Watching TV on the bus

Teen TV novelizations invade bookstores and void the teenage mind.

By Carina Chocano

Mar 3, 2000 | There's nothing like a book about brand-name snacks to turn a kid into a bibliophile.

At least that's the thinking at Simon & Schuster, where the popular "Cheerios Play Book" series has been followed recently by the "Sun-Maid Raisin Play Book." And HarperCollins' HarperFestival division has added "The Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Fun Book" to its preschool roster, while Charlesbridge Publishing (pioneers in the packaged goods literary genre) has contributed the seminal "The M&M's Brand Chocolate Candies Counting Book" to the kindergarten canon.

The trend shows no sign of slowing down, with stories based on Kellogg's Froot Loops, Hershey's Kisses and Barnum's Animal Crackers shooting down the pipeline.

Soon a generation of babies will utter "Nabisco" as their first word, a nasty development that should take some heat off the burgeoning industry in the novelization of teen TV shows. At the moment, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and other venerable publishers churn out these "books" at an average rate of six per year. And as hard as it may be to believe, compared with the "Story of Oreos," "Summer" (published by Hyperion and authored by fictitious television neuroteen "Felicity Porter") could pass for "Moby-Dick."

Five of the 13 prime-time programs on the WB network have spawned novelizations, which are all the rage in children's and young adults' publishing. Paperback versions of shows aimed at teens and preteens include, among many others, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (26 official novels so far), "Dawson's Creek" (eight) "Charmed" (one, with five on the way), "Clueless" (20), "7th Heaven" (five) and "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch" (30 novels and one magic handbook).

While original works of fiction must carve out a market for themselves, based-on-TV books are eagerly awaited by a receptive, pre-existing audience. Publishers swing both ways these days -- buying the rights to original characters from television production companies for books and selling to television production companies the rights to original book characters -- but the former practice, commonly referred to as "licensing in," is by far the more common.

Teens are addicted to TV (which has increasingly catered to them in the past several years), and publishers are aiming for codependency. According to the Licensing Letter, a newsletter that covers the licensed-product business, retail sales of licensed publishing in the United States and Canada totaled $4.90 billion in 1999, 7 percent of the total earnings for licensed products. This figure represents a 5 percent increase from 1998.

Everybody is jockeying for a piece of the licensing action and publishers are well placed in the greedy fray. In exchange for the "brand extension" and fee they provide production companies, publishers get the benefit of brand recognition from popular television shows. And when a publisher and production company (or network) are owned by the same umbrella company, the revenues stay in the family.

At this point, with the rapid expansion of media companies and the distinctions between their many acquisitions becoming blurred, it takes an MBA to distinguish the various parts of the money machine. Fortunately for those involved, there seems to be no such thing in this region of the economy as conflict of interest.

Next Page: "It rubbed us the way a Calvin in the irregular bin might"

• View blog reactions