Great white hype

An image from the website for The Raw Shark Texts, part of the book's massive marketing campaign. (Canongate)

For several weeks, novelist Steven Hall and his publishers have been playing games with me. First was the request, which arrived by e-mail, to take an online inkblot test (the results indicated a mild case of paranoia — and with what came next, no wonder). Then I received a typewritten letter in the mail with the ominous greeting, “First things first, stay calm.” It was sent to me by me, or at least, according to the signature, “The First Rachel Giese” and I advised myself to consult a Dr. Randle about my memory loss.

A few days later, yet another letter confirmed my membership in something called the Unspace Exploration Committee. That was followed by a message typed on a business card that read, “I need to speak to you,” and a telephone number. When I called, I got a recorded message from Dr. Randle advising me not to read any letters I might receive from myself and warning me not — “under any circumstances” — to read a book called The Raw Shark Texts.

That’s what the experts call “reverse psychology” and what book publishers call creative marketing. Of course I’m supposed to read The Raw Shark Texts — that’s the whole point of the letters, the website, the wiki, the upcoming book trailer starring Tilda Swinton, and the alternate reality game (start here and follow the clues).

Before it was even published, the wildly inventive novel by Steven Hall sparked a bidding frenzy — the 31-year-old first-time author has since signed 30 foreign rights deals. Naturally, a film adaptation is in the works. Publishers love to repeat the now-famous story of Nicole Kidman calling Hall and asking him to change the gender of the male hero, so that she could play the lead in the film. Hall wouldn’t budge and sold the book to Film Four instead. All this pre-publication buzz has made The Raw Shark Texts one of the year’s most hotly anticipated titles and it’s getting a massive global marketing push to match.

According to BookNet Canada, a not-for-profit agency that tracks the publishing industry, more than 60,000 new titles found their way to the shelves of Canadian bookstores last year, almost 14,000 of which were fiction books. In this increasingly competitive environment, a blockbuster success like The DaVinci Code or Harry Potter — with their sequels, special editions and spinoffs — can determine a publisher’s fortunes and reputation for years to come. Hall’s book is primed to be The Next Big Thing and the efforts to build enthusiasm and awareness of the novel represents a new level of sophistication in book marketing. In addition to the early publicity tease, the young author made the rounds of book fairs and bookseller conferences in the fall of 2006, shaking more hands than a politician seeking re-election.

Novelist Steven Hall. (HarperCollins Canada)

HarperCollins and the book’s other publishers are counting on the novel’s ambidexterity — it combines elements of science fiction, romance, thriller, adventure and mystery — to attract a broad audience. To sum it up briefly: a 20-something named Eric Sanderson wakes up one day in a house in England with no memory of his past. By following a series of clues, he soon discovers that he has lost the woman he loved and that he’s being pursued through an alternate world of ideas and concepts by a giant shark made of words, who is trying to devour his memory.

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, blurbed that the heady, reference-stuffed novel is “the bastard love child of The Matrix, Jaws and The DaVinci Code,” and a British critic quipped, “just when you thought it was safe to go back in the metatext.” The book is a pop culture gumbo of allusions and inspirations: there are nods to authors Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino and David Mitchell, along with filmmakers Christopher Nolan (Memento) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), among many, many others.

“The whole style and tone of the book reflects what’s going on in Eric’s brain,” says Hall in his pudding-thick Manchester accent, over the phone from his current home in Hull, England. “It’s a strange magpie’s nest of literary and film references.”

Hall wears his influences proudly. “To try and create something unique, untouched by any other influences, is impossible. Even if you could do that, it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone, anyway. The exciting thing about writing now is that most people now understand post-modernism. Thirty years ago these ideas might have been difficult, and now we have The Simpsons. We can play around, building a story out of parts of familiar ones. The way to be unique now is finding a new angle to something familiar — things that you almost recognize turned completely on its head.”

HarperCollins brought Hall to Toronto last November to meet with booksellers and plan the novel’s marketing strategy, something the company rarely does with international authors. Publicist Miranda Snyder arranged a book club with a handpicked group of Toronto hipsters, who read an unproofed version of the novel and then met with the author at a trendy boutique to discuss it. “It’s not that often that you come across a big idea at the heart of a book that’s also a page-turner,” Snyder says. “I think that underpins a lot of the excitement about the book.”

(HarperCollins Canada)

The hope is that word-of-mouth buzz from Generation YouTube/Facebook — which is not typically a big book-buying demographic — would make the novel a hit. “All of the creative brainstorming sessions we’ve had involved deconstructing the book and [finding ways to] get people who might not necessarily go to bookstores to [go out and] pick the book up,” says marketing manager Shelley Tangney.

In the U.S., where the book was released on April 2 by Canongate U.S. (an imprint of Grove/Atlantic), the initial print run was 100,000, a huge number for a boutique house. HarperCollins Canada, which publishes the book on April 21, won’t release its print run or sales numbers, but Snyder says The Raw Shark Texts has “a robust print run for the Canadian market.”

“In terms of the length of the campaign, I can’t think of another title that we’ve worked on for such a long time in advance,” says Steve Osgoode, director of digital marketing and business development. “It doesn’t have the biggest marketing budget, but is there a tremendous amount of creative energy being expended on this book? Without question.”

Much of that creative energy has come from Hall himself. The visual artist-turned writer had always envisioned the book as having a life beyond the page. The book’s “nice little tricks and traps,” as Hall calls them, include a 50-page flip-book in the middle of the novel depicting the approaching shark, chapter titles that allude to other books, special editions with extra chapters, a limited number of books printed with coloured ink, and a character from Hall’s next novel-in-progress who appears only in the Greek version of The Raw Shark Texts. Even the title is a game — a play on “Rorschach tests.”

“How you read the book says something about who you are,” Hall says.

An image from the website for The Raw Shark Texts. (Canongate)

Those tricks and traps have lent themselves to the book’s unique marketing campaign. “I do love the idea that it blurs the boundary between the book and real life. It’s been fantastic worldwide group effort.” Hall points to influences like the campaign for the film Snakes on a Plane, which used its website to commission music for the soundtrack, solicit comments on the script and sign people up to receive a special voicemail message from star Samuel L. Jackson, urging them to see the movie.

Hall sees nothing crass in mining the book’s plot for marketing gimmicks. For him, it’s just another aspect of the book’s central conceit. “You can just read it as a thriller, or a love story, or a novel about loss. And that’s great. But the more active the reader is, the more they’ll get out of it.

“I kind of like that there’s area where the [art and the marketing] meet. I mean, a book is always a book. You open it at page one and close it at the end. It’s never wholly integrated into anything else. For me, the whole fact that there is marketing is an excuse to create more puzzles and games. Instead of harassing people with info they don’t want, it’s almost seeding things that they’ll be excited to find.”

The Raw Shark Texts is published by HarperCollins Canada.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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