Ready, Set, Zoom: Trucktown Arrives

By Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 11/8/2007

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers is revving up for the debut of Jon Scieszka’s Trucktown, a multi-format book program that will encompass a minimum of 52 titles published over three years by at least four imprints. At the wheel sits Scieszka, whose bestselling books include The Stinky Cheese Man, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and the Time Warp Trio novels. The Trucktown titles are illustrated collaboratively by a trio of high-octane illustrators: David Shannon, Loren Long and David Gordon. In January, S&S will roll out with the series’ inaugural release, Smash! Crash!, a hardcover storybook that will be fueled by a 350,000-copy first printing, a national author tour and extensive advertising and promotion.

The program was born out of the author’s boyhood fascination with trucks and his role as an ardent literacy advocate. Scieszka describes himself and his five brothers as having been “crazy truck fans” growing up. “My dad would take us to construction sites and we’d stay for hours,” he says. “Today, I see the kids around my neighborhood totally obsessed with vehicles. My son, who’s now in college, was the same way.”

Smash! Crash! kicks off Jon Scieszka's
Trucktown in January.

More recently, Scieszka has poured much time and energy into Guys Read, his Web-based literacy initiative, designed to motivate boys to become lifelong readers. “I had never before written books for the preschool and kindergarten age level, and I thought it would be fun to catch kids just as they are learning about books and starting to read,” Scieszka says. “So I started thinking about how kids love trucks and about creating truck stories, and this whole world of Trucktown kind of came to me.”

In order to reacquaint himself with the way preschoolers think and play, Scieszka—a former elementary school teacher—spent a good bit of time in a preschool classroom near his Brooklyn home. “It was great hanging out with those guys,” he recalls. “I came to realize that a four-year-old brain is not like anything else.”

After writing a handful of Trucktown tales, Scieszka showed them to several publishers and asked, “What would you do with these?” The response from the folks at S&S, says the author, “blew everyone else out of the water.” Justin Chanda, associate publisher of S&S Books for Young Readers, recalls the enthusiastic in-house reaction. “We decided to get all divisions involved and create a full-blown Trucktown franchise, with hardcovers, ready-to-reads and novelty books. And before long we had a 52-book program in place.”

Getting the Graphics in Gear

Trucktown collaborators (from top l.)
Loren Long, Dan Potash, David Gordon,
David Shannon, Jon Scieszka and Justin Chanda.

The ambitious scope of the series led to an obvious roadblock: how could one artist illustrate so many titles? “After we wracked our brains, it suddenly hit me that maybe creating the art for the series using the animation model would make sense,” says Dan Potash, v-p and creative director for S&S Children’s Publishing. “Why not have multiple artists design the Trucktown world and create the characters and then have a studio render the art for the books based on a style guide synthesized from the artists’ work?”

Potash approached Shannon (Duck on a Bike), Long (The Little Engine That Could), and Gordon (The Three Little Rigs) to ask if they’d be interested in creating the visuals for Trucktown, musing that their personalities, senses of humor and what he terms “their love of metal” would make them ideal candidates. He recalls advising them that this would be a venture unlike any they’d ever worked on. “I told them that this was an opportunity for them to put their egos aside and lose themselves—and to bounce ideas off one another. Basically it was a chance to step into a sandbox.” All three illustrators were ready to play.

After two months of submitting art for Potash and Chanda to review, the artists met up—Shannon from Los Angeles, Long from Cincinnati and Gordon from Manhattan—for a weeklong creative “summit” at the S&S offices. For the occasion, a conference room was transformed into a facsimile of a truck garage, complete with exposed pipes and wires overhead, sheet metal walls, machine parts, old tires and oil drums and—as a fitting centerpiece—the front end of a real truck protruding from one wall. The publisher also installed bleachers so that staffers could witness Trucktown in the making.

Wearing matching coveralls, the illustrators each worked at their own stations, where they created pieces of art that were scanned and projected on a screen—making it easier for Scieszka, Chanda, Potash and the trio of artists to critique and combine them. “The garage played a huge role in the collaborative process,” Shannon remarks. “In our mechanics’ coveralls, we were no longer in an office building in Manhattan. We were in Trucktown. The other thing that helped was that the project was a true collaboration. I really admire Loren and Dave’s work, so it was fun using stuff that they came up with. How often do you have permission to steal from other illustrators?”

Part of S&S's NYC offices
were transformed into the
Trucktown Design Garage.

“I felt like a student again,” says Long. “Being given the same assignment, we all independently had the task of coming up with the best ideas we could. Then the collaboration began by choosing the best ideas and elements of each individual creation and molding it into one superior result. The reward for me was the camaraderie with Dave S. and Dave G. and being able to see firsthand how they work and think.”

Based on the style guide that Shannon, Long and Gordon put together, art for the Trucktown titles is being produced by Keytune Studios in Spain. In order to ensure a consistent look and quality among the books, the same five artists are painting the illustrations to specification.

Down the Road

Loren Long (l.) and David Gordon
at their workstations, developing
artwork for the series.

As the series rolls on, Scieszka and his publisher envision Trucktown moving to TV, movie and computer screens. “From the start, this world was created with the idea that it would be big enough to be adaptable to all kinds of formats,” says the author. “But we wanted to have the books come out first and not have people in other media dictate the creation of Trucktown or its characters. In the future, I can see these characters living on in toys and other media so that kids will be able to get to know them better in different ways.” Chanda supports this sequence, noting, “Jon wisely decided to first develop the literary property, create our own style guide and let the books drive the program. We are not taking cues from anyone else.”

Scieszka will jumpstart the promotion of Trucktown when Smash! Crash! appears in January in the form of a month-long tour with pit stops in 11 cities. S&S’s other marketing plans for the series include consumer advertising, a dedicated Web site, retail floor displays and an event kit.

The Trucktown vehicles will then appear in six new books next June: three Little Simon novelty board books, two Aladdin ready-to-read paperbacks and a color-and-activity book from Simon Scribbles. Though print runs for these titles are not yet set, Chanda says that none will be under the 100,000-copy mark. An additional six titles will appear in fall 2008.

Reflecting on the intrinsic goal of matching the Trucktown world to its target audience, Scieszka feels optimistic that they got it right. “Most of my earlier books are satire and parody, which fit the minds of kids in second grade and older perfectly,” says the author. “But it took me a while to find the right way to bring humor to preschoolers. And I finally realized that the way to do it is with sheer exuberance—with crazy, energetic stories that are just like the trucks themselves.”

And, it seems, just like Scieszka himself. “These books are all created in the spirit of play and are totally high-energy,” observes Chanda. “It’s Jon’s personality translated into books. They are definitely all Jon.”