The game launched June 2, and more than 20,000 users signed up in the first three weeks; the number has since doubled to more than 41,000. “We’re really excited about that number,” says Linda Leonard, director of new media marketing at RHCB. “It’s definitely in line with where we wanted to go.” According to Leonard, there is a 45% return rate among users, which shows the number of players revisiting to the site to check their progress and complete weekly challenges. She adds that a return rate of this level is high for this kind of campaign, and that there is strong participation among girls, with a 60/40 split between male and female players.  

Choosing the name was “difficult,” Johnston admits, because several potential names were unavailable, and because she didn’t want “something that sounded like a real estate office or a Hallmark card.” She wanted the name to reflect a sense of California, and it finally came to her once she rented office space. “It’s a block from the beach in La Jolla, on a small alley that looks like a lane,” she says. “The place gave us the name.”

Andrea Welch, who had worked with Johnston for eight years at Harcourt, has joined the imprint as an editor. Their aim is to produce 18 to 20 books a year, with a primary focus on “lyrical, engaging picture books for young children.” Though Johnston says they will also publish fiction for middle-graders and young adults, “that won’t be the driving force.”  

"We've found historically that New York publishing and Hollywood have eyed each other nervously across the dance floor for years," Rick Richter, president and publisher of S&S Children's Publishing, told PW. This deal, he said, comes out of a realization that "if we come together we have more of an influence on the outcome."

Indeed, these books hadn’t even been signed up, in most cases, when Bookshelf ran a roundup of new political titles back in January. Democrats have more options, with two picture books and a middle-grade biography about presumptive nominee Barack Obama and a picture book about the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. On the Republican side, there is a picture book about John McCain, from a biographer who should know him well—his daughter Meghan.

Of these titles, first to market was Yes We Can: A Biography of Barack Obama by Garen Thomas (Feiwel & Friends), which arrived in June. According to editor-in-chief Liz Szabla, the middle-grade book got its start in February, when publisher Jean Feiwel voiced her feeling that children were paying particular attention to this election—and to Barack Obama. As a mother, Szabla agreed. “My eight-year-old, in the margins of his notebook, was writing ‘Obama 2008,’ ” she recalls. “We hadn’t been talking about the election at home. They’d been talking about it school—not in a partisan way, but more in a way that this is a groundbreaking, history-making moment.”  

More than eight years in the making, Our White House began with a conversation between historian David McCullough, who provides an introduction to the book, and author and illustrator Mary Brigid Barrett, founder, president and executive director of the NCBLA. McCullough had been the keynote speaker at a NCBLA meeting at the JFK Library in Boston in 1999 and agreed to become an honorary board member of the organization. At a subsequent meeting with Barrett, he planted the seeds of the book.

“Over lunch one day, David told me that many of our country’s founding fathers and mothers believed that literacy was intrinsic to critical thinking and crucial to our young democracy surviving and thriving,” says Barrett. “He made the connection between literacy and historical literacy and emphasized how important it was to make history come alive for children.”  

Though Thomas and Bok had met several times at Washington functions, the book had its origins, according to Bok, through their having the same agent, Diane Nine of Nine Speakers, Inc. The cartoonist had long considered creating a children’s book, and when he shared that thought with Nine, she suggested he do a book with Thomas, set in Washington. “That seemed to make perfect sense,” says Bok, “and with the election coming up, the timing seemed right.”

Thomas, who has written several books for adults, hadn’t planned on penning a children’s book. “This came out of the blue,” she says, “but I was very flattered when Diane and Chip approached me with the idea of doing a book. Knowing the White House was my contribution to this book, which took me back many years.”