Kurt Hassler - Page 3

Tell us a bit about how Maximum Ride came about.

When we started Yen Press I always saw on the horizon that these adaptations are going to become more important as far as long term growth in the category. You have to have those big licenses bringing in new readers. And not only does it have that built-in readership when you're doing an adaption but it's something that retailers and librarians can really understand. It's a known entity and they can support it a lot more easily than someone who is not familiar with manga. If you start throwing out names like Rurouni Kenshin to the librarian who can't pronounce “manga” right... these adaptations are something that they know, they understand it. They understand the customer. So when we started Yen Press and because Hachette wanted to be in that business it was always on the agenda to do adaptations of some of those properties. We looked at the list and saw what made sense, what lent itself to that. Maximum Ride was a just a natural; I mean you have kids with wings. You have an adventure story, kids with wings, you got the number one author in the country. One in every ten hardcover books sold is James Patterson. He's massively talented and there's such a devoted following to the book. It was an absolute natural for an adaption. We approached Jim (James Paterson) and he always wants to be trying something new and expanding his area. We went to him with the concept and he was all for it. We found an illustrator and he fell in love with the designs immediately and he wanted to see a couple of tweaks to Max's characters to match his vision and then we started going full steam with it. It's so nice to see something like that develop from stage one. To have the idea that you want to see something like that and then to watch it grow and develop and then to actually see that first book on the shelves, it's great.

The artist, Narae Lee, you mentioned earlier that she was a great find. Can you tell me how you found her? Was she previously published?

That was JuYoun; she has all her irons in the fire in terms of the Korean market. She seems to know everyone. [Lee] had just around the same time started working on (her first) serialized title for Haksan (Haksan Culture Company, a major publisher of Korean manhwa) called Milky Sweety Cutey or something but she's still a college student. JuYoun saw a short story Lee worked on and just approached her about the possibility of working on this incredibly aggressive and high profile project. It's funny; she knew James Patterson because of a spot he did on The Simpsons once. It just developed from there. Since she's still a student, she had to ask her teachers if she could use the pages she's doing for Maximum Ride as her assignments. They said yes.

What is Yen Plus's function in all this?

Yen Plus's function is really straight forward. We were talking about the amount of titles being released in the market here and you have to have some way of differentiating your product from the sea of other product out there. You have to interest readers in your books versus all the other books out there and the anthology magazine is a great way to do that. If you have a couple of staples that people already know and give it to them in a format where it's interspersed with other product that they might not know but that you have a feeling they would enjoy, that is a way to really build up fan-following for the book. It's a marketing tool. That is, at the end of the day, it's a marketing tool.

So it's not its own stand-alone project?

It is its own stand-alone project but we have always looked at this as a way to reach audiences with properties they would otherwise not see. It's been incredibly effective. In the first issue everybody was talking about Jack Frost. It's a Korean title that no one had ever really heard of here but putting it in that format got it a ton of attention and then the material itself gets its own attention. Basically in the first issue, the main character Noh-A is decapitated and survives, and her head is off in a corner and she sees the rest of her body sort of… unfortunately displayed. That was something we even heard from Japan about. When they got the magazine Square Enix was like, “what is this Jack Frost?”

That's the function it serves. It gives you a platform to show people what you have rather than putting it on a sea of shelves with everything else and hoping that that of all the books lined up, spine out, on shelves for as far as the eye can see they pick up that one book. Coming to your publisher with a marketing plan is crucial. It's absolutely essential. Sometimes it's not enough just put an ad in a book and say, “Oh I hope you like this ad we did, now go buy the book.” Sometimes it takes a little more in-depth introduction to something to get it to stand out.

What's your favorite part of the job? The worst part?

Favorite part of the job has to be working with the artists and seeing the pages evolve from the concept to the final version. Working with Svetlana, Night School was one of the first projects we signed. Taking that from the original pitch and now seeing the books, the individual pages coming out in the magazine, seeing the print coming from the thumbnail stages and character design stages, seeing all that come together. It's just like Maximum Ride; having the concept, seeing the book translated into a finished work, that has to be the best part of the job definitely.

Worst part of the job… it's a dream job so it's tough to say. Convention set-up, and looking at bad trends in the market are up there, but the jet lag is the worst part. The amount of travel. I love going to see everybody but the week or two after I get back from a two or three week trip to Japan or Korea or the Frankfurt book fare is brutal. To get back in the proper time zone is just absolutely brutal. That is, hands down, the worst part of the job. Worse than convention set-up, unless it's convention set-up in a different time zone...

Special thanks to Zeynep Ozturk for transcribing this interview.