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As teen novels grow more sophisticated, their publishers' marketing strategies are anything but child's play.
Few books better illustrate this fact of life than the promotional push behind Sarah Mitchell's "Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn" that extends from high schools to the Internet to pop music.
The publishers at St. Martin's Press believe the book could be this year's hot teen novel and are pushing the industry's boundaries of traditional marketing to make it happen.
The campaign - driven by teens' shared passion for music and the Internet - was designed to build buzz months before the book appeared on shelves last week.
One unusual aspect is an extensive promotional deal with Canadian pop singer FeFe Dobson, who is also hoping to make a big splash when her album hits U.S. stores next month.
St. Martin's strategy for "Gideon," with an initial run of 100,000 copies, illustrates just how competitive and lucrative the market is for teen lit.
As "The Gossip Girls," "The Clique" and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," prove, a top-selling teen novel can lead to sequels and the sale of movie rights.
"We're spending a lot of money," said St. Martin's Associate Publisher Lisa Senz. "We want this book to rise above the competition."
The deal between St. Martin's and Dobson's record label, Island Def Jam, calls on each to plug the other. A "Win a Day in the Life of FeFe Dobson" contest for fans who visit the official "Gideon" Web site is just one example.
There is an upcoming appearance on MTV's "TRL" that calls for Dobson to tout the book alongside her "Sunday Love" album.
Other promotional events and giveaways are also in the works.
This is in addition to a "Gideon" page on MySpace.com and numerous ads placed on popular sites such as Alloy.com, Seventeen.com and Cosmogirl.com. MySpace is a division of News Corp., which also owns The Post.
Buzz Marketing Group, the agency St. Martin's hired to promote the book, started in September by giving out early copies of the book to dozens of trendy teens who could spread the word.
Buzz CEO Tina Wells said "Gideon" was an immediate hit with the group, which received ultra-preppy shirts emblazoned with the book's Lacoste-like logo to wear when they went to school.
"Gideon," which features a female narrator who crawls inside the head of a boy at her prep school, falls into a genre that has experienced a resurgence in popularity by, well, growing up.
"Sweet Valley High" this is not. Today's teen lit is edgier than ever, tackling taboos including pot smoking and sexual abuse.
Competition to find and promote a bestseller is likely to grow despite the cautionary tale of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore who was accused of plagiarizing in her first novel.
The scandal shed light on the "book packaging" industry, which few people knew existed, that gets publishers to buy ideas for novels aimed at teens.
"They can sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies," said Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publisher's Weekly. "This is big business."
holly.sanders@nypost.com
Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
