Gossip Girl Dishes On
By Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 4/3/2008
After being silenced by the screenwriters strike, gossip soon will fly once more, when new episodes of Gossip Girl begin to air again starting April 21. And fans eager for the next book need wait only until May, when Little Brown Books for Young Readers’ Poppy imprint will publish Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl: The Carlyles with a 200,000-copy first printing.
With the exception of the gossipy blogger who gives the series its name, the cast of this and subsequent volumes in the spin-off is all-new, though the setting remains the same. Exactly the same. The Carlyles—teen triplets who relocate to Manhattan from Nantucket—move into the very Fifth Avenue penthouse that Gossip Girl star Blair Waldorf’s family has vacated. They attend the same exclusive private schools as did the characters from the original arc and move in the same privileged social circles.
“My publisher and I wanted to continue Gossip Girl, but the last novel took the characters to the end of the summer after senior year and they were all going off to different parts of the country,” von Ziegesar says. “With all of them scattered, I thought it was more logical to follow a new group of characters, newcomers to the city who land in the same Upper East Side playground.”
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| Gossip Girl creator Cecily von Ziegesar. Photo: Roger Hagadone. |
Cindy Eagan, editorial director of Poppy, recalls being instantly attracted to the initial Gossip Girl proposal, which ironically—given its title character’s penchant for communicating on the Internet—was one of the first book proposals she received via e-mail. “Cecily’s writing was unapologetically catty, funny and incredibly descriptive,” says Eagan. “She seemed to have caught onto trends before they happened, with Gossip Girl being what was initially described as a ‘Web mistress,’ before the word ‘blogger’ was known. I jumped on the book right away.”
Though the publisher originally signed a contract with the author for four books to be published simultaneously in mass market format, that plan was scrapped. “When Cecily started writing, it became clear that the books would be more complex, more fleshed out, than we had anticipated,” Eagan explains. “They would take her longer to write and we knew it wasn’t going to be possible to get four out at once.”
And it soon became clear that the popular series, which debuted in 2002, would extend beyond four titles. There are more than five million copies in print of the 12 earlier Gossip Girl books, and a spin-off series, It Girl, has sold a million copies since its 2005 launch. After the first It Girl novel and the ninth Gossip Girl book, ghostwriters began to contribute to both series, Eagan says, though von Ziegesar continues to plot out each story and helps shape the drafts and characters.
Eagan reports that sales of Gossip Girls remain steady, though the publisher did see a spike when the TV show debuted last fall and Poppy published tie-in editions of the first two Gossip Girl novels. “The biggest change we see as a result of the show is that Gossip Girl is becoming part of the pop-culture language,” Eagan observes.
Although von Ziegesar is not part of the writing team for the Gossip Girl show, she does spend time on the set and says the show’s creators are doing “a terrific job,” noting, “I had thought that they might change everything so the books would be unrecognizable, but instead the show is close to the heart of the novels.”
Did von Ziegesar ever envision that her novels would ever make their way to the screen? “I didn’t think anyone would want to read the books, let alone watch the stories on TV,” she replies. “I really was nervous that this was such a privileged group of young people in Manhattan that no one would care about them. That was my challenge—to make people care.”
