The Mass-Marketing of Jean Auel

Browsers in 4,000 American bookstores these last few weeks may have mistaken the satin, six-foot-long banners that say “IT’S COMING!” for the announcement of a major religious phenomenon.

On the other hand, Jean M. Auel’s millions of fans might very well view the publication of “The Plains of Passage,” the latest in Auel’s “Earth’s Children” series, as a spiritual event of its own.

“It’s a devout following,” said Andrew K. Martin, vice president and director of publicity at Crown, Auel’s hardcover publisher. “It’s not a cult, exactly, but it’s just huge, and it’s intense. Jean is so loved by her readers.”

Auel’s fans are so devoted, in fact, that they regularly name children after Ayla, her Ice Age heroine, and are so persistent that they’ve called Martin’s office day in and day out for years asking for progress reports on the new book. Finally, Martin was forced to take refuge in a form letter that said, “Dear Reader, Thank you for your inquiry regarding the fourth novel in the celebrated ‘Earth’s Children’ saga. As of this date, author Jean M. Auel is still at work. . . .”

The success of Auel’s previous three novels combined with this intense level of interest surrounding “The Plains of Passage” prompted Crown to schedule a massive 1.3-million first-run hardcover printing. “There probably have never been higher expectations for a novel,” said Chip Gibson, Crown’s associate publisher and marketing vice president. Echoing this optimism, Stuart Applebaum, vice president of Bantam, Auel’s paperback publisher, called “The Plains of Passage” “perhaps the most anticipated popular novel in the last five years.”

Crown’s “major six-figure” marketing campaign resembles a crusade. Martin, Gibson and others at Crown “sat around to hash out” a marketing drive that would run on “two or three phases,” Martin said. Martin said the strategy, planned with military precision, is “all geared to answer that question that has been going on for five years--’When is the next Jean M. Auel?’ It’s saying, ‘Get ready, folks, it’s here.’ ”

First, the “IT’S COMING!” banners went up in stores in mid-September. On Oct. 3, when “The Plains of Passage” arrived in bookstores, they were replaced by satin banners of the same proportions that said “IT’S HERE!” For Phase Two, along with full-page advertisements in most major newspapers. Crown has teamed with Bantam to create a floor display with Auel’s three previous books.

“They will be selling in hardcover right alongside the Bantam paperback,” Martin said.

Finally, the third phase will spotlight Auel, the author who never wrote a word before she was 40, and who turned down a top-paying job with a bank to become what Newsweek once called “the late-Pleistocene Harold Robbins.” Auel, 54, will tour for a month-and-a-half, autographing books in two stores per city. In addition, Crown plans a 30-city satellite tour.

“We really started out trying to keep it down,” Martin said of the author’s publicity expedition.

Auel is not the only author, of course, who has a fanatical following. Carol Schneider, vice president for publicity for Random House, says fans of James Michener and Robert Ludlum are prone to call and say, “My father’s in the hospital dying. Couldn’t you just get it to me ahead of time so he can read it before he goes?”

And sizeable publicity blitzes have also been seen with best-selling authors such as Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel and Stephen King. Along with Auel, said Greg Mowry, associate publicity director at William Morrow, “those seem to be the four authors who are impervious to changes in the marketplace. They’re the ones you can go to the bank on.”

But Clancy, King and Steel, who publish books on an almost yearly schedule, are less likely to hit the interview trail, and are almost certain not to be seen signing books twice a day for a month-and-a-half. By contrast, the publicity drive designed for Auel, Mowry said, is “what I call a typical, glitzy mass-market paperback approach to a hardback.”

In the Auel offensive, “You’re seeing the mass-marketization of hardcover,” Mowry said. “It’s totally mass-market. It’s a campaign designed to reach the widest audience.”

The mass-market approach makes sense, said Applebaum, of Bantam, because “Jean is selling hardcovers in mass-market quantities. Therefore, the techniques that her publishers are putting forward are appropriate to the consumer demand.”

In any case, said Mary Ann Palumbo, the vice president for advertising, promotion and publicity at NAL, “I think more and more hardcover houses are doing things that paperback publishers do.” Palumbo was responsible for what Greg Mowry called the “fabulous launch” in paperback of Ken Follett’s “The Pillars of the Earth.”

In the case of Auel’s publicity extravaganza, Bantam’s Stuart Applebaum said, “to not do it would be like not crossing the street” to get to the other side. Logic might suggest that such an enormous promotion might not be necessary for an author whose readers have been calling and writing about this book for the last half-decade, but as Applebaum said, “It’s not so much that it’s necessary, it’s almost a reader service in this case.”

In some ways, this kind of effort also may be a publisher’s service. “Everyone else wants to lure these authors away,” Morrow’s Mowry said. Publishers who stage lavish and innovative publicity programs “are protecting their investments.”

Auel, Crown’s investment, is using every last minute before the cross-country stump begins to research her next books at the caves of Lascaux in southern France. Mother of five, grandmother of 14, Auel retains “a complete lack of affectation or pretension,” Martin said.

“She’s definitely not of the glamour set,” he said. “She’s a real celebrity of the people, of the masses.”

And “masses” is exactly the quantity of copies of “The Plains of Passage” that Martin expects to sell.

“It’s going to be incredible,” Martin said in a voice that was full of, yes, anticipation.