Beacon Street Girls Put on Traveling Shoes

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on November 30, 2006 Sign up now!

by Judith Rosen, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 11/30/2006

With more than 400,000 copies of the first nine books of its 34-book Beacon Street Girls series in print, B*tween Productions is looking to extend its reach beyond the traditional book and gift markets with Charlotte in Paris (Oct.), the first book in its BSG Adventure series. To promote the series, the Lexington, Mass.-based tween publisher is partnering with Atlas Travel International, a woman-owned travel agency, which is part of a travel network with 3,300 offices.

According to B*tween CEO and principal BSG creator Addie Swartz, the new series is projected to have 25 books, five featuring each of the five main Beacon Street Girls. "[Travel] is part of the fabric of the series; the goal is to provide broad exposure. The original idea was to have the girls meet in a school overseas," says Swartz, who regards travel as key to teaching tolerance and understanding. Initial plans for the series were overruled by the BSG Tween Advisory Board, which consists of 3,500 "super fans," who lobbied for Charlotte to go back to Paris and find her cat, Orangina. Future BSG Adventures will take place overseas as well as stateside in Colorado and Hollywood.

Atlas will not only lend its travel expertise to B*tween Productions on future books but later in December it is collaborating with B*tween Productions on a sweepstakes, which will offer a trip to Paris for the grand prize winners. In addition, Atlas will market family vacation packages based on destinations in BSG Adventures, starting with a Paris vacation for August 2007. Based on a survey coauthored by the two companies last month, more than 80% of the preteen respondents liked the idea of getting vacation ideas from the books they read, and 17% had taken a vacation based on a book they had read.

Closer to home, Atlas is marking the partnership by making this week BSG Shopping Week at its two Massachusetts brick-and-mortar travel stores. On Friday, December 1, Swartz will do a signing at the store in Lexington; on Saturday, December 2 she will appear at the Milford store.

In 2007, Swartz plans to publish six more BSG books, including two new Adventures.