`Miss Spider’ Spins A Hit Despite Skirting The Rules

A friendly female spider is showing the children’s book-publishing world how to spin a hit book, and the industry, troubled by overexpansion, is watching closely.

“Miss Spider’s Tea Party” was one of about 4,500 new children’s books published and shipped to bookstores last year. But its publisher, Scholastic Inc., beat the competitive odds, turning it into a best seller by ignoring the marketing principles usually used to produce winning children’s books.

Scholastic bent the rules by teaming up with an outsider to children’s publishing: Nicholas Callaway, the slick book packager and publisher who created Madonna’s “Sex” book. Meanwhile, Callaway, who has considerably more entrepreneurial hustle than the usual children’s book publisher, offered a huge advance to an unknown toy maker who had never written a book.

“Miss Spider,” with more than 200,000 copies in print since its publication in April 1994, scurried into the top 10 in the Publishers Weekly children’s best-seller list. (Typically, publishers are happy with sales of 15,000 or so for a book by a first-time children’s author.) And though American children’s books rarely succeed abroad, Callaway has already locked up international deals for “Spider” in Australia, Japan, Germany and France and signed up Scholastic to publish the sequel, “Miss Spider’s Wedding,” this fall.

The success of “Miss Spider” comes even as many other publishers are cutting their kids’ lists, and giants like Random House Inc. are trimming their juvenile staffs. Between 1982 and 1993, juvenile book sales rose more than 300 percent to $1.16 billion, and publishers bet that demand from new parents would continue to grow. But sales of children’s hardcovers dropped 8 percent in 1993, the only major book category to decline, and many publishers are reporting a similar drop for 1994.

“Miss Spider” crept into this market via a circuitous route. David Kirk, the author and illustrator, had spent most of the 1980s running two toy companies that ultimately failed. His only illustrations appeared on the sides of his toy boxes. Callaway stumbled onto his work in a Manhattan toy store as he shopped for his two-year-old daughter, and instantly pronounced Kirk “a genius.”

Eager to enter the growing kids’ market, Callaway tracked the artisttoy maker down at his upstate New York home. Kirk already had a modest $5,000 advance from Rizzoli International Publications Inc. for a book about a spider, but Rizzoli was planning a low-profile printing of about 7,000, according to Kirk. When Callaway offered a $20,000 advance, Kirk asked to get out of his contract, and Rizzoli obliged.

Kirk produced a slender rhyming tale with rich, vivid illustrations of a dreamy garden. Like many children’s books today, it has a socially uplifting theme, as a lonely spider wins over a clique of dismissive insects with courtesy and tea cakes.

At first, though, the publishers Callaway approached were every bit as dismissive as the story’s bugs. “It is amazing the creativity that goes into finding ways to say no,” Callaway says. In particular, the publishers didn’t like Callaway’s demand for a large guaranteed first printing. Based on Callaway’s price for the book, publishers figured they would have to list it at close to $20 to make their normal profit - a risky price for a first-time author.

Scholastic, though, had a powerful competitive weapon: The 75-year-old publisher has a vast array of established distribution channels in U.S. schools, including teacher-sponsored book clubs and school-organized book fairs. It gambled it could sell “Miss Spider” for $15.95, making up in volume what it lost in profit margin. It also took another risk, shunning the popular holiday season and introducing the book in the springtime.

Then came an unusual marketing blitz. Scholastic littered bookstores with special kits for “Miss Spider tea parties,” including a Pin the Legs on Miss Spider Game, and offered prizes for the best “Miss Spider” window display.

The big push helped “Miss Spider” tiptoe around some early lukewarm reviews in influential trade publications. Publishers Weekly called Kirk’s rhyming text “slack and predictable,” while Kirkus Reviews thought a story on a friendly spider seemed “wrongheaded … and though the art here is arresting, the doggerel verse hasn’t enough merit to outweigh the flawed premise.”

The book did get a plug, though, from National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” which featured an interview with Kirk, who read from the book.

Meanwhile, Callaway was aggressively violating the conventional kidsbook rule of product licensing: Wait until you have a hit character. Even before “Miss Spider” was released, he signed toy maker Dakin Inc. to produce a spider doll and dangled the book and toy package in front of top executives at the upscale FAO Schwarz toy chain.

Schwarz had shelves full of spider dolls in its stores just weeks after the book came out, and the colorful arachnid was displayed on the cover of the retailer’s fall catalog. Kirk went on a chainwide tour last fall. In early December, he showed up unannounced at the Manhattan Schwarz store to sign books and quickly sold 175 copies, helping put “Miss Spider” among the five top-selling holiday books at the chain.

Now Miss Spider is weighing some pretty serious adult offers. Callaway says a major Hollywood studio has offered to acquire animation-film rights to both books. He is also negotiating with a major software company to develop a Miss Spider CD-ROM for 1996, and a theme park is dreaming up Miss Spider attractions.

All the attention would have been hard for outsiders to predict, but the last lines of “Miss Spider’s Tea Party” suggest that the neophyte Kirk had a wily marketer’s sense all along:

Miss Spider’s reputation grew.

Before too long our hostess knew

Each bug who crawled or hopped or flew

And all their lovely children too.