Stephen King - The Stand Complete and Uncut - Background and Video
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Introduction to the DVD “Stephen King on THE STAND: Uncut”Peter Schneider
In early November 1989, the marketing and editorial departments of Doubleday were preparing for the December sales conference. This was a huge affair, held on a resort on Key Biscayne, Florida, and it included all three publishing companies of the BDD conglomerate: Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell. More than one thousand people from around the world would attend the conference.
At this sales conference the forty or so Doubleday sales reps would be presented with the titles from the Spring list (April through July). This would provide them with the information necessary for them to start meeting with all their bookstore accounts in January and gain the advance orders needed to determine the final print quantities for the titles in question.
For Doubleday (where I was a marketing director), our biggest title of this list was THE STAND: Complete & Uncut. We needed to deliver a presentation that would basically knock the socks off our sales reps, so that they would go out and make this book the bestseller that it deserved to be.
Though it may sound strange now, not everyone at BDD thought THE STAND would be a big book (in terms of sales, of course, not size). Lou Aronica, the publisher of BantamSpectra and one of my best friends at the company, thought that it might sell 60,000 copies at best. “Pete, the original book was published only twelve years ago. Sure, there’ll be some fanatics who want this new edition, but I think that the bulk of book buyers will say, ‘Been there, read that.’”
Having been a Stephen King reader for eighteen years, I knew he was wrong – but I also knew that in order to make this book work out of the gate, we’d have to do some pretty fancy dancing to persuade the sales reps.
The publisher of Doubleday at the time was Nancy Evans. She had been hired two years previously by Alberto Vitale, the CEO of BDD. She had previously been at Book-of-the-Month Club and, before that, had been the book editor of Glamor magazine. I had rejoined Doubleday in June of 1987, and for the first two years Nancy and I were, shall we say, not the best of friends.
But once we started work on THE STAND, she and I rapidly reached a meeting of the minds. She knew that Doubleday needed a huge bestseller, and I knew that THE STAND was that book, and so we ended up working very closely together and actually becoming friends.
One thing to understand is that almost half of the 42 Doubleday sales reps at that time had worked for the company back in the 1970s – therefore, they had sold in to bookstores the first five Stephen King books, and they’d been witness to the phenomenon that started with CARRIE and culminated with THE STAND – only to have him leave the company for NAL, much to their confusion.
As Nancy and I discussed plans for the sales conference, we came to the conclusion that the best person to make the presentation (or at least introduce it) would be Stephen King himself. And so I called the Bangor office and asked if we could come up to film a short video. We were told, “Knock yourself out, if you want to travel to Bangor in November.”
So Nancy and I made our reservations to fly up, leaving La Guardia in NYC, changing planes in Boston’s Logan Airport, and taking a small commuter plane from there to Bangor. We were due to fly out of La Guardia at 8:45 am, so we made plans to meet at the airport by 8:00.
We realized, however, that impressing the sales reps was only part of the equation – we wanted to impress Stephen King as well.
Nancy and the Doubleday art department had been working on repackages of the first five SK titles. They were much different from the original artwork (which was truly uninspiring) and they conveyed more of a unified “series” look. Nancy was bringing the color print-outs of these new dust jackets.
Given that I was directing the whole limited edition megillah, I had asked our production department if they could have a dummy of the limited ready for me to carry up to Bangor and show Steve. The production manager in charge of the book assured me that this would be no problem.
We were leaving on a Thursday – on Monday of that week I went down to production and asked about the dummy. “Oh, it’ll be here tomorrow,” I was told.
Tuesday came and went with the same response. To hedge my bets, I asked that the dummy be sent to me directly at my home in Westchester County, NY. On Wednesday afternoon I went down to Production and demanded to know where the dummy was. The manager made a call, then said, “Oh, they’ve had a problem, so it’s being sent out today via UPS Overnight to your home address (in Westchester county, the suburbs north of NYC) for arrival tomorrow.”
My reply (sanitized for a G-rated audience) was, “That’s not going to do me much good, given that I’ll be at La Guardia at 8:00 am.”
But I couldn’t let it go. I knew that the main UPS distribution facility for the northern suburbs of NYC was in Elmsford, NY, just twenty minutes south of where I lived and on the way to La Guardia airport. Thursday morning I was up at 4:30 am and I drove to Elmsford UPS (which operated on a 24-hour schedule). There, I pleaded my case to the director of the facility, and so, for the next two hours, he led me up and down the labyrinthine conveyor belts that carried packages to all the local distribution trucks. He was a truly nice guy (and a King fan, to boot), so we wandered around this facility the size of two football fields, trying to read labels until our eyes crossed. Finally, at 7:30, I cried Uncle, and I ran out to my car to make the trip to La Guardia.
(The next week, I had a long talk with the VP of Production about this SNAFU. She checked into it, and then showed up at my office with a red face. It seems the Production manager – the one who had kept promising the imminent arrival of the dummy – had basically made the whole thing up. He had never even asked for a dummy to be created. Therefore, my trip to the UPS distribution center was in vain. And cold-hearted as it may sound now, I didn’t shed a tear when the manager in question was asked to leave the company.)
So now I raced down the Hutchinson River Parkway, hoping to get to La Guardia before the plane left. As I ran down to the gate, Nancy was standing in the aisle waiting for me. “Did you get the dummy?” she asked. I simply grimaced and said, “Long, long story.”
The flight to Boston was uneventful. At Logan, we had to change terminals and then walk across the tarmac to a small ten-seater prop plane. Nancy was not used to transportation like this and her face was ashen as we climbed the small flight of steps to the cabin.
The trip took about an hour and a half, and we made nervous conversation throughout the flight. Once we arrived at Bangor, I picked up our rental car and we drove to Steve’s office (which is actually incredibly close to the airport). I ran in to let them know we had arrived – instead I was told by Shirley Sonderegger, Steve’s assistant, that he was still at the house and that I should go meet him there.
So back into the car we went and drove the mile or so to the King house. (Yes, the one with the wrought iron fence featuring spider webs.) Nancy and I pulled in the drive and we got out and walked up the path to the front door.
We took a minute to compose ourselves, then I rang the bell. No answer. I rang the bell again. Still no answer. I then knocked on the door, thinking perhaps the doorbell didn’t work. No answer.
At this point Nancy and I looked at each other and blurted out, at the same time, “Do you think he doesn’t want to see us?” (This is the level of insecurity that pervades those who work at publishers, whether they’re presidents of companies, as was Nancy, or marketing directors, or just about anyone when dealing with a major, major author.)
But I knew that Shirley wouldn’t have told us to go to the house if we weren’t wanted, so I said, “Let’s try the side door.” We walked around the house to the right side, where a short flight of steps led up to a door. I knocked on the door and Tabitha opened it almost immediately.
Steve was standing behind her, and he yelled out, “Oh, Pete, Shirley said you were coming. Come on in.”
After a few minutes of nervous banter, Steve put his coat on and said, “Follow me to the office.”
Nancy was clutching the folder with the new dust jacket art for the first five books and I was clutching the bag that held the VHS video camera and tripod. (It’s hard to believe these days, but that was the state of the art for filming videos. No remote microphones, no extra lighting.)
We pulled up to the office (where we had been twenty minutes earlier). We set up the video camera on a tripod in the reception area and Steve sat on the large couch. Nancy handed him the new dust jacket art, and he started to comment on it. It was at that point that I hit the red trigger on the camera – and it is at this point that you start watching the video.
Before you view the video, there are a few technical notes: the video you will see is the raw footage as recorded by my VHS camera that day. The time code that appears at the bottom was added by our video editing house so that I could do some small edits for the final version shown at the sales conference. What you see here, however, is the entirety of the video. Also, you’ll hear some background comments and guffaws – these come from Nancy Evans and me as we sat there making the video. No one else, aside from SK, was in the room.
Finally, you’ll notice that at the very beginning of the video that there are two instances where the camera goes dark while we set up another take. Blacking out the filming was accomplished by a very high-tech trick known as “Peter’s hand.” In other words, to denote a break in the scene, I would place my hand over the lens simply because I didn’t want to chance turning off the camcorder and then not getting it to turn back on. I’m a real technical whiz, don’t you agree?
Afterword to the DVD “Stephen King on THE STAND: Uncut”Peter Schneider
“. . . and that we can go ahead and do something together another time.” This is the penultimate sentence in the video, and it carried the most import to the many Doubleday and BDD people who watched the video.
As most of you know, in the summer of 1977 Stephen King decided to leave Doubleday and publish with New American Library. (NAL was a paperback publisher, so they back-sold the hardcover rights to King’s books to Viking. Later, Viking, NAL, Signet, Dutton, and Penguin would all become one company under the name Penguin Publishing.)
King’s decision to leave Doubleday was caused by some ridiculous decisions made by Doubleday top management at the time (which I won’t go into here). Most of the Doubleday employees not privy to the situation were perplexed by King’s decision to leave.
In the late 1980s Penguin approached Doubleday and asked to purchase the hardcover rights to THE STAND so that they could publish THE STAND: Complete & Uncut. Doubleday’s response was, “Of course not. We own those rights, so if anyone’s going to do a hardcover, it will be us. You (NAL and Penguin), of course, will have the paperback rights.”
This is why, in a nutshell, Doubleday once again was publishing Stephen King.
Quite frankly, there was no way that King was going to return to Doubleday except if he had to – and if you knew the whole unexpurgated story, you would understand why.
But as I said before, most of the regular Doubleday people had no clue as to all the sturm und drang that had occurred during the last thirteen years – and so the fact that Stephen King was once again publishing with Doubleday was, perhaps, a new beginning, in their view.
So, at the end of the video, when Stephen King made the off-hand comment that “. . . we can go ahead and do something together another time,” the sales reps thought that, “Wow, maybe he’s going to come back to Doubleday.”
Scene: We’re in a big conference room at the resort in Key Biscayne. I’ve spoken for twenty minutes about what the new book is, what we’re going to do to support it, and why people are going to buy it. I end my speech by saying something like, “But I’ve talked enough. I’m a marketing guy and you know I’m always going to tell you that a book is going to sell like hotcakes. (Yes, back then we all used horrific clichés like this.) But I think that there’s only one person out there who can give you the real story – the one person who can give you the inside dope as to what this crazy book is all about – and that person is Stephen King.” And with a nod, the lights darkened and the video started spilling out onto the screen.* * * * *
After the video ended, there was a second or two of silence,, and then, as one, the entire room of sales reps and other BDD people stood up and started applauding. Believe me, my previous presentations at sales conferences had been greeted with yawns and questions like, “So why do you think anyone is going to buy this book?”
I knew that the applause had nothing to do with me – it was all due to the amazing presentation by Stephen King and that second-to-last line about possibly doing “something together” again sometime
To fully understand the effect of this presentation, you should know that Doubleday/Dell, when it was still an independent company back in the 1970s and early 1980s, had become the butt of jokes in publishing. Then, in 1986, it was purchased by Bertelsmann publishing and folded into the incredibly successful Bantam publishing company, with the whole new entity dubbed “BDD.”
Bantam Books was the darling of Bertelsmann, of course – it had an incredibly successful mass market paperback publishing program, and recently it had become a powerhouse hardcover publisher as well, with monster-selling titles like IACOCCA. When Doubleday was brought into the fold in 1987, it was obvious that Bantam was the fair-haired boy while we were the ugly ducklings who hung back in the shadows.
Therefore, when Stephen King let slip that perhaps we could “do something together” again, a rush of chauvinism was sparked in the hearts of the Doubleday people.
Epilogue
This sales conference took place in December 1989. In January 1990 Nancy Evans was unceremoniously fired by Bertelsmann. She was replaced by Steve Rubin, who had been Editor-in-Chief of Bantam for several years.
At the end of April, we were all at the next sales conference (again held at Key Biscayne). THE STAND had just gone on sale the Tuesday of that week. At that time, publishers had a special number to call at the New York Times Book Review (after 5:00 pm on Friday) so that they could hear a recorded message listing all the bestsellers that would appear in the NYTBR on the Sunday nine days later. I had missed a few meetings in order to stay in my room at the resort and repeatedly call the number of the NYTBR. Though it was probably only ten or fifteen minutes, it felt like that many hours while I continued calling and kept getting the previous week’s list.
Finally, around 5:15, I called yet again. This time I heard a new voice on the recording. I knew this was it. And then I heard the words I had been waiting for: “For Sunday, May 13th, the New York Times Fiction Bestseller List is as follows: Number One, THE STAND: Complete & Uncut by Stephen King, published by Doubleday.” Please note that this ranking of number one did not even include a full week of sales – it only reflected bookstore sales from Tuesday (when the book went on sale) through Friday.
I hung up the phone, raced down the hall, and waited impatiently for the elevator to arrive so that I could get to the meetings that would end at 5:30. I got to the conference room level and ran to the room where the Doubleday sales reps were meeting to discuss the books presented that day. I flung open the door and ran in. People turned and looked to see who had made such an impetuous entrance. I managed to gibber out, “Please excuse my interruption, but I just wanted to tell you all: THE STAND is at number one on the New York Times Book Review list.” The room erupted in cheers.
What a miserable geek I was, right? But this was the one moment that all the Doubleday people could share in a real triumph – and it also put paid to all the naysayers who had predicted the book wouldn’t even break 50,000 copies sold.
The next week, Steve Rubin, the new publisher of Doubleday, sent out an interoffice memo which you can see at the end of this article.
By December of 1990, THE STAND had sold more than 700,000 hardcover copies.
But in June, six months prior, I had left Doubleday to accept a job at Grove Press as VP, Marketing & Sales.
And that is a completely different story . . . .
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Originally Posted by Randall Flagg
