When a book’s only mystery is its author

When it was released in June, John Twelve Hawks’ “The Traveler” seemed an obvious summer smash, a highly publicized, high-tech thriller cited by the New York Times as “page-turningly swift” and also praised in the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere.

But the book didn’t stay long on bestseller lists, failing to crack the Times’ top 10, and it’s now falling off entirely.

An author tour might have helped, but the strategy that got “The Traveler” so much attention also limited the publisher’s ability to keep the momentum going: There was no “author.” John Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym for a writer who allegedly “lives off the grid” and is unknown even to his publisher, Doubleday.

“Yes, I’m disappointed it has not sold at a stronger level,” says Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group. “But I’m thrilled we put as much effort as we did into this book.”

Rubin is still hopeful that paperback sales will be strong. He also notes that “The Traveler,” which had an initial printing of just under 190,000, is the first of a planned trilogy, meaning that it will have time to build an audience.

But the novel’s disappointing start illustrates the risks and advantages of having an unknown author.

With luck and the right story, an anonymously written book can seem like a secret everyone is dying to learn, a book that sells itself. Otherwise, the publisher has to depend on the slow, uncertain process of reviews and word of mouth.

“I still think our campaign worked to our advantage,” Rubin says. “There is no guarantee that with an author we would have gotten as much publicity.”

Countless books have been published anonymously or pseudonymously, notably Henry Adams’ political satire, “Democracy.”

A well-known recent example is “Primary Colors,” the fictionalized story of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign that sold and sold based on the public’s obsession with how the writer (later revealed as journalist Joe Klein) seemed to know so much about the Clintons.

“A book with an anonymous author has to have the sense of an expose, or of titillation,” says Dan Menaker, editor of “Primary Colors” and now executive editor-in-chief at the Random House Publishing Group.

“I had never collected a royalty check in my life, and I didn’t expect to get one for ‘Primary Colors,’ ” Klein says.

“A lot of it was purely fictional, speculation on my part. I figured the reaction from the White House was that whoever wrote this thing had no idea what the Clintons were all about. Then, shockingly, people in the White House started accusing each other of having written it. That reaction was what really set if off.”

Most “anonymous” books are either erotica for which authors prefer to keep their identities hidden, or nonfiction books on controversial subject matter. A recent bestseller was “Imperial Hubris,” a critique by an anonymous CIA agent (later identified as Michael Scheuer) of the government’s Middle East policy.

Other anonymous books include “The Hollywood Rules,” a 2000 publication for which a group of filmmakers offered blunt advice on succeeding in the industry. In 2003, Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, published “The Terrorist Hunter.” The author -- later revealed as Rita Katz, executive director of the terrorism research group SITE Institute -- documented her time among Islamic groups.

“I think putting it out anonymously backfired for us,” says Ecco Press publisher Dan Halpern. “It hurt our sales because people want a name. They wanted a real person.”

Menaker says that some books have such revealing information that keeping an author’s identity secret could have helped sales. He mentions a popular book from last year, “Against All Enemies,” in which former counterterrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke claimed that the Bush administration did not do enough to protect the country from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“I think you would have had a lot of people wondering, ‘Who can this be telling us what the president was doing before Sept. 11?’ I can’t imagine there wouldn’t have been an intense interest in the identity of the author,” Menaker says.

“I think if Clarke’s book had been anonymous, it wouldn’t have done anything,” Halpern says. “So much of the success of that book had to do with his character. He was this crusty guy with great credentials criticizing the Bush administration.

“That book wouldn’t have sold without his media appearances.”