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Penguin Group Signs License for Star Wars: The Clone Wars

By Karen Raugust -- Publishers Weekly, 5/1/2008 7:49:00 AM

The Penguin Group has acquired a global license to publish books based on Lucasfilm’s new 3D-animated film and television franchise, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The program will extend across several imprints within Penguin Young Readers Group, DK Publishing and Penguin in the U.K. While DK is a longtime Star Wars licensee, this is the first time Penguin Young Readers Group has been associated with the property.

“The animation is so amazing,” says 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.”

This summer, Grosset & Dunlap will publish a reader, 8x8, picture book, activity book, photo book and a movie novel (the last to be distributed in the U.K. by Puffin as well). DK will release Clone Wars: The Visual Guide, Clone Wars: Ultimate Sticker Book, two readers and, for U.K. only, a Funfax title, while Ladybird in the U.K. plans two activity books, two storybooks and a Press Out ‘n’ Build title.

Doug Whiteman, Penguin's president and publisher, and Dorfman at sales conference, flanked by "security."

The on-sale date for the first books is July 26 in the U.S. and August 7 in the U.K.; the U.S. movie release will be on August 15, followed by the DVD release and then a prime-time TV series on Cartoon Network and TNT in the fall. All the books on the initial roster 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 an additional five titles in the fall in conjunction with the TV series launch.

Penguin’s U.K and U.S. divisions are working closely on 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 U.K. 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.”

The U.S. on-sale date coincides with Comic-Con in San Diego, and Penguin plans a big event there, along with other promotions with Lucasfilm and other Clone Wars licensees. To generate excitement internally, Clone Troopers appeared at Penguin’s recent sales conference.