Girls' Series Pushes Books in a Digital Interactive Direction

If you haven't heard of The 39 Clues, you don't have an 11-year-old boy in your house. The 39 Clues is a series of adventure books that come with trading cards and relate to online adventures. The story starts with a death, and features a series of adventures in which the deceased's family members solve clues to find the secret of her family's power and wealth. Like most things aimed at kids that age, I don't understand it, but my son loves it.

A similar series, The Amanda Project, is poised to this fall, promises the same type of experience for girls.

Publishers have to be watching this model closely and considering adult equivalents. Imagine a cross between The 39 Clues and The Amazing Race tied into a book like The DaVinci Code or anything by Robert Ludlum.

Already, the television series Lost has broken through that wall from the other side. Gary Troup was passenger in the mid-section of flight 815 and wrote a book called Bad Twin, which was featured on an episode of the show (Sawyer was reading it). The plot was a tie-in to Lost and worked well with the rest of the mystery.

You don't need a vivid imagination to see a similar story, premiering in three or four years that includes the same kind of cross-pollenation. With TV networks and publishers both struggling, each will vie for the first multi-media home run.