Sterling Jumps on 'Snakes' Bandwagon

by Rachel Deahl, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 8/22/2006

The marketing team at Sterling Publishers can see book-to-film connections in places most of us could not. They've proven this with their new unlikely tie-in, Snakes on a Sudoku. The August 18 spin on the titular Japanese puzzle game connects ever-so-loosely to this weekend's box office winner, Snake on a Plane, by featuring Sudoku grids with diagnolly connected boxes, or "snakes," slithering through the standard game board. (Or, as the house's markeing copy describes it, "replaces the traditional 3x3 squares with deadly s-s-s-s-snakes.") The idea for the title, which went to press for 40,000 copies and has, according to Sterling director of library and specialty marketing, Chris Vaccari, sold 1,000 copies in its first three days on the market, grew out of a joke conceived by one of the house's editors.

Francis Heaney, who wound up editing Snakes on a Sudoku, said he posted a snake-filled Sudoku grid on his blog "as a lark" on March 27. Inspired by the buzz the New Line feature was drumming up in the blogosphere—the movie's kitschy title coupled with its so-stupid-its-funny premise (in which deadly snakes are left on a plane to do away with a witness on board) created an pre-release frenzy—Heaney was caught off guard when his pop culture prank received a "great response." Then, after his "lark" got a mention in an April 14 Entertainment Weekly cover story about the film and its unexpected online fan base, Heaney and his colleagues started thinking more seriously about doing a book of snake Sudokus. "I suggested…that we could do a book of them, but thought it would be tight to get it out before the movie." Deadlines be damned, because Sterling managed to scrape together a licensing deal and enough snake-filled Sodukus to get their unusual addition to the SOAP (that's the invented acronym of the title, to you non fans) frenzy in front of readers in just enough time.