We designed two versions of the book: An outrageous $294,038 self-destructing physical version that was promoted with an online film. And, 1,000 free e-books available at selfdestructingbook.com. There, users got codes to unlock the digital book and, to heighten the thrill, they could track other readers’ progress and steal time from them. The website became a community of fans united by the thrill of a book.The iPad e-book, downloadable from the website, included a 24 hours timer, frightening story-related animations and an ominous “page burner” that destroyed every page as the user swiped it.

Minds were blown. More than 13,000 hours were spent reading and users sabotage each other almost 6,000 times, for a total of 5,310,000 stolen seconds. 86 articles were written around the world. We got coverage from traditional newspapers, like The Guardian, to technology magazines, like Wired and Mashable. Some bloggers even wrote about their experience our-by-hour. All the press coverage gave the campaign more than 419 million impressions.

Visitors to jamespatterson.com went up more than 60%. And “Private Vegas” became a New York Times bestseller in the first week of the launch of the campaign.

James Patterson has been thrilling his readers for more than 30 years. Patterson’s books are famous for being addictive and difficult to put down. For the launch of James Patterson’s new book “Private Vegas”, we wanted to demonstrate that, after a 30-year career, he still is the master of thrill.We knew that we had to push the publishing world beyond conventional boundaries and use technology to engage a new generation of fans.

What we did was taking the inherent thrill of “Private Vegas” to a new, crazy height. We created the Self-Destructing Book. A campaign designed to dramatically heighten the thrill of reading a book. We gave people 24 hours to read “Private Vegas” before it self-destructed. We reinvented the e-book format by making it the most thrilling reading experience ever, a thrilling race against the clock.