Media push

For the September 9 laydown, the series is set to roar out of the gate with a one million-copy worldwide (500,000 copies in the U.S.) first printing of the novel The Maze of Bones by bestselling author Rick Riordan.

Innovation came into play on the marketing front, as well. “One of our biggest challenges was in conveying what The 39 Clues is,” said Suzanne Murphy, publisher of Scholastic Trade. “A lot of education was going on internally, about what is involved in a two-and-a-half year program like this.” Armed with a pitch that Murphy’s team tried to make “as clear and simple as possible,” Scholastic did road shows for accounts demonstrating how the cards and game would work, and a push-out to the industry featuring 39 Clues backpacks and a limited number of “inheritance kits” containing an ARC and other materials.

Murphy stressed that a multi-pronged strategy meant keeping in mind that “kids will be coming to it in different ways—online, through the books or cards.” A new property with that kind of reach had to be branded very quickly. “We needed to get the name and the number 39 out there,” said Murphy. A viral online marketing campaign is helping to fill the bill. Visitors to www.thenumber39.com (launched August 1, 39 days before the series launch) will find fictional bloggers posting about sightings of the number 39. In turn, postings about the number 39 site appear on MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo and other sites. Online advertising, 30-second television spots airing in major markets nationwide and a media blitz that includes an appearance by Riordan on The Today Show September 8 are other pieces of the marketing pie.
Ellen Wartella, distinguished professor of psychology at U.C. Riverside and an expert on the role of media in children’s development, believes that this full-court press by Scholastic makes sense. Tweens these days, she said, are using all kinds of media, including mobile media, more than ever before. “This is a new example of a content creator trying to capture children’s attention in a multiplicity of ways, wherever they may be.”
Levithan and his colleagues know that a lot is riding on their venture, especially as it arrives in the very large shadow of Harry Potter. “We don’t think of The 39 Clues in terms of anything else we’ve done,” he said. “Of course we want it to be hugely successful, but on its own terms.”
And in terms of producing a multi-platform program on this scale, “We are the bellwether,” Levithan said. “It’s an amazing, exciting thing, and it’s also a nervous thing. If it is successful, it’s going to change publishing. If not, we’ll find something else what will be successful.” Murphy has a similar outlook. “We hope to learn from any bumps in the road we experience with The 39 Clues,” she said. “The wave has already started for us; everyone in the trade division is looking for innovation.” Whatever happens with The 39 Clues, she notes, “will affect things that are already in the hopper and will affect how we market our trade books in the future.”
Looking ahead, the multi-platform “hopper” at Scholastic is indeed hopping. Next February will see the debut of the Skeleton Creek series by Patrick Carman, which Levithan describes as a “novel/web-video hybrid,” about two kids in a small town where strange, ghostly things happen. Other multimedia projects are also in development.