Fourth Story will produce stories and content that span multiple formats, including books, Web sites, online games, DVDs, audio/digital downloads and social networks. Its first series is The Amanda Project, an interactive, collaborative fictional mystery series for girls aged 12 to 14, told across a variety of different media including books, a Web site that features games and a social networking platform, a related series of blogs and satellite sites, music, and merchandise. Fourth Story, which owns all rights for the property, will produce the content for The Amanda Project with a creative team including Web design agency Happy Cog, young adult authors, artists and graphic designers. The project’s Web site will be up and running by the end of this year. Throughout the spring of 2009 Fourth Story will continue to build it, adding more features, and the first book—published under the HarperCollins flagship imprint—will come out in fall 2009. Seven more will follow.  

Furstenfeld and Meyer, who met for the first time last month.

Well, if you're Little, Brown, hoping to promote the August 2 release of Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling Twilight Saga, you come up with an alternative: a four-city concert tour. Beginning on August 1 in New York City, Meyer will appear in “an evening of story and song,” featuring a musical performance by Justin Furstenfeld of the group Blue October. The Breaking Dawn Concert Series includes stops at the Nokia Theatre at Times Square, the Harris Theatre in Chicago on August 5, Royce Hall in Los Angeles on August 7 and Benaroya Hall in Seattle on August 12.

In the concerts, Meyer will hold a Q&A with the audience, and will then be joined onstage by Furstenfeld. Meyer has cited several of his songs as having been inspirational in the writing of her books, and they are included in her playlists, which are popular with fans. She will talk about why she chose a particular song; Furstenfeld will talk about the process of writing it, and then perform it.  

Although Waldo’s heyday was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the books have continued to sell in backlist and he has remained a pop-culture icon, especially among young adults, many of whom have gone so far as to create user-generated content featuring the character on the Internet. The catchphrase “Where’s Waldo?” pops up in conversation, in film and on television; Waldo has even made five cameos on The Simpsons.

Candlewick Press released the sixth Waldo title, The Great Picture Hunt, back in 2006, nearly a decade after the fifth book was first published, followed by paperback versions of the first five titles in 2007. Meanwhile, Entertainment Rights/Classic Media acquired the licensing rights to the property in 2007. The two companies worked together to develop consistent product design and marketing plans for this phase of Waldo’s life.  

In these pages, D’Aluisio and Menzel profile the families they visited, presenting a summary of their lifestyle, a photograph of family members surrounded by the food they consume over a course of a week and a shopping list of those items. Among the eye-opening information is the cost of each clan’s weekly food expenditure, ranging from the equivalent of $1.22 spent by a family of six living in a refugee camp in the Darfur province of Sudan to the $341.98 spent by a North Carolina family of four.

The book was inspired by the couple’s longtime interest in nutrition and their love of travel. Menzel recalls visiting a supermarket after returning to their California home from one international trip. “It suddenly struck us that our fellow Americans are getting bigger and bigger, which leads to serious health consequences,” he says. “In 2000 the Center for Disease Control published a study that one in every three American children will at some point in their lives develop diabetes. American kids need to understand about nutrition and about the consequences of what they put in their bodies.”  

The 39 Clues was prominently highlighted at the Scholastic booth.

One trend that was evident was the growing role of the Internet in supporting a licensed brand, book-based or otherwise. While television or film exposure used to be the most critical aspect of an entertainment license, these days books, merchandise, television, films and the Internet all are considered almost equally important, with each helping promote the brand and drive consumers back and forth among all the elements.