Hachette Launches Blog Site for YA Fiction Series

By Jana Riess -- Publishers Weekly, 3/25/2008

Hachette is taking interactivity to the next level by bringing favorite fictional characters right to readers’ Web browsers. Beginning on April 1, Hachette’s FaithWords division will have the five main characters in its new All About Us YA series begin blogging. 

The blog site, www.allaboutusbooks.net, went live on Monday with a chatty post from “Lissa,” a fictional teen whose exploits at an elite boarding school will be featured in the first novel of the series, It’s All About Us by Shelley Adina, which will hit stores in May with a 65,000 copy first print run. Lissa’s troubles with boys, fashionistas, and fitting in with the trust-fund set may sound like Gossip Girls, and indeed it is—with a Christian twist, since the books deal with questions of faith. Lissa and her “besties” (that’s “best friends” in MySpace-speak) will take turns starring in the books—with The Fruit of My Lipstick and Be Strong and Curvaceous scheduled to release in August and January, respectively—but the characters will all have a presence simultaneously on the blog.

According to Jana Burson, director of publicity for FaithWords, Hachette wanted to reach teens where they live, “which is online.” This approach made the blog a logical extension of the series. “We wanted teen readers to feel like they could actually interact with the characters,” said Burson. Echo, the Nashville firm contracted to create the site, hired writers to blog as the characters and gave them lists of the girls’ likes and dislikes, shopping habits, problems and activities.

Fresh content is key. “If we give readers new and exclusive content online all the time, they’re going to keep coming back,” Burson said. “And since they have to sign in on the Web site, we will have their demographic information and e-mail addresses, and we can use that to build the audience for the next book.”