They’re All Hoping the Public Will Bite

The shark scenes, though powerful at first, get repetitive.

--Doubleday Editor Tom Congdon, critiquing a first novel in 1972

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It sounds like one of the worst judgment calls in publishing history. But as he worked on the manuscript by a young writer 25 years ago, Congdon was eerily prophetic.

The author was Peter Benchley, the book was “Jaws,” and during one stretch in the summer of 1975--soon after Steven Spielberg’s hit movie was released--the paperback version sold 6 million copies in four months. It remains a marketing record.

Congdon’s careful editing is seen now as a model: He guided Benchley’s vision of a giant shark terrorizing beach-goers into a tightly paced book that gripped millions of readers. And the editor was more clairvoyant than he knew: The gory attacks that startled readers back then have indeed become repetitive--a tired if not cliched theme in beach fiction.

Since “Jaws” first appeared, there have been dozens of shark-related titles, yet none has come close to equaling the original. You’d think the idea might be dead in the water by now, but New York publishers--like Hollywood moguls--never met an idea they didn’t try to copy over and over . . . and over.

Especially if it’s their own idea. This summer, the folks at Doubleday are sticking their toe in shark-infested waters once again, hoping for another big bite out of your wallet. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the bookstore, they have high hopes for a first novel by an unknown writer that stars a monster from the deep, an alcoholic hero, an idealistic scientist and, well, you get the picture.

“Meg” by Steve Alten is a Jurassic rehash of “Jaws,” with a 60-foot prehistoric predator feasting on bathers from San Diego to San Francisco. It could, like “Jaws,” benefit from a blockbuster summer marketing campaign and a big-budget movie further on down the road. But there the similarities end. The book world has changed dramatically in the 25 years since “Jaws,” and publishers prowling for summer profits now play by radically different rules.

For example, Universal Pictures acquired film rights to Benchley’s novel the old-fashioned way. Soon after Doubleday agreed to publish “Jaws,” editors began spreading the word about the book and Hollywood came calling.

Richard Zanuck paid Benchley $175,000 for the rights and a screenplay. More important, he and other executives helped actively promote the book with a national tour of their own, long before it came to the screen. They also accelerated production, ensuring that the movie came out a year after the book and right in the middle of a huge paperback sale.

“That was unusual, but it made a lot of sense for them to do this,” recalls Stewart Applebaum, vice president of Bantam Books, which published the paperback edition of Benchley’s book and will do the same with “Meg” next year. “They were so committed to building awareness of the book while the movie was in production, and in the end it paid off for them and us. The timing was perfect.”

Sales records tell the story: “Jaws” was published in hardcover in January 1974 and sold about 250,000 copies, says Arlene Friedman, Doubleday’s president and publisher. When the paperback came out a year later, America couldn’t get enough. Three million copies were sold in the first four months of the year, and when the movie came out in June, another 6 million sold through October.

“People think today that a movie makes a summer book, but it was exactly the opposite with ‘Jaws,’ ” says Sam Vaughn, who was Doubleday’s president and publisher in 1974. “This was a book that set the marketing pace, and Hollywood followed.”

Today, the tables have turned. Doubleday was eager to acquire “Meg” but had to wait in line. Like so many authors, Alten shopped his manuscript around to Hollywood studios before inking a book deal. The strategy was to sell movie rights, build industry buzz and then hit up the book world for a big advance. It worked like a charm.

Disney paid nearly $1 million for the rights, based on 100 pages of manuscript. Armed with that news, Alten’s agent, Ken Atchity, began circulating the draft in New York, and Bantam Doubleday Dell agreed to pay the unpublished author $2.1 million for “Meg” and an as-yet-untitled second novel.

“We’re not the slightest bit surprised anymore when we hear of a movie sale for a book first,” Friedman says. “We know [agents] are just following the trends and trying to get publishers interested before we even read the book. They wait for us, the suckers, to come in with the big money at the end, and we do. We do it every time.”

Will the Disney movie feed into the summer marketing stream as Spielberg’s did for “Jaws”? It’s hard to tell, Friedman says. There’s no guarantee when the film will come out, and certainly no indication that Disney will be heavily promoting “Meg” as a book. All the publishers know for sure, in fact, is that Bantam Books will put out a paperback edition next year.

“We’ll have the hardcover this summer, the paperback next year and possibly a third round with the movie when it comes out,” Friedman says. “Hopefully you get three times at bat with a book, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”

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For now, Doubleday’s main task is to get “Meg” into the stores. Yet it’s more complicated and financially risky than when “Jaws” first appeared on sales racks. The marketing of a big summer book today is driven by different assumptions than it was 25 years ago.

It’s hard to remember, but when Benchley’s novel appeared, American bookselling was dominated by relatively small, independent bookstores. There were few large chains to speak of, and the process of getting your newly published titles to market relied as much on human contact as anything else.

“You had the notion then that if the publisher’s sales representatives said to the store, ‘You should buy X copies of this book,’ then the store would buy that many copies,” says Jackie Everly, Doubleday’s executive marketing director. “The stores, in turn, told customers to buy it.”

In those days, hardcover books were not discounted as heavily as they are today, so paperbacks sold in greater numbers. It was not unusual in the 1970s for such books as “The Godfather,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Jaws” to sell 9 million to 12 million paperback copies, especially in the wake of popular movies.

For “Meg” to join that elite company, the book will have to navigate more treacherous waters. Nowadays, big chains call the shots, and there is feverish competition to fill shelf space in the lucrative summer months. With deep discounting more common now, hardcovers have become less expensive, and publishers rely on them more than paperbacks for big sales.

When Doubleday told Barnes & Noble or Borders about “Meg,” the chains already knew about it from industry buzz, and their sophisticated marketing departments already had made their own calculations about how many copies to order. Bookselling has become much more businesslike, and the human factor has little or nothing to do with the ultimate sale.

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Are American beach-goers ready for yet another shark book? Then as now, the key to summer success is a tricky combination of inventive publicity and that indefinable something that connects with a mass market audience.

It’s easy to treat all the people involved with Benchley’s book like geniuses, but Friedman recalls that as a young editor with Doubleday in 1975, she wrote a memo saying the book might sell a million copies. More than 10 million copies later, she is the first to suggest that luck plays a huge role.

Looking back, Doubleday’s publicity campaign for Benchley’s book was strong but hardly unique. Like other authors, he went on tour and made TV appearances. Airplanes pulled “Jaws” banners over New York beaches and the book’s cover--a woman stalked by a shark--became a potent marketing tool.

The key element, however, was that Benchley’s tale took root in a relatively uncluttered media culture. Back then, there were no CNNs, MTVs, VCRs and www.coms to compete for an American’s leisure hours. To be sure, there was competition from other summer books and movies, but it was a simpler time.

“ ‘Jaws’ ’ name recognition in our society was simply unbelievable,” Applebaum says. “People who had not read a book since ‘Tom Sawyer’ in grade school were picking up that book.”

The excitement grew and continued to grow. Benchley’s thriller was a sensation for 10 months in 1975--which may be the most telling difference between its world and our own.

No matter how popular a movie or book might be today, it’s hard to imagine one media product dominating America’s imagination for most of a year. Attention spans are too fleeting, and the competition from The Next Big Thing is too great for such unchallenged dominance in the marketplace.

Consider the new playing field: Doubleday, a proud, independent company at the time it published “Jaws,” was gobbled up in 1986 by Bertelsmann, a German media giant. Today, Bantam Doubleday Dell is part of a conglomerate that also records music, makes videos, markets digital television and manufactures compact discs. Books are but one element of the company’s global mix.

That internal competition mirrors the larger marketplace in which “Meg” must hunt for profits. In the summer of 1997, beach-goers can bring lots of toys with them on vacation: Walkmen, cell phones, laptops, CD players, video cameras, video games . . . and books. How do you carve out a niche for summer fiction?

“The trick,” Everly says, “is reaching people in the summer . . . at the beach, on holiday, all over the place. You have to connect your advertising and promotion with them and go where they are.”

It means placing books in little resort shops as well as in big-city chains. Airplane rope tows still generate visibility on California and New York beaches, and publicity on TV and radio remain crucial. These days, there’s practically no difference between the marketing of summer books and summer movies.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, the book business has gradually become very much like the movie business,” Friedman says. “Particularly in the way we fashion our titles for summer like they do in their summer releases. The books are light--they’re popcorn. They’re fun and they’re fast.”

They’re also risky. “Meg” got some positive early reviews, but the major word of mouth has yet to begin. For every critic who finds something new in the story of a prehistoric shark, there are others who dismiss the whole idea.

You can imagine their disbelief that someone is still trying to market this stuff. As a shrewd observer once wrote: “The shark scenes, though powerful at first, get repetitive.”