Chooseco is skewing its signature interactive reading concept younger—significantly—with the launch of its Choose Your Own Adventure: Your First Adventure board book line, which is aimed at babies and toddlers up to age three. Due in September, the debut titles are adaptations of the company’s first three Choose Your Own middle-grade novels, written by the series founder, the late R.A. Montgomery: The Abominable Snowman, Journey Under the Sea, and Space and Beyond. Kalon Sardin, an artist living in France who makes her book debut with this series, illustrated the board books.
Modifying the publisher’s multiple-endings concept for the board-book audience has been long in the works, explained marketing manager Elizabeth Middleman. “In spring 2007, we began publishing Choose Your Owns for younger children when we started the Dragonlarks imprint for kids ages five to nine,” she said. “Those books have been a big hit and consistently sell well, so a while back we began talking about creating board books, but there were some big question marks about how to adapt the stories for babies. Since Choose Your Own Adventure storylines are known for danger and immersive excitement, how could we translate them into something cute, sweet, and kind?”
Under the direction of associate publisher Melissa Bounty, the editorial team tackled the adaptation task, abridging the texts of the original versions of the three inaugural Your First Adventure titles from 17,000 to 350 words. The project “really came together,” Middleman added, when Kalon Sardin came on board as illustrator: “She did a wonderful job of condensing the big scenes down to simple images portrayed in full color, a drastic change from the original books’ very detailed, black-and-white line art.”
The adaptation process also involved the obvious challenge of integrating the element of choice-making into the dramatically streamlined stories and ensuring that those options were baby-friendly. Each board book presents three possible endings, reached by making simple visual selections involving colors and objects—a spaceship, a goldfish, a rainbow—familiar to toddlers. The multiple-endings feature adds a new dimension to the traditional board-book reading experience, said Shannon Gilligan, Chooseco’s CEO and publisher, noting, “What I love about these baby books is the idea of parents and very young readers discussing choices together.”
