OUR SEVEN CORE VALUES:
The Gossip Mill
(Excerpt)
(The New Yorker) — Millions of girls have consumed Alloy Entertainment’s products, but the company’s name does not appear on the spine of its books. Rather, it packages about thirty novels a year for publishers, and also generates television shows and a growing number of ideas for feature films. In order to do all this, Alloy has developed a process with an industrial level of efficiency. Ideas are typically suggested in weekly development meetings, and if they gain approval, are fleshed out into a short summary by an editor. A writer is asked to create a sample chapter on spec; if Alloy executives are happy with the sample they put her (or, on occasion, him) on contract. …
Last year, eighteen of Alloy’s twenty-nine titles hit the Times children’s best-seller list. Elise Howard, the associate publisher for fiction in the children’s division of HarperCollins, says of the Alloy executives, “They have a no-holds-barred approach to giving readers exactly what they want to find.”
“Editors and publishers can get hung up on what’s good for kids,” Howard told me. “At Alloy, they always think first about what the kids want to read.” …
The company’s main goal is to produce blockbusters. It is the belief at Alloy that what kids want to read is not so different from what adults want to read, and many Alloy books have their genesis in successful grownup entertainment reworked for a younger audience. The “Pretty Little Liars” series, for example, was conceived as a “Desperate Housewives for teens.” (It has sold more than eight thousand copies.) …
In the middle of this decade, one of the things that kids most wanted to read was the “Gossip Girl” series. “Gossip Girl”…had its genesis in a development meeting in early 2000, and is written in the voice of an anonymous blogger who chronicles the antics of students at elite New York private schools. …Sex, drugs, and alcohol are an essential part of the “Gossip Girl” curriculum. The first book was published in 2002, and was written by Cecily von Ziegesar, who at the time was an Alloy editor and an old hand at the writing-by-committee method. …
There have been twelve “Gossip Girl” books so far, although several of the later ones were only “created” by von Ziegesar, who oversaw the work of a ghost-writer while also “creating” another ghostwritten series, “The It Girl,” a best-selling “Gossip Girl” spinoff set in an upstate boarding school. … So far, more than five and a half million “Gossip Girl” books have been sold, and a TV show, on the CW network, is in its third season.
Leslie Morgenstein (the president of Alloy), who has two sons, aged thirteen and ten, says that when the “Gossip Girl” show began airing, parents at his son’s Upper East Side private school—especially parents with daughters—were horrified. Success seems to have dispelled the opprobrium, however, and these days he is more likely to be asked to donate, for a school silent auction, a visit to the set of the series. …
These days, Alloy Media and Marketing is the owner of Teen.com, a popular Web site that heavily promotes Alloy Entertainment products; it also owns Channel 1, the in-school television network created by Chris Whittle, which means that it can broadcast commercials for Alloy properties to a captive teen audience numbering in the millions…
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Something for me to think about as my own daughters will be reading soon…