A New HarperCollins Mystery

Early this month, HarperCollins announced to booksellers via mass e-mail that it would soon release a book that "will make headlines around the world," but it kept the title and author a secret. The e-mail offered most of the bibliographic information -- the ISBN, page number, and release date, but included nothing that could divulge the title.

HarperCollins described the book, which has a release date of August 23 and a lay-down date of September 12, as "a world wide publishing event.... A shattering, provocative and mesmerizing true story, [that] will receive major national media attention here in the U.S. in addition to making news around the globe."

However, for booksellers, ordering a book with a title to-be-revealed presents challenges. Buyer Paul Ingram at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa, told BTW that he wasn't happy with the secrecy and guesswork. "I hate this!" he said. "I don't think there's a bookseller on the planet who doesn't hate it -- to ask us to buy something secret and in quantity. Of course, we all have experience with mysterious Oprah books, but at least with those you can figure they'll be midlist novels."

Carole Horne of Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, expressed similar sentiments and added that "this approach has become so common that no one can support all of them."

Ingram's tempered approach is to initially order five copies and then wait to find out the title. He said, "Harper's saying, 'All we can tell you is that it's going to be a big deal.... Well, every bookstore's needs are different."

At the Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, Kelly Justice said that she also could have done without the mystery. "Just tell me what the title is," she said. "I can't hop in on an unknown." Justice's caution was learned from experience. "We've repeatedly seen these titles that we don't get any information on. And I've repeatedly sat on cartons of unsold books." Justice planned on ordering two copies of the Harper title.

McKenna Jordan, manager and buyer at Murder By The Book in Houston, was using the same careful buying strategy as other booksellers. "I don't want go out on limb and get cartons of it, because we don't know what it is," she explained. "There's a lot of hype, and it's a neat concept, but especially since we're an independent, we have to pick and choose the big books that we're backing. And it's impossible to back this if we don't know what it's about."

But Jordan still didn't want to get caught short. "I'm game for a couple of copies," she said. "And if the day it gets in, it looks great, someone here reads and enjoys it, we'll order more. We also don't want to be the one store that doesn't have it, if it is the most talked about book. That would be horrible, so we'll get a couple to cover our bases." --Karen Schechner