Daniel Handler, pretending yet again that he is but an innocent bystander to the madness of Lemony Snicket, does not want you to know that a new book is coming out and that Snicket himself may be seen reading at a movie theater near you.
“I am warning people away from Mr. Snicket’s 12th volume in an attempt to calm down the national panic surrounding this book,” Handler said with undue urgency during a recent phone interview with The Associated Press, sounding like the Gothic nephew of Woody Allen.
The 12th installment of Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” comes out Tuesday and technology has enabled Handler/Snicket to reach thousands of fans, around the country, in a single shot.
Handler will appear Tuesday night by way of satellite at 15 movie theaters, from Miami to Cleveland to Portland, Ore. Free tickets are being given out at participating bookstores, on a first-come basis, to fans who have pre-ordered the new book. The author will then tour eight cities.
Like music videos, satellite feeds allow popular writers to promote their work without having to show up in person. J.K. Rowling did something similar last summer for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” when her reading of the book from a castle in Scotland was beamed around the world.
Handler’s hour-long broadcast Tuesday night will originate from a sound stage in New York City, where he will read before about 150 young fans. The event was coordinated by his publisher, HarperCollins Children’s Books, and by a division of National CineMedia, LLC, a venture of the theatrical exhibition companies AMC Entertainment Inc., Cinemark USA, Inc. and Regal Entertainment Group.
“We’ve done a version of this with movie studios, where we take a film and have the director or producer come to the screening and talk about the film,” says CineMedia CEO Kurt Hall. “It seemed like a natural fit to do this with a book release.”
“It’s a very practical solution, because Lemony Snicket is in such great such demand that he can’t visit with each of his fans,” says Suzanne Daghlian, marketing director for HarperCollins Children’s Books.
‘Title Too Terrible to Reveal’Movie theaters have been used before to promote books, with publishers often paying for promotional slides that appear on screens before the lights go down. Sue Fleming, vice president and marketing director for Simon & Schuster’s trade division, says Stephen King and Dr. Phil McGraw are among the writers who have been advertised.
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“You have a captive audience, people sitting for 10 minutes waiting for the trailers to begin,” she says. “When Stephen King did his book on the Boston Red Sox (‘Faithful,’ co-authored by Stewart O’Nan), we did a heavy rotation of ads in movie theaters in the New England area.”
Getting attention is no snap for the Lemony Snicket books, those creepy, compulsive adventures of orphans Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire. The first 11 of planned 13 volumes have sold 40 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 44 languages, including French, Indonesian and Ukranian. The new book has an announced first printing of 2 1/2 million copies.
As if any suspense were necessary, HarperCollins is withholding the new book’s name until the day of publication. On Amazon.com on Monday, a sample cover read “Title Too Terrible to Reveal” and “Art Too Awful to Show.”
“It’s full of depressing details about the children’s lives,” Handler says, “and, I’m sorry to say, it’s the longest in the series. So in terms of total misery, it’s quite a lot to deal with well, both in terms of the number of pages and the amount of misery per page.”
Handler dreamed up his odd pseudonym while researching radical right-wing groups for his dark comic adult novel, “The Basic Eight,” which came out in 1999, a few months before the first Lemony Snicket book. He found himself on the phone with one such group, which asked for his name. Handler didn’t want to be added to a mailing list so he replied with a name that popped into his head, “Lemony Snicket.”