A New Page in Tie-Ins of Books, Films

Can books save Hollywood?

Movie producers may grumble and publishers mumble over slow summer business, but Esther Margolis is smiling.

This has been her year of the book, the "serious" Hollywood motion picture tie-in book, from "Far and Away" to "The Age of Innocence."

Margolis, through her Newmarket Press, operates on several levels: publisher (book producer, too, she says), packager, agent and, for some, consultant to the stars and studios. Let others wait for their one-shot limo rides to fame and fortune; she is busier than a bus driver in a presidential road race.

Book tie-ins are an expanding and increasingly important phase in marketing movies and other forms of entertainment, especially in capturing a particularly desirable demographic segment: people who read and spend time and money at bookstores.

Buy a book, see the movie. See the movie, read the book. Somebody gains.

Margolis is often contacted by producers or studio marketing departments to develop book campaigns long before a movie comes out. Her task is to calculate strategies and realistic programs--what kind of book would best represent the upcoming movie. If not her books, whose? She might suggest that a paperback novelization of the script be published by a large mass-market company or reprinting an original novel or a special art book project.

At the same time, she determines programs for her own New York-based Newmarket Press, which in the last 10 years has developed a niche--publisher of usually large-size paperback books about the making of a movie that incorporate a star or a director as the author, reproducing lavish numbers of photos and special reading material, from scripts to production notes.

Here is an evolving art form: the movie as literature, as coffee-table adornment, as collectible . . . as attention-getting tie-in.

Margolis prefers the term "companion books." Others do tie-ins.

"There seems to be a growing interest generally in book tie-ins," Mark Gill, a senior vice president at Columbia Studios, said. "A heightened presence. The more the publishers do this field, the more it seems to pay off."

Ted Turner found that to be the case. The smallest of his many divisions is 2-year-old Turner Publishing, which already can claim to be profitable. The Turner tie-ins are synergistic--the MGM film library became in part a TNT movie and a book called "When the Lion Roars." The reissued film "Casablanca" became both a hardcover and a paperback book. The Turner book "Save the Earth" became a six-hour TV documentary. The book "Kisses" became a TNT special.