St. Martin’s Expands KenKen Publishing Program

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 2/26/2009 1:51:00 PM

Earlier this month, the New York Times added a new puzzle, kenken, to its daily paper. It was the first new puzzle the paper had introduced since the 1950s. And one U.S. publisher is poised to take advantage of the increased interest. St. Martin’s has already published seven kenken books, with 300,000 copies in print, and it has another three coming in April.

St. Martin’s associate publisher Lisa Senz said that with the Times now carrying kenken, the house sees an opportunity. “Sales of the books in the markets where a daily newspaper carries the puzzle are more than double that of our typical book sales for that market.” The Times features kenken in the newspaper Monday through Saturday and on NYTimes.com. So far about 30 newspapers across the country run kenken puzzles, as well as Reader's Digest. Kenken shares some properties with sudoku; as Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz explains, “Each is a pure logic challenge in which numbers are filled in the squares of a grid. Unlike sudoku, though, in which the numbers act solely as symbols (letters or pictures would work as well), kenken requires arithmetic.”

St. Martin’s exclusively released the first seven kenken books in the U.S., edited by Shortz, beginning in October 2008. St. Martin’s originally had three more books scheduled for later in the summer, but it moved them to the spring to meet what it expects will be a greater demand.