. These customers are unlikely to pick up many of the house's other books, but Random takes a refreshingly long-term view: that guy in the dorm room down the hall may not be buying William Styron now, but if we get him used to reading for pleasure, he'll be a lot more likely to buy that kind of book 10 years from now.

If some publishers are using video games to capture nonbook consumers, others have an eye on a different visual format: the DVD. Publishers have long included audio, but Andrews McMeel took it a step further. The coffee-table retrospective Stay Tuned by Joe Garner is packaged with a DVD in addition to two CDs. The book is a collection of passages and images about the greatest moments on TV, from Nixon's "Checkers" speech to the U.S. Olympic hockey team's victory over the U.S.S.R. The idea follows in the footsteps of the successful And the Crowd Goes Wild, a Sourcebooks project that Garner also worked on that included audio as well as text and photographic recollections of some of the greatest games ever played.

Complementing the prose descriptions of Stay Tuned with audio and video, says the publisher, not only enriches the package but widens the reader base. "You can't do a book like this in 2002 without adding a DVD," explains v-p of sales and marketing Hugh Andrews. "We're fulfilling our obligation to our core readers, but we really want to bring new audiences to bookstores." He says he thinks both the multimedia format and the subject matter will help accomplish this.

With permissions-heavy projects like this, price may be an issue (the book reportedly did not fly off the shelves at $50). But Andrews McMeel may have set an example for an experiment that will become refined as more try it. After all, the cost of actually producing DVDs is minimal, and there are vast archives from which these compilations might come. The right kind of project, packaged correctly, can appeal to the many consumers who live in the 44% of households that don't buy even one book over the course of a year. With so many to target, it seems that no amount of multimedia can be too much.