The Penguin Group won the global license to publish books based on Lucasfilm‘s new 3D-animated film and television franchise, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Penguin will be publishing books through several imprings, including Penguin Young Readers Group, DK Publishing, and Penguin in the UK. This will be the first time Penguin Young Readers publishes Star Wars titles.
“The animation is so amazing,” said Debra Dorfman, president and publisher of Grosset & Dunlap and Price Stern Sloan. “It’s George Lucas’s baby and he’s working directly on it, so we knew it would be spectacular. And it spans all the age ranges, young to old.”
Grosset & Dunlap will publish a reader, picture book, activity book, photo book, and a movie novel this summer. DK will be putting out Clone Wars: The Visual Guide, Clone Wars: Ultimate Sticker Book, two readers and a Funfax title (the last only in the UK). British Ladybird has scheduled two activity books, two storybooks, and a Press Out ‘n’ Build book.
The first books should appear on 26 July in the US (to coincide with San Diego Comic-Con), and 7 August in the UK. These will presage the movie release (15 August), which itself precedes the Cartoon Network/TNT television series debuting this Autumn. All the initial books are movie-based, but the characters are the same in the movie and series, and “those titles will naturally backlist,” Dorfman believes. Grosset & Dunlap will release five more titles this Autumn in conjunction with the TV series launch.
The UK and US divisions are combining efforts developing the books, reformatting some titles to fit each other’s markets and sharing files. For example, one of Grosset & Dunlap’s fall titles, a model-making kit, is a Penguin UK format that it first launched with Dr. Who. “I think Lucas was intrigued that we were all able to work together to do a global deal,” Dorfman says. “That doesn’t happen a lot.”