Fantasist conjures help in promotion

As Time's lead technology writer and its book critic, Lev Grossman knows the power of crowdsourcing. So as the publication date approached for his novel The Magician King, the second installment in a projected trilogy, Grossman turned to his readers for help promoting the book.

Soliciting everything from a crest for Brakebills, the novel's Hogwarts-like magic school, to a poster for his coming book tour, Grossman has inspired some of the most inventive literary fan culture in years. The book, released Aug. 9, debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times best-seller list. (The Magicians, the first volume in the series, was also a New York Times best-seller.)

The solitary pursuit of novel-writing and the crowd-pleasing flair of a successful self-promoter require divergent skills.

"In some ways, it's an unfortunate turn of events, just because authors tend to be uniquely ungifted in the art of publicizing their work," Grossman said by phone while preparing for an appearance at Reno's WorldCon. "And yet, we've been pressed into service, mostly because of the hot competition right now for people's attention, which has more and more demands placed on it."

Fans responded to Grossman's appeal for help. Parry Gripp, the lead singer of the dormant geek-rock band Nerf Herder, wrote and recorded a theme song for The Magician King's promotional trailer, with references to Castle Whitespire and the Questing Beast. Amy Billingham, a professional graphic designer, contributed an array of sophisticated images that now adorn Grossman's website.

In addition to extending the world of Grossman's books and furthering a sense of community among their fans, the artworks generated by Gripp, Billingham, and other fans are easily apprehended, not something that can be said of a 450-page novel.

"Books are difficult things to put across to people," Grossman said. "They can't be grokked in 60 seconds, or even 60 minutes. You hear a little music, and you're like, 'Right. I get the general idea.' A book is a black box. It's hard to put across to people what its contents are in any manageable time frame. And yet one has to, otherwise no one will ever know about it."

Gripp, whose main musical endeavor these days is releasing short, YouTube-friendly songs and videos through his own website, is fluent in the knowing homage. Nerf Herder's name is an obscure Star Wars reference, and on his own, Gripp is responsible for the flagrantly Beatlesque music to Wawa's Hoagiefest ads. So the pop-savvy world of Grossman's books, in which characters both study magic and read Harry Potter, had a particular appeal.

Not all of Gripp's 115,000 YouTube subscribers appreciated the departure from quirky songs about hamsters; fewer than a tenth that number have viewed the clip, most coming from sources other than Gripp's website. But that in itself has been gratifying for Gripp. "Judging from the comments, the people that are watching it aren't people that would normally look at my channel," Gripp says. "The sentences are more complete, and not just a few letters strung together."

Although they're not consumed with pop-cultural homage, the Magicians books can themselves be seen as attenuated works of fan art. The novels' protagonist is Quentin Coldwater, a Brooklyn teenager obsessed with Fillory and Further, a quintet of British fantasy novels transparently modeled on C.S. Lewis' Narnia series - itself an obvious touchstone for Grossman.

Quentin assumes the Fillory books are fiction, but he discovers their world is real, and in need of his help. Although Grossman didn't anticipate the extent to which fans of The Magicians would make its world their own, the seeds of their involvement are sown in the book itself, where Quentin's ardent fandom makes him ideally qualified to navigate Fillory's perils.

"The extent to which fantasy culture is a participatory culture is just an amazing and beautiful thing," Grossman said. "They invest imaginatively in the books they read in a way I haven't seen in other genres. When you read some very serious literary novels, that's a world that is completely run and occupied by that author. I would never write fan fiction based on a book by Jhumpa Lahiri. She is the master of her universe. I am a master of my universe, but there's room for other masters in there."

Billingham, who often does branding work for corporate and nonprofit clients, spent weeks researching reference images and several evenings putting her own designs together. "I'm not really a hard-core sci-fi/fantasy reader," she wrote in an e-mail, "but The Magicians books have just the right amount of the fantastic in them to suit me. The way Lev incorporates allusions to our real world into his fictional world creates a very strong connection to that fictional world."

The extent to which the Internet puts writers in immediate contact with reactions to their work is a mixed blessing; Grossman recently killed the Google alert on his name, reasoning, "I don't need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just being me."

He added, "It's a very weird time to be writing books. There was a time not long ago when information about one's readers and what they sought and liked was a very scarce resource, and in a really short period of time that situation has inverted itself, and now when you write you're absolutely flooded with people's responses to your work. Just imagine Melville had published Typee and then immediately 1,000 people tweeted at him what they thought of it and that information fed back into Moby-Dick. Suddenly, we're absolutely drowning in responses to our work, and we know maybe a little more than is good for us about who our audience is and what they think."

But there's a tonic effect in knowing he's not the only inhabitant of his invented world.

"It's like you're playing with dolls," Grossman said. "You feel ridiculous sometimes, writing about these made-up characters, and the idea that other people would invest in them the way you do seems very remote. You feel very alone on this little island."

When readers write back, he said, "it's like Friday's footprint on the beach in Robinson Crusoe. You suddenly realize, 'I'm not alone here.' "