Publishing Puzzle: Decoding the Sudoku Glut

by Steven Zeitchik and Michael Rose, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 7/22/2005

The sudoku books just keep on coming. The number of compilations of the popular--and inexpensive to publish--Japanese puzzle is climbing above a half-dozen, with publishers announcing new volumes seemingly daily.

Sudoku, if you haven't heard, is a genre of puzzles that uses numbers and pattern recognition; it's crosswords without the factoidal information. The NY Post and USA Today are among the American papers featuring them regularly, picking up on the English craze. Given the low cost and ease-of-turnaround of a sudoku book, the trend has been a boon for small houses, who can jump in with the big boys. Overlook and Wiley's For Dummies have books, and Newmarket, Harper and SMP's Griffin will all have books later this summer. By September stores will be filled with them.

All the books include puzzles, of course, and many have instructions and tips, which is what houses say differentiates them. Michael Mepham, who's kind of the Will Shortz of England (he edits the puzzles in the Daily Telegraph and was editing sudoku books years ago) has three volumes being pubbed here by Overlook, after Peter Mayer came across the puzzle in England. And Shortz himself is getting involved—he's got a book coming out from Griffin this summer.

Meanwhile, HarperResource will publish Wayne Gould, who edits the puzzles for Murdoch sister firm NY Post (and who by designing a computer program to create the things is sort of its godfather). Wiley's doing a Dummies. Newmarket has imported three books from the U.K., two adult and one for children; Esther Margolis says that her ears perked up because "Addiction and obsession are the two words I kept hearing." And perhaps the biggest surprise so far is an unlikely import from the U.K.'s Harriman House, which has been the most consistent on Amazon's bestseller list.

But while the publishers talk about strong retail interest, some indie bookstores seemed hesitant. The Tattered Cover's Nancy Hague and Hastings' Ed White said their stores hadn't taken a strong position. "It's tricky to say one is different from another with a number puzzle," admits Overlook publicist John Mark Boling. Publishers are simply hoping there's enough interest for anything sudoku that it fills the grid.