Salon exclusive: The behind-the-scenes story of the readers and booksellers who launched the Hunger Games franchise
Jennifer Lawrence in "The Hunger Games" (Credit: Dakota Nicole Photography)
“You don’t know how many times I’ve watched that thing,” said Caitlin, 10, about the trailer for “The Hunger Games,” a movie based on the first of three dark, brutal, bestselling novels by Suzanne Collins. A boy at her school told her she had to read the first book, and after that, “My mom says I started a revolution,” passing the books from one classmate to another. Now they’re all obsessed. Caitlin’s grandmother (a fan as well) made her a replica of the survival-gear-stuffed backpack that the book’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen, nabs at the beginning of a life-and-death competition set in a bleak future America. Caitlin and her closest friends talk about “The Hunger Games” several times a day, have nicknamed each other after the characters and are deep in plans to make their own Flip camera video of the book. When the Hollywood version comes out on Friday, they’ll be there, celebrating Caitlin’s birthday by catching the late-night opening at a San Francisco theater. The only other movie she’s even been close to this excited about is “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.”
The Hunger Games franchise, with Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role, aims for a spot in a select but very sweet pantheon: movie adaptations of bestselling children’s book series that have become box office juggernauts. The Harry Potter movies set the pattern, and the Twilight films proved that it could be replicated. So far, the Hunger Games’ chances look good; according to a poll conducted by MTV’s Nextmovie.com, the film version of Collins’ dystopian young adult novel is even more eagerly anticipated than “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2.”
Being made into a movie can do a lot for a book. But consider the boost a book this popular can give to the movie. The Harry Potter and Twilight series delivered up obsessively devoted audiences who speculated about casting for years before the films were released, who debated and pored over every still, poster, teaser, trailer — in short, every shred of news about the forthcoming cinematic realization of their favorite characters and stories. They loved those books as only kids can, with an intensity that makes for sprawling fan sites and mobbed midnight release parties at your ordinarily sleepy neighborhood bookstore.
As of this writing, the first book in the Hunger Games series has been parked on the USA Today bestseller list for 132 weeks; the second, “Catching Fire,” for 131. There are more than 16 million copies of all three books in print. Unlike the Harry Potter series, which was aimed (originally) at middle-grade readers, this is a young-adult epic with a particularly dark premise: In a future version of America called Panem, 12 districts subjugated by a central authority must each send a pair of their children to compete in a gladiatorial contest from which only one will emerge alive. In marked contrast to the swoony vampire romance of the Twilight series, the many harrowing action sequences in “The Hunger Games” make the books equally appealing to boys and girls.
It’s indicative of the balkanization of the reading world that if you don’t have teenage children, you may not have heard of “The Hunger Games” until quite recently, despite the fact that for several years the book’s success has rivaled that of “The Help” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Although both Harry Potter and Twilight have demonstrated that there’s a sizable adult readership for some children’s books, the genre is still (mostly) reviewed in separate publications, shelved in its own section of the library and often sold in separate stores. In fact, children’s book publishing operates quite differently from its adult counterpart. And in many respects, that’s a good thing.
“The Hunger Games” started out with an advantage. Scholastic Books, Collins’ publisher, had done well with Collins’ previous series, the Underland Chronicles, five books for middle-grade (8-to-12-year-old) readers about a boy who discovers a gritty fantasy world under the streets of New York. With that in mind, Scholastic bought “The Hunger Games” on the strength of a four-page proposal covering all three books of the projected YA (young adult) trilogy. In the summer of 2007, Collins submitted a draft of the first book to three editors, including Scholastic’s executive editorial director, David Levithan, and Kate Egan, a freelancer who has worked on all of Collins’ books.
“The Hunger Games” is a novel that takes to heart Billy Wilder’s famous dictum for screenwriters: “Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.” Before she turned to books, Collins, who has a background in theater, wrote children’s television shows for Nickelodeon. “I think that writing for episodic television, knowing that you have to have that rising and falling tension, and end that episode at a particular place, has served her very well,” said her agent, Rosemary Stimola. Karen Springen, a former Newsweek reporter and one of the first journalists to extoll “The Hunger Games,” puts it this way: “She knew how to do cliffhangers to get you to come back after the commercial break. Each chapter is a cliffhanger, and each book is a cliffhanger.”
Scholastic employees began eagerly passing the manuscript around the office. It was the first stirring of what would become a tidal wave of word of mouth. “When you have the kind of book,” said Rachel Coun, executive director of marketing, “where assistants from other departments, even though it’s not their job, come asking for the galleys because they’ve heard it’s really great, you know you have something.” “We made a lot of copies,” said Levithan. “Coming out of the fall sales conference, everyone knew that the best way to generate excitement about ‘The Hunger Games’ was to get people to read ‘The Hunger Games.’” That isn’t as easy as it sounds; over 20,000 new children’s books are published annually, and the people Scholastic needed to reach — people outside the company — are drowning in the piles of books arriving from hopeful publishers.
The possibility of “The Hunger Games” crossing over to adult readers (the Holy Grail for children’s book marketers) got its first big public boost when Stephen King reviewed it for Entertainment Weekly (even if he only gave it a B) a few days after the book came out. Not long after that, Stephenie Meyer, whose “Twilight” also made significant inroads with adult readers, raved about “The Hunger Games” on her blog: “I was so obsessed with this book I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table so I wouldn’t have to stop reading,” she wrote. This was major. Meyer doesn’t just have a lot of fans; she has a lot of fans who will read pretty much whatever she tells them to.
How did the Meyer recommendation come about? Van Straaten, like a lot of children’s book publicists, makes a habit of mailing out advance reader’s copies of her own favorite Scholastic titles to her peers. One of the people she sent “The Hunger Games” to was Meyer’s publicist, who loved the book and — even though it’s published by another house — urged it on Meyer. Suggesting that the creator of your company’s flagship property might want to plug a competitor’s new product would be unthinkable in most other industries. But at that moment, neither woman was thinking about business. They were just two readers, spreading the word.
Continue ReadingBeing made into a movie can do a lot for a book. But consider the boost a book this popular can give to the movie. The Harry Potter and Twilight series delivered up obsessively devoted audiences who speculated about casting for years before the films were released, who debated and pored over every still, poster, teaser, trailer — in short, every shred of news about the forthcoming cinematic realization of their favorite characters and stories. They loved those books as only kids can, with an intensity that makes for sprawling fan sites and mobbed midnight release parties at your ordinarily sleepy neighborhood bookstore.
As of this writing, the first book in the Hunger Games series has been parked on the USA Today bestseller list for 132 weeks; the second, “Catching Fire,” for 131. There are more than 16 million copies of all three books in print. Unlike the Harry Potter series, which was aimed (originally) at middle-grade readers, this is a young-adult epic with a particularly dark premise: In a future version of America called Panem, 12 districts subjugated by a central authority must each send a pair of their children to compete in a gladiatorial contest from which only one will emerge alive. In marked contrast to the swoony vampire romance of the Twilight series, the many harrowing action sequences in “The Hunger Games” make the books equally appealing to boys and girls.
It’s indicative of the balkanization of the reading world that if you don’t have teenage children, you may not have heard of “The Hunger Games” until quite recently, despite the fact that for several years the book’s success has rivaled that of “The Help” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Although both Harry Potter and Twilight have demonstrated that there’s a sizable adult readership for some children’s books, the genre is still (mostly) reviewed in separate publications, shelved in its own section of the library and often sold in separate stores. In fact, children’s book publishing operates quite differently from its adult counterpart. And in many respects, that’s a good thing.
“The Hunger Games” started out with an advantage. Scholastic Books, Collins’ publisher, had done well with Collins’ previous series, the Underland Chronicles, five books for middle-grade (8-to-12-year-old) readers about a boy who discovers a gritty fantasy world under the streets of New York. With that in mind, Scholastic bought “The Hunger Games” on the strength of a four-page proposal covering all three books of the projected YA (young adult) trilogy. In the summer of 2007, Collins submitted a draft of the first book to three editors, including Scholastic’s executive editorial director, David Levithan, and Kate Egan, a freelancer who has worked on all of Collins’ books.
“The Hunger Games” is a novel that takes to heart Billy Wilder’s famous dictum for screenwriters: “Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.” Before she turned to books, Collins, who has a background in theater, wrote children’s television shows for Nickelodeon. “I think that writing for episodic television, knowing that you have to have that rising and falling tension, and end that episode at a particular place, has served her very well,” said her agent, Rosemary Stimola. Karen Springen, a former Newsweek reporter and one of the first journalists to extoll “The Hunger Games,” puts it this way: “She knew how to do cliffhangers to get you to come back after the commercial break. Each chapter is a cliffhanger, and each book is a cliffhanger.”
Scholastic employees began eagerly passing the manuscript around the office. It was the first stirring of what would become a tidal wave of word of mouth. “When you have the kind of book,” said Rachel Coun, executive director of marketing, “where assistants from other departments, even though it’s not their job, come asking for the galleys because they’ve heard it’s really great, you know you have something.” “We made a lot of copies,” said Levithan. “Coming out of the fall sales conference, everyone knew that the best way to generate excitement about ‘The Hunger Games’ was to get people to read ‘The Hunger Games.’” That isn’t as easy as it sounds; over 20,000 new children’s books are published annually, and the people Scholastic needed to reach — people outside the company — are drowning in the piles of books arriving from hopeful publishers.
The possibility of “The Hunger Games” crossing over to adult readers (the Holy Grail for children’s book marketers) got its first big public boost when Stephen King reviewed it for Entertainment Weekly (even if he only gave it a B) a few days after the book came out. Not long after that, Stephenie Meyer, whose “Twilight” also made significant inroads with adult readers, raved about “The Hunger Games” on her blog: “I was so obsessed with this book I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table so I wouldn’t have to stop reading,” she wrote. This was major. Meyer doesn’t just have a lot of fans; she has a lot of fans who will read pretty much whatever she tells them to.
How did the Meyer recommendation come about? Van Straaten, like a lot of children’s book publicists, makes a habit of mailing out advance reader’s copies of her own favorite Scholastic titles to her peers. One of the people she sent “The Hunger Games” to was Meyer’s publicist, who loved the book and — even though it’s published by another house — urged it on Meyer. Suggesting that the creator of your company’s flagship property might want to plug a competitor’s new product would be unthinkable in most other industries. But at that moment, neither woman was thinking about business. They were just two readers, spreading the word.
- Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller
1 comment:
I wonder what it can be if "Twilight" and "Hunger Games" mixed together.
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