17th Street Productions Takes On Hollywood
What do you get when you take a teen-oriented book packager, implant a Silicon Alley–style “convergence media business model,” and throw in a few Hollywood film options? As Leslie Morgenstein, president of 17th Street Productions, puts it, “We’re becoming a multimedia company rather than a book packager,” and that fairly describes one production outfit’s quest to take book packaging to new frontiers. Last January, Morgenstein and partner Ann Brashares, who had bought out their partner Dan Weiss’s interest in 17th Street, in turn sold the company to Alloy, a web-focused marketing company that hosts a teen website — alloy.com — and mails 40 million catalogs per year. Alloy also owns CCS, a direct marketer of skateboarding gear. Now teamed up with 17th Street, the budding teen e-media conglomerate is making a gender-targeted play — Alloy’s the girl brand, CCS is the boy brand — to leverage book-based content into media properties for film, television, and the Internet.
To take one example, Fearless is a book series by teen mega-author Francine Pascal about a girl “born without the fear gene” — and positioned as a somewhat grittier version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — which 17th Street and Simon & Schuster had in galley form when they took it to Alloy over a year ago. TV options had already been sold to Columbia TriStar, and the Alloy team jumped on board to design a “microsite” for an interactive component to the series, complete with a sort of pop-up feature that enables users to nose around in a simulation of the protagonist’s laptop computer. In a similar vein, the company has produced The Black Book: Diaries of a Teenage Stud, a property optioned for Hollywood by Storyline Entertainment and the Greenblatt Janollari Studio; a publishing deal is in place with HarperCollins.
The convergence comes in with Alloy’s capacity to market these properties via its six-million-name database and what it claims is a total reach of 10 million individuals per month. According to Morgenstein, viral marketing is essential for developing projects for Gen Y. “Alloy knows how to get the audience engaged and get them to market to their friends,” he says. “We get a thing living out there in the online world, and we say, hey, this is a book series.” 17th Street has also created AlloyBooks, a partnership with Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers that launched with four titles last August. The idea is that the books gain from Alloy’s credibility with teens, and draw from what’s been billed as Alloy’s “focus group” for book ideas and even content scooped up from all those message boards. Then there’s television. A handful of options deals last season netted two TV pilots, one of which is based on the book Spy Girls, which 17th Street produced for Pocket. If the pilots spawn series, Alloy will promote the shows on the web and in catalogs.
As other packagers have found, though, dot-coms can be bruising partners. Alloy’s second-quarter losses mounted to $6.9 million, and its stock value has been drifting southward for a year. With a backlist including Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series (a veritable cottage industry of its own), Morgenstein knows a steady gig when he sees one. “We’ll always be developing for book publishing. We want to monetize our content,” he says, sounding like the MBA he is, “and the best way to do that is to be in business with the Random Houses and the Harpers.”
