Dan Brown, Simon Kernick, and the marketing fail that wasn’t (maybe)

It’s illustrative of the speed with which information travels on the ol’ Internets. Stories get fired off, people get their knickers all in a twist, and only later does anyone realize that the story that got everyone so incensed was not entirely … well … accurate.

Last week, the Internet was abuzz with a story about a novel by Simon Kernick called Deadline, which the U.K. bookseller W.H. Smith was selling in an edition that featured author Dan Brown’s name above Kernick’s, and in a significantly larger font. Cover copy below Brown’s name read, “If you like your thrillers as fast, furious and unputdownable as Dan Brown, then we thought you’d enjoy …” followed by Kernick’s name and the title of the book. Bloggers (including, ahem, us) immediately responded with angry posts decrying the duplicity involved in this literary scam. One of the angriest was from Pace J. Miller, who wrote a post called “The Most Disgraceful Cover Ever!” which read, in part:

There is no right of publicity in the UK, but I’m sure both Brown and Kernick would be spewing if they knew about this cover (and at least a prima facie case of passing off could be made). It’s designed to mislead and deceive the careless book buyer, or at the very least cause what is commonly referred to as “initial interest confusion.”

Problem being, Kernick did know about the special edition of the book, which he endorsed. The W.H. Smith paperback was not, in fact, a new novel, but a reprint of a book that was a year old, and was being given away free to customers who pre-ordered The Lost Symbol, Brown’s upcoming sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

In an e-mail to writer Sarah Weinman, which she published on her blog, Kernick clarifies his position on the whole affair:

I sincerely hope that no one feels duped in any way … [but] to be honest, I’m still not a hundred percent sure what all the fuss is about. This was always a one-off promotion to promote my books by giving away Deadline with pre-orders of the new Dan Brown book in W.H. Smith. The book with the new cover is not, never was, and never will be for sale, and Deadline’s still in print with its original cover and available in Smiths and elsewhere. I also knew about the whole thing from the start, and it seems to have worked because my backsales have gone up very substantially in the weeks since it begun, and both Transworld and Smiths are very pleased. I guess, in conclusion, I’m fairly relaxed about the whole thing since anyone who got the book as part of the promotion, got it free and should have been told that it wasn’t by Dan Brown but my me.

What was initially decried as the basest kind of deception was in fact a cross-promotion marketing scheme. The worst Kernick’s publishers and W.H. Smith can be accused of in this instance is opportunism. Which is something that Internet scribes are also guilty of on occasion.

3 Responses to “Dan Brown, Simon Kernick, and the marketing fail that wasn’t (maybe)”

1. July 27, 2009 | 1:05 pm Rob in Victoria says:
   

   “What was initially decried as the basest kind of deception was in fact a cross-promotion marketing scheme.”

   You say that like the two terms are mutually exclusive…

2. July 28, 2009 | 8:50 am angel guerra says:
   

   It’s all okay because the author agrees with the publisher to mislead the public? To buy a book today you need to come armed with a Hemingway shit detector.

3. July 28, 2009 | 11:35 pm patricia says:
   

   snort…spewing coffee out my nose…