Chris Snowdon: Character building

Series publishing for children has seen something of a renaissance in the past couple of years. This month, a new mass-market series called the Party Fairies leapt straight into the bestseller charts. Combined sales of the series' titles--which include Phoebe the Fashion Fairy, Cherry the Cake Fairy and Melodie the Music Fairy--were 50,000 in the first two weeks.

The series is published by Orchard Books under the Rainbow Magic brand--one of 2004's most successful mass-market brands with sales of nearly a million books to date, according to BookScan's TCM. The next in the series, Jewel Fairies, is already planned for this autumn. The creator of the Rainbow Magic brand, packager Working Partners, argues that series publishing has always been a core part of the children's market--it is only its profile that changes.

"Series never went away--they are at the heart of children's books," Chris Snowdon, Working Partners m.d. says. "A few years ago, publishers decided to market children's books by focusing on authors. But I believe that, with the exception of Jacqueline Wilson, children associate with central characters and stories, rather than writers."

Ideas hothouse

This year marks Working Partners' 10th anniversary. The company was set up in the UK by Ben Baglio and Rod Ritchie to "package" concepts and ideas for fiction series. Baglio had been working in the packaging business in the US. Today, Working Partners remains the only packager of its kind in the UK. Unlike traditional packagers, Working Partners creates the concept and editorial text and lets its publishing partners create the visual package.

The company's reputation developed both here and in the US on the back of long-running series such as Animal Ark (Hodder Children's Books) and Heartland (Scholastic). Animal Ark's sales have now passed 7.5 million across nearly 90 titles.

But changing fashions and a new focus on author-led fiction meant that, two to three years ago, the company needed to diversify its portfolio. "Publishers wanted shorter series and longer books and instead of using pseudonyms, they wanted author-led series," says Snowdon. This was the same in the US and the UK. "As a result, packagers like ourselves needed to produce more individual projects--we have to work much more creatively and have more ideas each year than ever before." Some series have also had to become more literary and are created by individual writers, including Stephen Cole (The Wereling) and Allan Frewin Jones (Talisman).

Today, Working Partners is usually involved in 20 projects at any given time and will sign about seven new projects a year. Current output ranges from horror to spy stories, historical fiction and, of course, fairies. Many of the popular series in bookshops have been generated by the creative team, including RHCB's Lady Grace series, HC Children's Books' Warriors series, and Puffin's My Secret Unicorn by Linda Chapman. Only very successful series are now expected to develop beyond eight titles, which would once have been considered the norm.

Some of Working Partners' products are custom-developed, and it expects to do more in this arena. "We don't develop someone else's idea though," Snowdon says. "All we ask for is an age group and a genre, and we will work from that." This ensures the intellectual property rights remain with Working Partners.

Partner publishers

As most of its series are originated inhouse, the company is second-guessing fashions a couple of years in advance. It believes the latest trend is for more horror titles and is behind a range of projects in this arena, including HarperCollins' Warriors, Scholastic's Vampire Plagues, Bloomsbury's The Wereling trilogy and Hodder's upcoming series for younger readers, Midnight Library.

The team has a standardised approach to developing new projects. "We will create the concept, match our database of writers to the project and, when we are happy with the concept and the writing, we will take the project to a publisher," Snowdon says. Many of its inhouse editors are also writers.

Publishers who sign Working Partners' series are those that are "most excited" about any one project. "What makes projects work is editorial energy," Snowdon says. He points to RHCB's enthusiasm for its Lady Grace historical fiction series and Orchard's confident marketing of the Rainbow Magic brand.

Beyond the early stages of a project, a publisher's involvement will vary. Working Partners' job is to create the storylines and editorial but some publishers like to get very involved editorially at the storyline stage and when creating characters, Baglio says.

At each new launch, it is difficult to predict how long a project will run--Rainbow Magic has exceeded all expectations, but Scholastic's long-running Heartland series was much slower to take off. "I tell publishers to do as many titles in the series as they want. But the main thing is that they go to market with commitment," Snowdon says.

The packager is now spreading its wings into other related areas, including merchandise for Rainbow Magic and Animal Ark. It has agreed a partwork deal for Animal Ark and is also looking into a television series for Rainbow Magic. Each of these ventures is expected to underpin the publishing programmes, with books remaining the main business.

Its editorial and rights teams in the UK will be expanded. Internationally, the success of Working Partners' approach can be measured by how well series such as Rainbow Magic travel-- France, Italy, Spain, Germany, South Korea and Japan are some of the publishing partner countries for the series.

The company has also become much more aggressive about selling into the US, where its main publishing partners are Scholastic and HarperCollins, and it also works with S&S, Penguin, Hyperion and Random House. US publishers are more predisposed to working with fiction packagers such as Working Partners and about half the company's primary publishers are in the US. "US publishers get very editorially involved in projects, much more so than in the UK," Baglio says. "We would, therefore, like to have a physical presence in the US."

Working Partners is likely to see more competition in this business in the UK and Europe at some stage, but the company believes there is still plenty of room for growth. Looking at its track record and how quickly it has grown its market here, it is probably right. n > Working Partners: left to right Snowdon, Ritchie and Baglio at the Bologna Children's Book Fair last week

Caroline Horn