04/01/07

Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani

This is something we’ve been working on for a while and which we’re very excited about. Londonstani by Gautam Malkani was one of the most talked-about debut novels of 2006. But lots of the talk was about the anything other than the book itself. Most regularly, the size of the advance paid by 4th Estate (rumoured to be £300,000), was the talking point.

I was sent a copy of the book this time last year, whilst working on a promo film for 4th Estate’s spring catalogue titles. Obviously I’d read about the book/hype and wanted to make up my own mind. For the film, we ended up using the stencilled tiger (from the hardback of Londonstani, pictured above) as a theme in the video as it was the most iconic of the available jackets and was an easy image to add to the film in post production.

I read the book during production and thought it was great: it had some flaws, but was much stronger than much of the press I’d read had lead me to believe. And people I know, and respect, in publishing – people who might easily have an axe to grind against the publishers – agreed with me. And it was more original than a lot of the stuff that had been touted as a ‘compelling and original new voice’ bursting onto the scene. In language terms, it’s closely related to Clockwork Orange or Trainspotting, in that it’s written in parts in dialect.

Anyway, last year, after working with HarperCollins on FifthEstate, we were approached by HarperPress to come up with some marketing ideas for the paperback publication of Londonstani, which will be released in the UK in April this year. The brief was totally open, very informal, and originally was just to have some ideas and to try to find ways of connecting the book with people who will read and enjoy it. In the end, our approach wasn’t just about online ideas – we actually ended up outlining a strategy which takes place almost entirely offline.

When I started researching the job, the first thing that I noticed, was that bloggers (i.e. not the MSM – and really, people who actually chose to read the thing) seemed to really like this book. It connected with them – certainly enough to write about it. A technorati search pulled up, of 10 articles, 9 favourable if not passionate mentions on blogs. Not scientific, but interesting. And doing the search again today, it still seems to be the case.

I took this ‘fact’ as the starting point for the ideas we would propose: what we could begin with was the knowledge that if people actually got their hands on the story, then chances were they’d enjoy reading it.

We also had a fairly unique situation where the ‘core audience’ were actually the sort of people that would blog about it, which meant we could track what they thought about it by just running searches and RSS feeds. That’s not something that you can say about Jilly Cooper. That’s useful in that you can find a way to connect directly with what people think about a book – when usually you are totally in the dark. There’s not much you can do with the blog posts (unless you want to scare people by commenting on each and every one of them). But it’s really interesting.

These readers were also (it became clear) less and less likely to be influenced by reviews in the broadsheets, or to consider the opinions of Robert McCrumb (probably the most vitriolic in his rejection of Gautam Malkani’s place in ‘literature’), at all relevant. In fact, they were likely to not even register on their radars. So – we could actually come up with a campaign strategy that didn’t (for once) hinge on review coverage, mainstream media advertising, or any of that usual book-marketing stuff. And we could actually use this distance from the usual way of doing things as part of the campaign.

In the end, we could maybe do something that could possibly take advantage of some real, positive, albeit under-the-radar, word of mouth.

Anyway, the campaign and creative is gathering pace. I’ll post stuff as it comes on, but it’s getting more and more exciting by the day, and whilst it’s mutated – it’s actually one of the few times that an idea has gone through almost entirely unchanged from concept to execution.

It’s great for us to do something that is planned and executed across media, and has made the jump from online to ‘offline’ in a way we’ve always wanted to but haven’t quit emanaged yet.

More soon.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Apt Studio work, Publishing, Reading.

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