Cover Story
Tying in to Tintin
by Becky Clark
Books Division Marketing Director
Where were you in 2009? If you happened to be in a 7-Eleven, you might have come face-to-face with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The convenience store giant had partnered with Warner Brothers for a merchandising tie-in of Guy Ritchie’s blockbuster movie Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic characters were licensed into the service of 99-cent Go-Go Taquitos, their images looming over the slogan “Get a Clue.”
Movie merchandising licenses have blessed us with everything from “How Holmes Are You?” coffee sleeves to the Kung Fu Panda 2 Chia Pet. Alvin and the Chipmunks grace boxes of Kellogg’s Fruit Snacks, and the visage of Luke’s real father beckons on bags of Star Wars Vader’s Dark Side Roast Coffee.
Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin became the latest Hollywood blockbuster to spawn a merchandising frenzy. Licensing deals created a glut of official products, including Beanie Babies, jigsaw puzzles, keychains, and T-shirts.
Books play a big role in movie merchandising and promotion, and early on Little, Brown and Bantam locked up the official movie tie-in books for The Adventures of Tintin. But a host of other publishers have been able to capitalize on the movie’s market power by releasing titles about the intrepid boy reporter and his fox terrier, including JHU Press with Hergé, Son of Tintin. Such unofficial tie-in campaigns are crowded with competitors (do an Amazon search for Tintin and you’ll find more than 600 books), and they don’t always result in extra attention for the book. They also take a significant investment of lead time and marketing resources, not to mention flexibility.
Hoping to get swept up in the movie’s tidal wave of promotion , we fast-tracked our critical biography of Tintin’s creator to coincide with the movie’s North American release. Manuscript Editing and Design & Production colleagues shaved their schedules so that we could start shipping books in November. Our publicity campaign began in mid-September, well before the book was published. We sent uncorrected proofs to members of the media, along with Amazon’s Vine program, which exposes selected new titles to Amazon’s best customer reviewers.
Since its release, our book has reaped the benefit of the movie tie-in campaign. It was covered in the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and PRI’s The World. And it was featured in that crème de la crème of book reviews—The New York Times Book Review. Best of all, sales have been brisk.
Movie releases and the enormous publicity they generate can help scholarly publishers draw extra attention to serious works on popular culture. In this market, we have to be just as creative and aggressive—sometimes more so—than our trade counterparts.
Just don’t look for us in 7-Eleven.
