Viking UK Goes Serial for 'Dream Eaters'

by Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 1/29/2007

What do you do when a highly anticipated, costly book flops in a foreign country before you've published it locally? If you're Viking UK, you come up with a wildly different marketing approach. The British imprint, which is releasing Gordon Dahlquist's U.S. under-performer Glass Books of the Dream Eaters—it has sold just 21,000 copies in the States, according to Nielsen BookScan (see p. 36)—created a pre-pub serialization offer to lure early readers and build some hype for the book's traditional laydown later this week.

Pulling a page from Dickens, the 768-page novel, set in Victorian London, was initially offered to English readers in segments in October. Viking sold 5,000 subscriptions online at www.glassbooks. co.uk for £25 ($49)—a jump from the £16.99 list price—and readers received one chapter a week for 10 weeks. After the first chapter, which was released digitally—and at no charge—the installments were published as individually bound printed books. Viking concentrated on online and alternative venues for publicity for the serialization, and is promoting the hardcover through literary magazines and newspapers. That the book might have more appeal to a European audience, especially a British one (given its setting), is not something that escaped Viking, said Dahlquist's agent, Danny Baror.

The U.K. hardcover has a vastly different look than the U.S. one—in addition to a new cover, the book also features editorial add-ons like illustrations and a character chart. "The idea was to create scarcity value pre-publication," said Venetia Butterfield, publishing director of Viking UK. "We wanted to create an extraordinary buzz so when the publication date hit, there is an immediate demand for the book." Dream Eaters has an announced first printing of 30,000 in the U.K.

—with reporting by Lynn Andriani