Bookshelf spoke with Cindy Eagan, executive editor at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, about chick lit for teens, and the Gossip Girl series she edits.
Q: How did Gossip Girl come your way?
A: I was reading in PW about how 17th Street Productions was sending around one of the very first e-mail proposals, about private school girls who were kind of out of control. The name of the project was Gossip Girl. I contacted 17th Street and they sent me the proposal, which was quite different from what Gossip Girl turned out to be. I was attracted to it because of the word "gossip." I had gone to boarding school, and thought the proposal sounded deliciously naughty without apologizing. I thought, "I want to read it!"
I went to 17th Street and asked who wrote the proposal and it was Cecily [von Ziegesar, now author of the books]. She was an assistant editor there at the time, and she'd gone to Nightingale-Bamford [a private all-girls' school in New York City]. We signed up four books and were going to do them as mass market paperbacks, all four at once. Cecily really worked hard on the first novel, and it became evident that we couldn't get four out at the same time. It turned out to be a fantastic story that we thought could be a lot more, and we shaped it into an original trade paperback.
John Keller was our publisher at the time. I remember him coming into my office after reading the first manuscript and saying, "I think this is going to be big." It turned out that it was. I thought we'd get a lot of controversy but we really didn't. The third book hit the bestseller list and that was so exciting. And it's taken off from there.
Q: Was your boarding school experience helpful as the editor of the books?
A: Yes. I was inspired by a lot of the girls I went to boarding school with. When I got to school there were all these girls from Manhattan who were flitting all over the East Coast, and I was a 14-year-old from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It certainly helped me [with Gossip Girl]—I understood a lot of the references the characters were making. Sometimes people accuse the books of not being real, but they definitely are.
Q: When and why did you spin off the series?
A: Two years later we decided to try to duplicate its success but in a different way. Teenagers today are pummeled with a million cable channels and tabloid magazines. The lifestyles of movie stars have become almost as important as the movie itself. Teenagers see pictures of Demi Moore and Halle Berry and can't help but wonder what that lifestyle would be like. That was the inspiration for The A-List. It's inspired by Gossip Girl but it's the West Coast version.
Then we realized we had a lot of nine- and ten-year-old girls who were reading Gossip Girl, which was a little disturbing because there's swearing and drinking and sex in them. We wanted to give those girls something of their own that's fun and has fashion and friendship, so we put together The Clique, which are a group of Westchester seventh-grade girls.
Q: And there's another spinoff coming this fall?
A: Yes — The It Girl. We set it in a boarding school, with Jenny Humphrey, one of the characters from Gossip Girl. It has different kinds of characters and a different flavor. The school has tradition and rules, and of course those are made to be broken.
Q: What is the appeal of Gossip Girl and its successors?
A: I feel these books help girls get through the hard times of peer pressure and insecurity. Each series has a main bitchy character who is probably the most insecure of them all. Teenagers are all reading Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada and watching Sex and the City. They're worldly and sophisticated. These books give them characters their own age who are going through the same things they are. And they don't talk down to their readers.
Q: Do you think the chick lit genre will stay strong?
A: I do. Girls have always read adult chick lit, and now there are books for their own age range. Because there's so much of it right now, girls will be selective about what they're reading. It will smooth down to an even level. But I do think the genre is here to stay.
