Abadazad's Magical Budget

Continuing our theme of commenting on stories from ICV2, we have an interview with Jennifer Zatorski, Associate Publicity Director for Disney Publishing worldwide about their promotional efforts for former comic, now prose/graphic novel hybrid Abadazad. Abadazad had a HUGE presence at BookExpo and it's clearly a book that should be able to make some headway with young readers.

Interestingly, though, the initial ICV2 story indicated that $200,000 would be put into the campaign (as referenced by Kevin Melrose). Likely just a typo, and $100,000 is certainly still a significant budget, but not quite what it initially seemed. Its nice to see Disney putting some muscle behind their promotions, but this is a book that's target audience, I think, is going to be libraries. Its size and binding seem tailor made for the children and young adult sections of libraries. In fact, we've already sold copies of the first two volumes to a local elementary school. The point being, a significant chunk of that $100,000 has probably already been spent to market the book to libraries and bookstores (particularly those that specialize in children's books) and I'm sure it wasn't cheap to get the sort of placement it had at BEA.

As for the books themselves, their hybrid format will probably help them appeal to both kids and adults, while the format itself seems to hinder the storytelling. The scenes chosen for illustration aren't always the first to come to mind and unfortunately Ploog's artwork doesn't hold up nearly as well in the smaller format (compare on of the books to the beautiful Stardust Kid that hit shelves today). Whereas I enjoyed the one issue of Abadazad I read as a straight comic, the books (and the prose sections in particular) seem a bit too watered down to appeal to adults with fond memories of Oz and Wonderland.