Stephen King’s Serial Book Making A Killing

Stephen King is accomplishing some remarkable feats in September. This Sunday, like last Sunday, he will have six books on the New York Times paperback fiction best-seller list. His publisher says - and no one has disputed - that this is a record.

“That’s what Dylan Thomas said after the 25th martini - ‘I believe that’s a record.’ Then he dropped dead,” King commented Wednesday from his home in Maine. But even he couldn’t remain morbid for more than a sentence.

“I feel like Sally Field - ‘You love me, you really love me,”’ he said.

The six books make up one novel, “The Green Mile,” a horror tale that has appeared serially. As each book has come out over the past six months, it has drawn the preceding volumes onto the list, “like suspects entering a drawing room at the end of a Hercule Poirot mystery,” in King’s analogy.

Tuesday, bookstores will be carpet-bombed with two new King novels in hardcover, “Desperation” and “The Regulators” - the second written under his all-too-public pseudonym, Richard Bachman. Each has first printings of more than a million copies; 200,000 of each have been packaged together in a $52.90 set, complete with a “keep you up all night” light (batteries not included).

All told, more than 25 million Stephen King books will be sold this year. That’s doubtless another record. King makes John Grisham and Danielle Steel look like slackers.

Yet he’s still modest, grumpy, full of apprehension. In an afterword to the last volume of the series, “Coffey on the Mile,” King writes, “I don’t think I’d want to do another serial novel (if only because the critics get to kick your ass six times instead of once).”

But critics have generally praised this Depression-era death row thriller. Said King: “I didn’t know they would like it at the time I wrote the afterword. I guess it was like saying, ‘Gee, I hope my mother-in-law will live forever.’ By saying something, you really hope the opposite will happen.”

Originally, he was going to publish the series only in Britain. “I thought if I was going to flop, I’ll flop in the visitor’s field. I’m not going to flop on my home court.”

Even after a deal was worked out for Signet to do it here, failure was uppermost in King’s mind. “I promoted the hell out of it, they promoted the hell out of it. Before it came out, for five nights I didn’t sleep. ‘Why did you do this?’ I asked myself. ‘This is insane.’ The idea of taking over the best-seller list was the furthest thing from my mind. I wanted to escape with my dignity.”

Now, in spite of this unprecedented success, he doesn’t intend to do it again. But Ballantine Books recently announced it will be doing a six-part horror novel by John Saul, beginning in February.

“I’m really glad Saul is going to try it,” said King. “With me, a lot of publishers intimated this probably wouldn’t work. Then it worked, and they said, ‘Yes, it worked, but it only worked because it’s Stephen King. He’s a unique case’ - like I’m a six-legged goat or two-headed cow.”

Ballantine President Linda Grey said in a statement announcing the Saul deal that “there is clearly an audience for fast-paced cliffhangers. A serialized publication provides increased suspense, bringing people back into the bookstores month after month.”

It would seem serial publishing also provides an opportunity for increased profits - “The Green Mile” would sell in a one-volume paperback for $7.99; to buy the pieces individually costs nearly $20. But King said, “I didn’t sit down and say, ‘How can I screw my loyal fans out of as much money as possible?’ I feel my hands are clean.”

Signet told him that, because of the economics of mass-market publishing, $2.99 was the lowest they could charge per volume.