Getting Ahead of the Game

It was exciting, during the time I roamed the conference rooms and met other attendees at Bouchercon Indianapolis, to discover how many people were talking about the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson and his “Millennium Trilogy.” UK publisher Quercus/MacLehose Press had kindly sent me some spare copies of the newly released British edition of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, the third and final volume in this series. I purchased a few additional copies, and then handed those out to my friends in the U.S. reviewing community. The problem was, of course, that I know a lot of reviewers, so coming to the convention adequately prepared meant I was stung for more than $100 in excess baggage costs at London’s Heathrow Airport. (These are big books, after all.) And even then, I didn’t have sufficient copies for all of my colleagues and friends, so after returning to Britain, I had to spend more time and money mailing copies back to the States.

I know all of this sounds like madness, but I just love Larsson’s Millennium novels, and want the whole world to read about the adventures of social misfit Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist. I also wanted to juice up word-of-mouth about the U.S. release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, coming next spring. Bouchercon, attended by some 1,700 people, was the ideal venue to start that pre-publicizing.

The Indianapolis Bouchercon created some of its own favorable publicity for Larsson’s trilogy. His first release in the States, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, picked up three major awards--the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Barry. Larsson’s father, Erland, had sent me (via Quercus/MacLehose) an acceptance letter he wanted to have read at the event, were his son to win any of the prizes for which he’d been nominated. I passed that missive on to Ed Kastenmeier, the vice president for Vintage/Anchor Books, who of course ended up reading it three times over.

It seems I wasn’t the only one in the States willing and anxious to pass around British copies of Larsson’s third thriller. Check out this report from The New York Times:

At a time of price wars and pressure from electronic books, a group of independent bookstores has found at least one way to lure customers into paying premium prices for a hardcover title: import an eagerly awaited book from Britain several months before its release in the United States and then jack up the price.

Coming on the heels of the breakout success of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” the first two volumes in the posthumously published thriller trilogy by the Swedish author Stieg Larsson, booksellers are now importing British editions of “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the third volume in the bestselling series six months before its publication here.

Charging as much as $45 for the book, which sells on Amazon in Britain for £8.99 (about $14.75), some booksellers have sold more than a hundred copies each. ...

The importing has been so widespread that the British edition of “Hornet’s Nest” tied for No. 5 on the best-seller list of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association in the United States in October.

The full Times piece can be found here.

If you’re planning to hold out for the American edition of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, note that Knopf has scheduled its release for May 25 of next year, with an announced first print run of half a million copies.

READ MORE: “The Girl Who Made American Readers Impatient,” by Sarah Weinman (Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind).