The Penguin Blog

Video Killed the Radio Star

Regular readers of the Penguin blog will remember my yearning for legwarmers and leotards when Puffin visited the Brit School of performing arts late last year. We were scouting for talent, and found it, casting brilliant young actress Chloe St. Clair Stannard as the eponymous Sara in Melvin Burgess’ latest paperback Sara’s Face. The novel is a gritty thriller about a young girl, desperate for fame and obsessed with plastic surgery.
Today we’ve launched the first of eight mini Sara’s Face ‘webisodes’ starring Chloe on Penguin’s teen site www.spinebreakers.co.uk. As far as we know, no publisher’s tried this before. Sure, we’ve all seen snazzy online trailers but this project’s just a little bit different.
In effect, Spinebreakers.co.uk is broadcasting a mini drama-series, gradually revealing a story which both stands alone, and enhances what’s in the novel.
Much of the book consists of transcripts from Sara’s vlog. She’s always recording herself, always creating new versions of Sara to present to the camera. Melvin worked with an experienced director to adapt these so that they were suitable to use as scripts for film shorts.

But teenagers are used to myriad extras, be they bonus features on dvds or the option to customise their mii to allow them to wander off into other peoples’ games. Melvin also wrote some brand new and exclusive material, which doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, to give readers/viewers an extra insight into the story.
According to Melvin, writing on the timesonline’s book site this morning, adapting his words from page to, well, webpage, wasn’t easy. But as each new webisode is broadcast Sara, and her destructive hunger for fame, become bigger, better, and even more believable. Here at Penguin, we’re sure the challenge will pay off. And spinebreakers (any story-surfing, web-exploring, word-loving, day-dreaming, reader/writer/artist/thinker between the ages of 13 and 18, in case you were wondering) can also enter a competition to win a state of the art DV camera by uploading their own video-rant about fame here.

Jodie Mullish, Publicity Manager, Puffin

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I'm Gonna Live Forever, I'm Gonna Learn How to Fly!

Kids dancing outside classrooms. Uberstylish girls singing with perfect pitch on the stairs. A young couple rowing at the tops of their voices before stopping  to ask ‘shall we take that from the top?’. And an almost unbearable urge on my part to pull on the leggings and leg warmers and start limbering up.

It can only mean one thing. Puffin entered the world of Fame at the Brit School, an institution who’s distinguished alumni include Leona Lewis, the Kooks, and a certain Ms. Winehouse (heard of her lately, anyone?). We travelled to Croydon, the UK’s latest hotbed of performing talent to cast the part of Sara in our version of Kate Modern – regularly updated dramatic 'vlogs' - based on Melvin Burgess’ latest novel Sara’s Face.

Melvin is rightly known as the Godfather of Teen Fiction, and he first soared to fame himself in 1997 on publication of the hugely controversial Junk.  Since then, his books have never shied away from combining difficult issues with fantastic storytelling.

Sara’s Face (out in Penguin paperback at the end of Jan) focuses on celebrity, image, and cosmetic surgery. Lead character Sara is 17, gorgeous and desperate for fame. The story is told partly through transcripts of her vidlogs, and it’s these, along with some new and exclusive material from Melvin, that we’re going to be shooting and releasing as ‘webisodes’ on Penguin’s teen site Spinebreakers.co.uk early next year.

Coming over all Simon Cowell wasn’t necessary, as the actresses who turned up to the auditions were seriously talented. Still, they had a difficult task. The clips need to feel entirely natural and Sara, who’s beautiful, manipulative and damaged runs the gamut of emotions from ecstasy to horror. The director reckoned these girls’ abilities easily surpassed those of the groups he gets sent when he’s casting with big TV stations. Each girl brought her own interpretation to the role and any one of three particularly talented auditionees could land the part. It’s time to roll back the tapes and watch them back to find out who’ll be lucky.

As well as the videos, spinebreakers will be hosting a vlogging competition. Entrants can upload their own  rants on the subject of beauty, and how far they’d go to get it onto the site from early next year to win state of the art video recording equipment.

The eight professionally shot and acted videos based on Sara’s Face will be broadcast on spinebreakers in January. Don’t forget to watch them. In fact, remember remember remember remember remember.

Jodie from Puffin

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The Kids are Alright

Last night saw the launch of Spinebreakers, Penguin's brand new community site for teenagers. In internal meetings, at publishing industry conferences and on this blog we've long wrung our hands over the young readers we lose to video games, youtube and myspace and finally some of the folks here have tried to do something about it.

Over the last 9 months a hardworking team from Penguin and an equally hardworking panel of teenagers have been discussing, shaping and finetuning the Spinebreakers site. From the look and feel, to the colours, to the content itself, the teen panel have been involved in every stage of what was sometimes an ardous process. Authors have been interviewed (by teenagers), vodcasts and podcasts recorded and uploaded (by teenagers), alternative endings written and alternative covers drawn (by, yes you guessed it, teenagers).

As you can probably tell, Spinebreakers will be a hugely interactive site - teenagers everywhere are encouraged to send in audio, video, writing, alternative covers and basically just get involved. We know that internet users, and teenagers in particular, are not content to be passive consumers of content, they want to get on with it and actively create stuff and Spinebreakers will be a place where book related content in all formats will be welcomed, displayed and shared. If you are a creative teenager interested in books, or know one,  get stuck in and pass on the link.

I think it is a hugely exciting project and I can't wait to see how it evolves. Congratulations to the Spinebreakers Crew and everyone involved in this.

Jeremy Ettinghausen
Digital Publisher

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(Not) My Generation

Spinebreaker (n):
    1.    a well-loved and enthusiastically thumbed book
    2.    a member of www.spinebreakers.co.uk, Penguin’s pioneering online book community website for teenagers.

This morning Penguin announced the launch of www.spinebreakers.co.uk, a booklovers community website, revolutionary in the UK publishing world because it’s the first site that’s not just for teenagers … it’s by them too.

Yes (gulp), it’s true.  We’ve realised that as much as many of us may still think we’re the voice of edgy youth, it’s been many a year (many a decade for most of us if we’re frank) since we actually were teenagers, so who are we to write a teen website?  Rather than look like dancing dads, we’ve handed control over to a crack teen-team, who will get to interview authors, read and review books, design their own jackets and, crucially, editorially manage the website, including making decisions around all the user-generated content we’ll be encouraging from the online community and even  deciding what the URL should be (that took some time and many, many hours of teen debate, believe me!).

So, after many months of working on the idea, it’s finally out there and set to launch in September.  What do you think?  Any teens out there who want to get involved?  Drop me a mail.

Anna Rafferty – Penguin Digital Marketing Director

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