This month, Highlights Press kicked off brainPLAY, a line of puzzle books spun off from brainPLAY magazine for kids seven and up, which Highlights added to its periodical portfolio in June 2023.

Featuring puzzles within puzzles that play out in hidden-picture scenes, riddles, tongue twisters, jokes, mazes, and brainteasers, the book series launched earlier this month with brainPLAY Halloween Puzzles, brainPLAY Funniest Puzzles Ever, and brainPLAY Trickiest Puzzles Ever. Due in March 2025 are brainPLAY Nearly Impossible Puzzles and brainPLAY Top Secret Puzzles and Codes.

“The brainPLAY books are an extension of the magazine, but they contain mostly new content,” said Marlo Scrimizzi, senior editorial director of Highlights Press. “We have an ongoing dialogue with readers through our magazines and we have launched a new kid-testing program for our books. We tapped into that to create brainPLAY books, and learned that kids want harder puzzles, so we made the series extra challenging.”

The Highlights global media brand has a, well, storied history. The original Highlights monthly magazine for children ages six to 12 was started in 1946 by education and child-development experts Garry Cleveland Myers and Caroline Clark Myers, a husband-and-wife team who were nationally recognized leaders in education and child development.

The company’s magazine portfolio has expanded to include Highlights High Five (and its English-Spanish version, High Five Bilingüe), introducing stories and characters that promote kindness, empathy, and social awareness to kids ages two to six; and Highlights Hello, which contains stories and activities for babies and toddlers and supports early language development.

Making a Leap into Books

In 2014, six decades after the debut of Highlights magazine, Highlights Press opened its doors, and the advent of Highlights Education, a book imprint that focuses on puzzle content aligned to school curricula from preschool through second grade, followed in 2017. Both imprints’ titles are distributed by Penguin Random House.

“Highlights Press’s releases were initially sold in trade and mass markets,” Scrimizzi said. “Because the books were largely consumable puzzle and activity books, we did not distribute them to schools and libraries. However, our line and distribution channels have been expanding ever since.” Recent data from Circana BookScan reveals that, year to date, Highlights Press is the fastest growing of the top 20 children’s publishers and is ranked number two in market share in the Games/Activity/Hobby category.”

Among Highlight Press’s core backlist titles is The Highlights Book of Things to Do (2020), which has sold 125,000 copies and spawned a roundup of ancillary books, including The Highlights Book of How, The Highlights Book of Things to Draw, and The Highlights Book of Things to Write.

The press’s current top sellers are Jumbo Book of Hidden Pictures (2017), which has sold more than 715,000 copies; Ultimate Puzzle Challenge! (2019), which has sold 630,000 copies; and The Hardest Hidden Pictures Book Ever (2021), with sales of 530,000 copies.

Sowing Seeds for Growth

Highlights Press has recently implemented strategies for further expansion. “With a new sales and marketing team in place, led by Chris Bauerle, Rachel Barry, Todd Jones, and Jessica Davis, we are increasing our marketing into the school and library markets and deepening our relationships with librarians and educators,” Scrimizzi said.

The press is also extending its reach editorially. “We are always building and adding new series based on innovative puzzles and activities,” she added. “Right now, we are also making significant investments toward expanding our publishing categories and are building relationships with authors and illustrators to create a line of nonfiction and fiction picture books.” These will be released as paper-over-board books or jacketed hardcovers and will be geared toward the trade, library, and mass markets.

Discussing the press’s recent and upcoming hardcovers, the editor highlighted a June picture book, Find the Kind: The Biggest Day in Kindness History by Samantha Berger, illustrated by Marina Verola, for which sequels and spinoffs are planned. “We are also anticipating publishing more science titles, including The Ultimate Science Cookbook for Kids, coming out in spring 2025,” Scrimizzi noted. “And we’ve just launched a collection of interactive board books called Baby’s First Puzzle Books.”

Barry, marketing and publicity director of Highlights Press, emphasized that her team is committed to building on the Highlights brand’s mission statement: Children Are the World’s Most Important People. “We’ve taken that message out in big and new ways,” she said. “In 2024, we exhibited at ALA for the first time in five years, launched a major-market book festivals strategy, built an impressive list of social influencers to partner with us, upgraded our Edelweiss content, and changed the metric for success within our marketing department to how many books are we getting into the hands of kids and families.”