In a bid to tap into a new talent pool for preschool picture books, Random House Children's Publishing is forming a new imprint, Bolder Books for Boys and Girls, which will release multiple titles by artists working in TV animation. The venture is a broad-based licensing agreement with Bolder Media for Boys and Girls, a company recently founded by Fred Siebert, executive producer of Frederator Studios, the largest independent producer of animation for Nickelodeon, and Susan Miller, president of Mixed Media Group, a property development, production and licensing firm.
Bolder Media's mission is to foster the creation of new book-based properties with potential for television, film and licensing. "We're bringing [Random House] a fresh point of view from a whole bunch of people who they never would have met," Miller said. At the same time, animators get the opportunity to develop their own properties and explore a new medium.
Random House teamed up with Bolder Media for the new imprint before it had seen a single word or drawing. The agreement, said Kate Klimo, v-p and publisher, Random House/ Golden Books for Young Readers, gives Random a chance to experiment with different artists and formats.
A Concept Rooted in History
Bolder Media follows a creative model implemented by organizations such as Warner Bros. Animation in the 1940s and Motown Records in the 1960s. Their process was to identify people with raw talent and place them in an environment conducive to innovation. Siebert emulated this process when he launched creator-driven short film initiatives at both Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, which ultimately led to TV series such as The Powerpuff Girlsand The Fairly OddParents.
There is precedent for this model in publishing as well. Klimo pointed out that Golden Books got its start by opening a Beverly Hills office to tap into a wave of European animation talent that had begun working at the Hollywood studios; these same animators designed the first Golden Books. Similarly, at Random House, "Ted [Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss] was an ad man, and he opened the doors to his buddies on Madison Avenue to create Beginner Books," Klimo explained.
In the case of Bolder Media, Siebert put out the word within the animation community that he was looking for book ideas. He provided limited guidelines, including the number of words and that the stories should appeal to preschoolers, and let interested artists take it from there. He received a flood of proposals—nearly 500 to date—ranging from fully illustrated storyboards to good ideas that needed refinement to concepts that didn't work. "A few came in and you wondered if they'd ever even seen a child," Siebert said.
Bolder presented 32 proposals to Random House, which currently is focusing on a dozen of those and will select at least four for its inaugural list, tentatively planned for spring 2007. Klimo reported that the authors have been very willing to cooperate on revisions. "They're super high energy, they're as flexible as pretzels and they're so enthusiastic that it warms the cockles of a jaded book editor's heart," she said.
Books First, TV Second
Meanwhile, Bolder Media took the manuscripts and art to Nick Jr., which recently announced plans to launch one of the properties, Bob Boyle's Wubby, Widget and Walden, in fall 2006. Wubby is among the first dozen properties Random House has under development, but having Nick Jr. on board wasn't a driving force behind the publisher's involvement. "Our marketing and publicity people perked up at that," Klimo admitted. "But we're bibliocentric. That [Nick Jr. presence] was nice, but it was sort of gravy."
Siebert and Miller noted that animators naturally have a creative style that lends itself to television, and aren't reluctant to translate their books to entertainment, as some children's authors are. Yet they stressed that the books come first. "We don't think about TV whatsoever, we just think about the book," Siebert said. "If the book is great, you have a one-in-a-thousand shot of making it into something else. If it's not great, you have no chance. So you focus on making the book great."
While each book will be unique, the imprint is likely to have an overriding look and feel. "We're creating a specific sense of place, where talented people can go to be heard," said Klimo. "The books emanating from this sense of place will be—much like TV animation—irreverent, spontaneous, kid-friendly and innocent. We're trying to throw out some of our preconceived ideas and test the notion of what a children's book is."
