PW: A Mass Market Breakout

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A Mass Market Breakout
Bridget Kinsella -- 8/7/00
Bantam takes an unusual route to help push
a romance writer into suspense

Three full-length titles
from a romance writer
to hit the stores
back to back
to back this fall

In Kay Hooper, Bantam thinks it has another Lisa Gardner, Iris Johansen or Tami Hoag on its hands. Before these three superstars of suspense made the hardcover bestseller lists, each had a faithful following as paperback romance writers. Then, as their work crept into darker themes and increased in complexity, Bantam decided to break them out, which traditionally means a big push and leap into hardcoverdom. Not so with Hooper.
Just when Bantam thinks Hooper has written her best work to date, Stealing Shadows, it is snubbing the hardcover and going for a breakout in mass market instead. And it is using what Bantam president and publisher Irwyn Applebaum called the "bing, bang, boom" approach, with not one, not two, but three new full-length suspense novels by Hooper this fall. Following the release of Stealing Shadows in September will be Hiding in the Shadows in October and Out of the Shadows in November, creating a mass market "thrillogy."

"With a new author you hope to sell 50,000 in hardcover, and that's with a real push," said Applebaum, "as opposed to the ten times and more that we will get out with Stealing Shadows." Bantam is printing 600,000 copies of the initial title in the trilogy, a figure that Applebaum said was based on pre-pub orders. "We fought the prevailing idea where we think hardcover is the Holy Grail," he continued. "In the end, even John Grisham sells more copies in paperback than in hardcover."

Bantam went straight to the booksellers with their somewhat nontraditional breakout strategy by flooding the market with advance reader's copies of Stealing Shadows this spring. "The response has been phenomenal," said Barb Burg, Bantam's director of publicity. "Everybody thinks it's a big thing."

Susan Wasson, a bookseller at Bookworks in Albuquerque, told PW that she has read Hooper since she was a romance writer in Bantam's Loveswept line. She said she loved Stealing Shadows and thinks the work shows how Hooper has matured as a writer. "I think she has taken that big step to the next level," said Wasson. "I think there is more depth and everything is more fleshed out."

When Hooper's editor Nita Taublib read Stealing Shadows, she said she immediately noticed a certain shift in the writing. "Kay's unusual in her ability to write many different kinds of things," she told PW. On Hooper's journey from romance to suspense, she dabbled in mystery and what Taublib called "modern-day Victoria Holt with sex." In Stealing Shadows Taublib said all of the facets of Hooper's writing connected. "When she wrote this book everything clicked," she added.

At the time she delivered the manuscript Hooper had a five-book contract with Bantam, but Applebaum said the house thought the new work was so good that it asked the author to write two more with the same characters right away. In just a little more than a year Hooper wrote the three books. "She's strong enough to publish in hardcover," said Applebaum, "but we would never reach as many people as quickly as we can in mass market. And we're doing it back to back to back."

Wasson and other booksellers told PW that the three-hit approach in paperback would go over well with readers, especially readers coming to Hooper's work for the first time. "It's a wonderful idea because when somebody finds an author that they really like, usually it's a whole year for the next hardcover to come out, and that's a long time to wait," she said. There are other advantages to publishing in mass market. "It's easier to try something new at $7.99 than at $24.99," said Wasson. "Our mass market mystery section sells an incredible number of books."

With the Shadows trilogy, Bantam hopes to drastically increase the size of Hooper's audience. Several years ago Bantam tried publishing Hooper in hardcover beginning with Amanda but did not see any significant growth in her sales. "With this unique approach we hope to reach the broadest audience possible and put her in the front of all kinds of stores. We can accomplish that by publishing her at the top of the paperback list for three consecutive months," said Applebaum. "We expect that she will develop into a hardcover author of suspense," he added. But for now Bantam is betting that its mass market strategy will generate the most word of mouth for Hooper. "Our goal is to bring our authors of popular fiction to the widest-distributed audience possible. The format is not the crucial issue."
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