286. Nobody Knows Anything

<p>In 1977, Richard Bachman published his first novel. In an unusual move for a first-time author, Bachman made his publisher promise to release his books with hardly any marketing.</p> <h3>Bachman stacked the dice against himself</h3> <p>Bachman’s books were to skip the hardcover format and go straight to bargain-bin paperback – the kind you’d find mixed in with other nobody-authors, at a truck stop on I-80, somewhere near Grand Island. He also insisted he was unavailable for interviews, which cut his books off from a key marketing channel. Most publishers wouldn’t agree to such bizarre terms, but they were especially excited to release Bachman’s books.</p> <h4>But he still did pretty well</h4> <p>Today, forty-five years later, most people have unsurprisingly never heard of Richard Bachman. His books did alright, though: His fourth was optioned for film rights, his fifth sold 28,000 copies, and he got a couple letters a month from fans of his writing.</p> <h3>Bachman wasn’t Bachman</h3> <p>But his books were so good, one Washington D.C. bookstore clerk was suspicious. Steve Brown dug through the Library of Congress copyright records, and confirmed his suspicion: Richard Bachman was Stephen King.</p> <p>Why did one of the world’s hottest authors publish – in the same genre – under a pen name? At the time, King’s publisher had an almost-superstitious belief that if they published more than one of his books in a year, they would distract readers from This Year’s Book (that they let King publish Bachman books with so little fanfare speaks to their conviction in this belief). King later described it as like being married to someone with a drastically-smaller sexual appetite: He had to find an outlet somewhere else.</p> <h3>“Either find an audience or disappear quietly”</h3> <p>While he was publishing under a pen name, he figured he’d conduct an experiment. He wondered, to what degree was his massive success due to luck? So, as he has said, Stephen King “stacked the dice” against Richard Bachman. He wanted Bachman’s b