What Authors and Publishers Can Learn from the Hunger Games Marketing Campaign, Part 1

Two weeks before its release on March 23rd, The Hunger Games movie is already expected to do as well in the box office as—if not even better than—the final Twilight movies. It’s expected to gross $100 million in its opening weekend alone, and $275 million over the length of its run in theaters. In Fandango’s twelve-year history, it’s never even come close to selling as many advance tickets as it has for The Hunger Games. Fueled by the pre-movie buzz, the paperback of the first book—by no means a new splash in the market, having been out for two years already—is outselling the year’s biggest book hits. And the excitement is only growing.

Both book and film can chalk their incredible recent success up to a versatile and inexhaustible marketing push by Lionsgate studios. And though we might have little hope of matching the blockbuster studio’s budget, much of what’s made the studio’s push so successful can easily be applied to publishers’ and writers’ own promotional campaigns. Here are just a few elements you can adapt:

1.) Create a bridge for existing fans. When Lionsgate inked a deal to bring The Hunger Games to the big screen, the series was already a hit with teens, reporting more than 150,000 sales and boasting a fan frenzy that came close to the Twilight and Harry Potter series. But with three years between the movie deal and its big-screen release, Lionsgate needed a way to keep the film on fans’ radars. By creating a “bridge” of content the existing fans were hungry for already to lead them to the new content in theaters, Lionsgate turned what could have been a setback into a chance for existing fans to spread their fervor through word of mouth.

Why it matters for books: When an author has an existing fan base—whether from social media popularity, recent recognition in the media, or another successful novel or series—one of the biggest challenges to bringing a new book out is carrying the author’s popularity over to a new title. Though most marketing campaigns focus on attracting new fan bases, they still take care not to lose the hard-won fans that already exist—and getting a reader to pick up an author’s second book can be harder than you think. Writers and publishers must approach the gap between initial buzz and the new book’s publication strategically by bridging content. The most successful bridges give existing fans more of what they already love and want (whether it’s the books’ smoldering love interests, the author’s snarkily hilarious style, or the writer’s off-the-page personality) while at the same time introducing concepts and characters that will appear in the new book and tying back to the upcoming new release.

2.) Create extra content… Lionsgate made every landmark on the route to a finished film a spectacle for fans, building buzz around everything from the choice of a director to fan input on casting calls and auditions and finally their strategic release of casting decisions, one name at a time. But it was the extra materials the studio generated—everything from posters featuring each individual character to viral social media content from social networks to name generators —that really held hungry fans’ attention. Part of the brilliance of the Hunger Games marketing campaign is that much of the content released to build excitement would have needed to be created for the films anyway—like music for the soundtrack and clips of Katniss in the arena. Put it all together, and fans had plenty to munch on while they waited for the movie to release.

Why it matters for books: Not every publisher or author has the resources to build whole social networks or schedule a photo shoot for every character, but there’s a world of possibility available nonetheless. Consider hinting that one character from a previous series will show up in the new book, and allowing fans to guess which one. Introduce your main character with a short story in their voice, or give fans a story about an existing character that made them clamor for more. With a little creativity you can put together “dream casts,” interactive games and contests, early reveals of content and images, and more. The key is to delve into what makes a book—or an author’s previous books—appealing, and find an efficient way to create more of that content than will be needed in the finished book. By re-purposing material for an early buzz-building release online, publishers and authors can make a new release visible and appealing without an unmanageable investment.

But plop all that extra content up online at once and you're likely to find it's wasted; truly good content needs an innovative and strategic plan to succeed. Next week, we'll talk about what that plan might look like! Tune back in next Thursday to find out more about how to bend the odds in your favor.

Tuesday Muse: Hugo's Big Machine

Today's muse is a clip from the movie Hugo, which was both visually stunning and incredibly well-written:



What's your reason for being here?

Many apologies for the lack of a non-muse post last week! I'll have something cool on the blog soon to compensate.

Tuesday Muse: The Earth from Space

At the risk of stating the obvious... our world is pretty incredible:



It amazes me that you can see thunderstorms and the aurora borealis so clearly from space. It amazes me how much of this earth we have marked with our presence, and how visibly. That the lives we lead can feel so tiny individually, but the sum of the parts is enough to literally light up the world from outer space.

What amazes you?

What IS a Feminist Character, Really? (A Bit of a Love Letter to Kristin Cashore)

I thought I'd write a post today about how, in the midst of all this talk about what isn't really a "strong female character," about what isn't a feminist character, we—myself included, perhaps myself most of all—risk falling into the trap of scrutinizing female characters more closely than men, criticizing them more often, and thus reinforcing messages that can hurt the feminist cause more than they might help it. About how we risk widening a rift when what we need is mutual understanding of all women, of all men, and of all the everything in between, in all our wonderful and utterly dumbfounding complexity. About how, while it's necessary and important to examine tropes, to pick apart their underlying themes and put them back together with a better understanding of the messages we absorb from them, if that picking apart leaves us without a single female character we can feel proud of and sure of, then we are lost. How if we spend all our time figuring out why we shouldn't love female characters, we will do exactly what we accuse others of, and fail to love women.

I was going to write that post.

And then I read Bitterblue. And I was reminded of the wonderful feminist thing that is Kristin Cashore.

Her main characters are all strong women. They all have power. They are also all broken, haunted by these truly terrible pasts. And they are so wholly, completely, complexly human that they defy simplification. They refuse to be tropes. None of them—women or men, primary or secondary—can be ignored. They seem to live and breathe, and they offer windows—some of the only broad, clear windows I've ever encountered in literature—into what it really is to be a woman. They are human.

These are the characters we need. It's not enough to say "strong." It's not enough to say "flawed." They must be whole. They must be human. So that each of us, in reading them, can feel what it is to be a human who is not ourselves.* So we can all understand each other better for it.


*That said, it would be remiss of me to ignore the fact that all of Cashore's main characters, and in fact almost all of her secondary and tertiary characters, are people of considerable privilege and with the power to command nations. They are primarily members of the dominant race in their respective kingdoms, or, in the case of Fire, they have powers that compensate for the prejudices of those around them by providing them with some control over others. It isn't quite enough to give us both women and men who are whole and human—we also need to see whole, human characters of all genders who are underprivileged in other ways, so that their unique perspectives can be forefronted and understood as well. I hope you understand that I don't intend to criticize Kristin—I believe that she has the skill and the humility to do those tales justice, and one day I truly hope to see them from her.

Tuesday Muse: The Sight of the Stars

What makes you dream?