Author/Illustrator Gets Own Line of Books

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on January 25, 2007 Sign up now!

by Joy Bean, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 1/25/2007

The Penguin Young Readers Group has inked an exclusive deal with writer and illustrator Salina Yoon for a line of novelty books bearing her name. Salina Yoon Books will debut this March with two titles, Just for Daddy! and Just for Mommy!, followed by two more in April, My Princess Essentials and Construction Trucks.

Debra Dorfman, president of Grosset & Dunlap and Price Stern Sloan, says the deal came out of her longstanding relationship with Yoon and the more than 25 books they had worked on together. "We started doing so many books that I thought we would want an exclusive with her, because we don't want anyone else to publish her," Dorfman says. They reached agreement last March for a two-year deal, and a third-year option. The details of the deal include 22 books, with 10 books a year published with Price Stern Sloan and one book a year with Putnam.

Aside from the 25 books Yoon has done with Penguin, she has published close to 45 others with a variety of other publishers. Her path to getting published began with an internship at Intervisual Books in California. "I offered to work for Intervisual for free for the summer during art school," Yoon recalls, "and I was offered a job there [as a junior designer] six weeks into the internship." From there, Yoon worked her way up to art director at Intervisual, and began illustrating books for the company.

Yoon.

Her first book, The Icky Sticky Frog, was published in 1999 by the Piggy Toes Press imprint, and Yoon says most of her books are still in print "because they are all pretty recent, done within the span of eight or nine years. I do about 10 books a year."

Before now, you'd have to have a very keen eye to pick out a Salina Yoon book, because she has a number of different styles. "I don't keep doing any one style for too long," she says. "I did digital, painterly, really loose paintings and some tighter. I change my style around so much because I've never been interested in getting famous for any one style, but rather I just wanted to do a good number of books." The changing of styles became a habit while she was working at Intervisual because in one year alone, the company published 14 of her titles. "I changed my style so it looked like they had a different illustrator for the books."

Yoon left Intervisual after three years and started freelancing in order to "try my hand at doing it all myself," she says. Since then she has published books with Simon & Schuster, Scholastic and, of course, Penguin. She was discovered there in 2003, through the slush pile. "I got an eight-book contract from Penguin from one slush pile submission," Yoon says. "On average, out of three submissions, S&S would take one and Scholastic would take one out of about five, but it was always multiple contracts with Penguin. "Each year they would ask me for an exclusive, and this year I finally agreed."

One of the four books
on the debut list.

Though the books in the line will all bear Yoon's name as well as a logo she created, she says that any stress she used to feel has disappeared. "I felt pressure before, when I was submitting one book at a time, but now it's like having a steady job. My husband is also a freelancer and we never know what kind of year we're going to have. Once we had this contract, we felt like we could make some plans."

Dorfman says the line will help people recognize Yoon's work as a brand. "People will know to look for the next Salina Yoon book. And hopefully she will some day want to license her characters. We're branding as much as possible."