What do you get when you combine the power of kids’ books with games and online communities? If you’re Scholastic US, you get a transmedia property that results in a bestselling series, and millions of kids engaging with your content. In this week’s episode, Scholastic’s Keith Fretz explains their strategy behind transmedia properties and offers some case studies to show how others can experiment with transmedia.
Keith’s presentation slides are available here.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast for free, you can find us on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, TuneIn, and SoundCloud.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
Transcript
Keith Fretz: There's a lot of really amazing advantages to doing this type of publishing, which I'll talk about a few of those later on in the presentation. But one of the most important I find is this idea of seeking out as many kids as possible that might have an interest in this property. Be whether they identify as a book lover or a game lover or somewhere in between.
Zalina Alvi: In this week's episode, Keith Fretz from Scholastic US shares a few case studies of building successful transmedia properties with a mix of books, games, and community. With four bestselling series, over 22 million books in print across the U.S., and three and a half million registered online game users, the strategy behind Scholastic's transmedia approach is definitely worth considering for any publisher of kids' books. If you'd like to see Keith's presentation slides, you can find them at slideshare.net/booknetcanada. Now, here's Keith.
Keith: Hello. My name is Keith Fretz and I'm an associate producer and game designer for Scholastic. And Scholastic is the world's largest publisher and distributor of children's books. So a lot of the things I'm going to be talking about revolve around my groups, target demographic, middle-grade boys and girls ages 8 to 12. That being said, a lot of these principles can be applied to other demographics as well. I am lucky enough to work on a really fun team at Scholastic. We are in charge of our transmedia publishing properties and, as was just mentioned also, these are for us anyway, book series that have an accompanying online game or online component to them. And there's a lot of really amazing advantages to doing this type of publishing, which I'll talk about a few of those later on in the presentation. But one of the most important I find is this idea of seeking out as many kids as possible that might have an interest in this property. Be whether they identify as a book lover or a game lover or somewhere in between.
We've developed four of these transmedia properties thus far, all 4 have become bestselling series with more than 22 million books in print in the U.S., over 3.5 million registered users for our games and a stat that I'm personally really proud of, 26 minutes average time spent on the site, which is a really healthy number in terms of user engagement on the web. The first series that we developed was the "39 Clues" back in 2008, the first book of this being written by rock star author, Rick Riordan. And "39 Clues" is a really fun worldwide treasure hunt adventure that is now in its fourth arc. So it has stood the test of time and we are proud of it certainly. Each book in the "39 Clues" was packaged with a set of physical trading cards and also a code that when added to your account on our website, unlocked game content that paralleled things that were happening in the book and characters in the book. And this would serve as the basis of our model moving forward as we continued our transmedia publishing programme.
The follow-up to "39 Clues" was "Infinity Ring," launched in 2012. "Infinity Ring" is a time travel adventure. The first book of this series is written by James Dashner, who many of you know is the bestselling author of the "Maze Runner" which was turned into a movie that did quite well in its own right. And with "Infinity Ring" on the website, we wanted to kind of step things up a bit. So we started working with a different game engine that would allow us to create fully-realized 3D worlds for the kids to explore. It was quite a leap from the traditional 2D, flash-based games that were available to us to produce for the "39 Clues." But more importantly, this "Infinity Ring" was our first time being able to bring the game experience from the web also onto mobile devices and tablets, which I think we can all agree is a very important space to be involved in not only for book publishing but also on the game side.
And then the follow-up to "Infinity Ring" was "Spirit Animals." Launched in 2013, "Spirit Animals" has quickly become our flagship series. The first book written by Brandon Mull, who is a very prominent fantasy writer in this demographic, it's really great to have him on board. And as you might be able to see quite small print, but amazing authors following the rest of this series anchored by Marie Lu, who incidentally is a hardcore game fan herself. So it's been really cool to talk to her about this stuff. Since we launched "Spirit Animals," it's really taken off for us. You can see here, there's some really nice pictures from live events we've done. There's a packed-out stadium here. This is from an event in New Hampshire that I was actually at. There's a picture of me signing my first and only autograph to some kids who thought it was cool I made the game. So, it will always hold a special place in my heart. And like I said, it has been a really wild success for us, both hitting the bestseller New York Times and "USA Today" with more than 2.7 million copies in print in the U.S. alone.
The game for "Spirit Animals" is our most robust yet, a fully-realized action role-playing game where kids create their own hero and call their own spirit animal. I mean, who doesn't wanna call their own spirit animal and go on adventures that are similar to the ones that the kids go on in the book? But more importantly, I think is the fact that "Spirit Animals" was our first time being able to bring a multiplayer experience to our games. So not only could you play by yourself as you could with the previous two, but now you can play with your friends and the people that you've met in this community that we're developing for our transmedia series. And this is a really important initiative for us as we continue to try to make our transmedia series a overwhelmingly social experience.
And then the newest member of the gang "Tomb Quest" just released in January of 2015. A really fun Egyptian-themed adventure written by Michael Northrop, who is a fantastic writer and we believe a rising star in this demographic. "Tomb Quest" has already hit the bestseller list and we're really excited to see how it fares going forward. And just briefly touching on some concepts for the game behind "Tomb Quest" was this idea of create, share, and play. Anyone who has kids, I assume that many of them probably play "Minecraft" yeah, I play it too. But what "Minecraft" does really well is gives the kids this kind of sandbox environment and provides them with tools to create their own kind of thing and not have a linear experience, but allow them to explore their own creativity in this game space. So we wanted to take a page outta their book and create something that allowed for user-generated content. And so, we like to think that we've achieved that, of course on a much smaller scale than "Minecraft." But it's been really a positive experience to see the kids creating their...in this they're creating their own tombs and creating traps so other people can't steal their treasures. It's really very fun.
And so when I talk about the transmedia programme that we develop, one of the big questions that I always get, or the big concerns is, is this type of a programme worth it? Not just from a financial perspective, but also there's a fair amount of personnel that needs to be involved in this around the company. It can be a fairly large undertaking. And I think if you ask around Scholastic, the resounding response will be yes. For no other reason than the fact that we've had so much success with this programme, all four of these series have gone on to be best sellers and be quite successful. And we like to think of this is not a book and a game, but a product as a whole that will succeed together. And we're really proud of that.
Excuse me. But I guess the romantic in me likes to think that innovation in of itself is worth it to try to do something different, to try to take risks, to reach a path that might not have been travelled before. And I always love that famous Albert Einstein quote where he defines, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." And it's that type of forward-thinking and that type of dedication to innovation that has allowed Scholastic to become the first publisher to embrace this type of publishing programme and to succeed with it.
And while the properties that I just mentioned definitely had a sizeable budget behind them, we have begun experimenting with this model on a smaller scale. And we're also seeing a lot of positive results for those properties as well. So I think one of the common misconceptions is that this type of model is not scalable and it absolutely can be. And so, I wanna take the rest of my presentation to talk about three main components of transmedia publishing that contributes to its success. And before I go any further, I want to make clear that these are not the only three. There are many more to make something like this get off the ground and be successful. But many of them I have no business talking about. So I'm gonna stick to the ones that I can speak to from my expertise.
So what I'm gonna talk about are offering a unique experience, then evolving this product over time, over the course of its life cycle and building a community around this product. When we talk about a unique experience, first and foremost, we are, of course, talking about that experience for the consumer. And the idea of transmedia publishing in and of itself is really appealing to the consumer. It's a grand experience that travels beyond just book into a whole ‘nother universe, if you will, the online game. And I touched on this a little before, but one of the really amazing things about this transmedia programme is the ability to reach a wider audience. Not every child is a book lover. A lot of them are reluctant readers. A lot of them identify with games and that's fine. As a kid, I identified with games and I still love them. But this type of programme encourages kids of all kinds to take an interest in this type of the programme, which we found to be really successful in terms of providing a crossover interest. So somebody who is a book lover that might not really be into games, will come and try out your game and be familiar and comforted by that familiarity with some of the characters and environments that they've been loving reading about in the game and have a nice experience. And it works the other way with people who start in your game and then cross over to your book.
But it's not just a unique experience for the consumer, it's also a very unique experience for our authors. For the most part, our transmedia series employ what we like to call internally the dream team author strategy. And this very simply means that we have a different author write each book in the series. And there are a number of benefits of doing this. One of the major benefits is the fact that it allows us to publish on a pretty fast schedule. So we are putting out per series, three to four books per year. This is really important for us because in this day and age with so much media out there to grab the attention of everyone and, you know, kids included, it's important to once we pique their interest with a series, to then follow it up in a timely manner to give them the content that they're craving.
And also having this idea of working with a number of authors is really important for having ambassadors to your brand. So when we do live events, when we do live author chats, which I'll talk about a little bit later, we have a lot of people to call on. We have a nice bullpen. These authors are busy, they're on tour, they're writing new books. They are not at our beck and call for everything. So it's nice to have a lot of faces to put in front of our community and to pair with our community for these really important events. And then also the idea of building talent. You know, Rick Riordan doesn't need our help at all. We need his. But there are authors who are up and coming in this middle-grade genre that really benefit from being a part of this programme. It's a really exciting thing. It's very hyped up both in retail and in the consumer. And it's a nice way of breaking some of these rising stars out into the middle-grade publishing demographic.
And then finally, it's a really unique experience for us, the publisher. We have a small, but a very eclectic team working on these, yeah, we're all wearing animal hats, so I don't know if you can see. We've gotten a lot of mileage out of those hats. We have a small but eclectic team working on these series, editorial, game design, marketing, publicity, production, and more all working from the conception of this idea, seeing it through all the way to the end and beyond through its entire life cycle. And when you do this, not only are you getting some really amazing ideas pulling from the expertise of all of the individuals in these very different fields, but it builds a lot of internal excitement about the product because everyone involved is very invested in this product from the beginning all the way through. And one of the real advantages to working so closely with each department, especially between editorial and game design and marketing is this idea of providing some level of continuity between what we're offering in the book and what we're offering as our online component.
I'm a huge sci-fi fan. And Robert Highland has single-handedly made me wanna be a space pirate, an astronaut, and a Martian, you know, all within a couple of months of each other. And I think this idea of wanting to be the thing you're experiencing reading is a very common experience for us, especially with our target demographic kids. We find that very often, they don't just want to read it, they want to be it. And that is what a online component or online game can do for your book property. It can act as this destination that the consumer goes to in between reading, after they've finished, while they're waiting for the next book in the series to get a different, perhaps more interactive experience, but one that has the potential to be familiar enough to evoke some of the same excitement and joy that they got out of reading the book in the first place.
And because of this rare opportunity, we've always felt a large onus on the game side to provide a level of continuity between what we're offering in the book and online. Because ultimately that's what we feel somebody who loves your book wants out of this online experience. They wanna see some of the things that they've fallen in love with reading about realized in some way. And it doesn't need to be 100% accurate, the continuity between them. I often am an advocate for it not being, it can be a bit limiting in terms of some game mechanics or just ideas that you have that you want to get across on the website. For example, in "Spirit Animals," you're not playing as the same main characters. You're not going on the same adventure. You're creating your own hero, you're going on your own adventure, but you're doing so in familiar environments that you've come to know from reading about in the books and also meeting familiar characters that you've come to know from reading about in the books.
Something as simple as including a character that's in the book in this online world in this game can be a really powerful way to get that crossover interest between the people who love each of your products individually. I always like to think of our game as a sort of digital summer camp. Summer camp is not just a way for parents to keep their kids outta their hair for two months in the summers, although my mom certainly used that for me and my twin brother. But it's a way for the child to put to use some of the important life skills that they've learned over the course of their school year in a different and more casual environment. Things like team building, how to build relationships, critical thinking with some of the activities they do. And this is exactly what we are offering on the web. We're offering a different experience, often labelled more casual, but one that allows the user to bring over experiences that they've had in the book into this realized world, which is really quite amazing for them. And the reaction from them is overwhelmingly positive when they're starting to see these things that they've been reading about come to life.
And when you do this, when you have this continuity between a book and game or book and online component, what you're doing is ensuring that users who enjoy one of those components will have that great crossover interest as I mentioned before. So a book lover comes to your game comforted by the familiarity of knowing the characters, knowing the environment, and has a really great experience. Same with the game. Someone who plays the game might be wanting to know more about the lore about the things behind what they're experiencing in the game. And then even if they're a reluctant reader or someone who doesn't read at all might be interested in going and trying out the book to get more of this information. And when you do that, you're creating people that like your product as a whole, not the component separately. And these will be the vocal ambassadors that will support your product for an extended period of time.
And speaking about maintaining interest over time, it brings me to the next thing I want to focus on, evolving this product that you've developed. So, why is evolving the product important? Well, we have this pipe dream that when we create something it's gonna be perfect, and we work on it for years and we put so much effort and thought into it. And the truth of the matter is it's very hard to reach perfection, and perfection is not something that just happens on your pub date. It's something that you need to earn through progress. And so, looking at data and analyzing data is a way to evolve the product and progress the product to reach this idea of perfections, a really great experience for your users. And it also helps you stay current. We live in a world where you buy a computer and it's outdated. You create something and somebody's already replicated it. Everything is moving very fast. And it's important that once you release a product like this to show support in evolving it to staying with it, staying the course and showing a commitment to it.
And so there are two main types of data that we look at for these transmedia series on the website, the first of which is analytical data. And most of us are familiar with that. It's been discussed many times today already. But for the game, these are the type of things like, at what point in the game are users struggling? Or on the website, where are they spending the most time? What parts are they ignoring that maybe we thought they would be really interested in? It's all pretty simple stuff to think about, but it's really important to actually look at and analyze. And this type of information is very important for evolving the product. And it's something that we found... Traditional print, it's very hard to achieve this level of drill-down data in the same way that an online game or online space can. When you release a book, generally it's not always easy to know the exact points that people are confused or the exact points that they're most happy unless you, of course, ask them yourselves. But with the analytical data on the game side, we can get answers to these questions without ever asking those questions at all, which is a very organic way to look at how somebody uses your product.
And this idea of evolving, this idea of evolving the product is also something that the game side really brings to the table in this transmedia relationship between book and game. Even if you could get all this really great down drill-down data with traditional print publishing, what can you really do with that data? Generally, you're not going to be pulling books off the shelves and redoing certain parts that you've found the community to maybe not take to. You can of course, take these experiences and improve the next book in the series or future products, but in general, that product that you're getting the data for will largely remain unchanged. And so, this is an advantage of this online game, this online component that brings to the, like I said, the relationship between the two. And it's very nice to have that at our disposal and to get those kind of analytics about our community, about our user base.
A very simple example of this, is in "Spirit Animals," we offered a small mini-game, a very ancillary experience to what was considered the main component of our game offering. And when we looked at some of the analytical data behind it, we found that while a number of users were not...it was a very small amount of people that were using this ancillary mini-game, but the ones that were, were spending an incredible amount of time on it. And so we decided, "Hey, let's try to make this more visible. Let's try to make this a bigger part of what we're offering." And we did. And what we found was that a number of people were now flocking to this very small insignificant, we thought, game that we had developed within the larger sphere in animals world. And as a result, our time on site, our engagement in the game went up quite a bit. So, that's a really simple way of looking at this type of data of where kids are spending their time and how they're using their time, and then using it to make your product better for everyone.
The second type of data that we generally look at is the type of data that you get from having a direct connection with your consumer. All of our transmedia series have a very robust and active online community with safe and moderated forums that kids can come on and talk about the books and the games, things they like, things they don't like, or just goof off with their friends, which they very often do. And anyone who has kids, or works with kids, or develops products for kids knows how brutally honest they can be about your product. So you better believe that we've gotten some really incredible insight into the things we're doing right and wrong just by having this space for them to have a voice. And that idea of giving them a voice is really, really important. Not only to have this direct connection that has all sorts of wonderful marketing benefits as well, but also to build a trust between the consumer and the producer. So when you have this space and they're voicing their opinions on the product that you're creating, we make it a concerted effort to respond as much as we can and show that we are interested in their ideas, that we're taking into consideration the things that they wanna see out of our product. And they really appreciate that. Even if their ideas don't end up making it into the next version of our game, or they make suggestions for the books too, which generally, we don't always take all of their wild suggestions. But the idea that we are listening to them, the idea that we are an active part in their experience with our product is really powerful. And something as simple as forums has the idea...has the ability to provide that.
One example of this, spoilers for anyone who has not read "Spirit Animals," in book six, a well-known character passes away. And when the kids read this and found out about it, they were up in arms on our message boards, "How could we do this? Tarik was our favourite character. Oh, I don't know if I can read any more of these books." And we were really taken back because we knew he was a very likeable character, but we had not realized that he was such a fan favourite. And so it sparked a couple of ideas, hey, how can we maybe do some ancillary publishing around this character that is clearly a fan favourite, to try to get them more background on this character, even though unfortunately is not a part of the books anymore. So, this idea of giving the people what they want taking into consideration the things that they like about your product, and then being reactive to it and responding.
And this idea of community is the last major pillar that I wanted to talk about. And it's something that we have over the past couple of years really started to take seriously. And I think it is one of the greatest things that you can do in having an online space like this is to take the community seriously. When we released the "39 Clues," basically our website consisted of the game and a way to access the game via the code, and to look at, you know, digital versions of your cards. And then shortly thereafter, we added the forums, which I was talking about before. And I'm not here to say that message boards or forums are a great revelation, they've been around for ages, but they are a very simple and inexpensive way of giving the community a voice, giving the community a platform to express their creativity. And it's a great way for generating user-generated content. We found that when we released it, not only were the kids talking about the books and the game and giving us insight into how they're using it, but also talking about other things. So, fan fiction about, you know, about the stories and other stories, and then the idea of role-playing as some of the characters in the book. They were having a great time and making friends on this very simple platform that is readily, at this point in time, almost readily available to anyone that wants to really use it.
We've done a lot of cool things, just having these forums. Last year we did a crowdsourced mashup book of all of our properties. So what we did is we asked the kids on the forums, we gave them story starters and asked them to write, to finish, you know, from using the story starter prompt. And then our editors spent some tireless hours taking all of this content and generating a mashup story of all of the popular characters in all of our transmedia series. And then we offered it as a free download on iBooks. And you should have seen how excited these kids were to see their usernames, book fan 103 in the credits of this free book that we offered. And it's this idea of supporting their creativity. A lot of these kids wanna be writers. They have dreams, aspirations of becoming writers, and the forums are just amazing way to let them start doing that and to positively reinforce the things that they're talking about.
It's also a really easy way to get author access. Very often we'll ask the kids on our forums to send us questions for an author who's gonna post in the coming week, and then we'll have that author answer the questions and then post. And they're very happy to do so. It really doesn't take much time at all. We're even there to help them out if they're not the most technologically savvy. But this is a really easy way to get the authors some theoretical FaceTime with the community, and the kids love this. They love the idea of these rock star authors answering their questions. Their questions that might seem, you know, insignificant are now being taken seriously by somebody that they consider a really big part of their life.
So from there, we wanted to take that idea of making our online experience social, and then bringing it into the game itself. And I touched on this a little bit before with "Spirit Animals," it was our first time making a multiplayer game. And we also developed a pretty sophisticated chat feature that allowed the kids to communicate. Anybody that's a game fan, I don't know if there's any out there, but you would know that if you're in a multiplayer game, it's important to communicate with your friends to kind of coordinate, and even just kind of hang out and have fun. So, this was our way of bringing that wonderful experience that we've offered on the forums into our game space. And it's been really successful. We have, like, a common area in "Spirit Animals" when you first get in, it's like a, a nice outdoor courtyard. And that is where these kids are hanging out before they go on their epic quests.
And oftentimes they're kind of just hanging out there talking. And so sometimes I'll pop in and they'll, "Oh, hi, Keith." They know me as the elegant admin on the site. And sometimes they are... I am in there and they're organizing tag in this courtyard. They've organized races, or sorry, like races around the whole courtyard. They're building a game out of nothing, you know, and it's really cool to see. It's really fun. I actually, one time I went in there and one of the kids was like, "Tell us a joke." So I found some funny animal jokes that were appropriate for "Spirit Animals." And then I had like 10 kids just kind of standing there with their avatar, like, as I was telling these jokes and some were getting hahas and some dot, dot, dots. It was pretty exciting. This is not the game, this is not any part of the game at all. And yet it's like the most fun thing that they can do. So this idea of a social experience within the game has become really important to us.
And then from there, the next thing and something pretty recent is this idea of live streaming. Live streaming is very popular now, especially in the game space. And we have taken that chat feature I was talking about and paired it with technology that allows us to do these live stream videos. And over the last couple of months, we've been starting to do these really cool live stream author events. You can see here, this is one with Maggie Stiefvater. We did this last week. And at one point we heard dogs barking in the video and to no one's surprise, everyone in the chat was like, "Puppies, puppies. I love dogs." And so Maggie, knowing how to play to a crowd, went and fetched her two cute little dogs and was showing them to the kids. And this obviously has nothing to do with the books that she's writing. Are you commenting on the latter comment? I was gonna point out that's my favourite one. Where does it go?
But this, again, this is something that we use this platform to have author talks and get this amazing face-to-face, actual face-to-face time with the community and almost kind of humanize the authors a bit. And this is a great example of it. "Oh my God. Maggie loves dogs, just like I do." You know, it's something very simple like that, but for kids, that's very powerful. And I would imagine she has a lot more fans, from the kids that were attending this live stream. I'm glad you picked up with the latter thing. I was dying when I saw that. We also, for the live stream just briefly, it's not just author stuff. We do some really cool book talks with our editors on the book, because, you know, it's great to have these authors there, but they're busy and many of them aren't very comfortable with doing this. So we've found other avenues for this platform like I said, book talks. On the game side, I've done tips and tricks or where me and one of the other admins go head to head in some competition that the kids find really funny. So there's a lot of things you can do to just build this family, build this community around your product.
And then finally, we have begun beefing up what we're doing in live events. It's a pretty amazing picture with James, just fist-pounding. But last year we embarked on what we called the world's collide tour. And that was a pretty elaborate author tour, where we sent James Dashner, Rick Riordan, Brandon Mull, Jules Watson, Gordon Korman all out to a couple of different live events to do book signings. And, we had a face painting station where the kids get their face painted by animals, kids, and myself, I was there. And we had a game spot set up for the kids to come and try the game. And it was our first time really committing the full transmedia product to some sort of a live event. We'd done an author tours in the past, but we brought members of the game team. We brought members of our full team there to set up this kind of con if you will, in these various different locations.
And this year we wanted to kind of flip it a little bit and bring people to us. So next week, actually we are hosting our own Scholastic Con event at our New York office. And we're having a number of these authors come and we've invited kids to come. We have a much bigger turnout than we thought we would. I hope we're able to handle them all. But now these kids get to spend a full day just enjoying these transmedia products and sitting in on panels of some of these authors. And this calls back to the idea of having a lot of these authors available to us because many of them are busy and we're not always gonna get Rick Riordan there, you know. So it's important to have a lot of these upcoming authors that can have FaceTime with the community. And that's a great way of building your name and your brand is actually having true face-to-face time with the community. So we're really excited for that.
And all of this, the unique experience, the author events, the live streaming, the evolution of the product through data, it all comes down to us trying to make reading as fun as possible for as many kids as possible. But the transmedia platform is a perfect platform for this idea of encouraging fun. It's fun for us, the publisher. It's fun for the authors. It's a different experience for them and the ones that really embrace it, have a lot of good time doing things like live streaming and participating in the game. And it's fun for these kids. They're getting this amazing experience, not just reading, but also online. And we're reaching so many different kids that have different interests that we're encouraging fun, no matter what you might find your interest being
Zalina: Next week, we've got Brian O'Leary talking about content marketing and how you can leverage free content to increase discoverability of your titles. If you want to learn more about what we do, you can find us at booknetcanada.ca. Thanks to Keith for speaking at Tech Forum, and everyone who attended or helped put it together. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and of course, thanks too for listening.
