Saturday October 11th marks the third Star Wars Reads Day. What is Star Wars Reads Day? Basically it’s a celebration of Star Wars books. Hundreds of book stores and libraries across the country are taking part in the event, so chances are it’s happening near you! I had the opportunity to speak with Pablo Hidalgo about it last week. Pablo is an author and member of the Lucasfilm Story Group. I spoke with Pablo about Reads Day, his newest Star Wars book: Star Wars Rebels – A New Hero, and his role in locking down the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
The idea came from one of our publishers. What’s kind of great is even though our publishing program is split across different publishers, different companies, it’s always been viewed as this kind of cohesive family. The editors from across different companies kind of come to the same table and talk about their experiences, and share their information and knowledge. So you can have editors from DK Publishing, Random House, and now the Disney imprint all talking to each other and communicating. Understanding that they all have the same audience, an audience with a great deal of overlap. The idea may have originated from a round table like this, and I believe that it was DK Publishing that first took the torch at the first Star Wars Reads Day. Endeavoring to set up an event at book stores and libraries across the nation. It became sort of a book tour that wasn’t dependent on a single title or a single author. It just became dependent on the interest in the content. Because our publishing program is a year long proposition, it’s not like a seasonal thing. There’s always a fair amount of books that are coming out. There’s always books that are being talked about, and books that are in the forefront of the Star Wars communities mind. It became something that you could do every year regardless of what else may have been happening with Star Wars.
Part of the Reads Day event is the opportunity to meet and speak with many of the authors behind these Star Wars books. As an author yourself, will you be speaking about your newest book?
It’s a great opportunity to get face to face with the readers, and have an opportunity to talk about whatever we’re working on, and field whatever questions they may have. I’ve been involved with Star Wars Reads Day for a couple of years. I’ve been fortunate that in addition to my day to day job at Lucasfilm to have authored a number of Star Wars books. The great thing about Reads is that you really do get a sense of Star Wars being an all ages kind of experience. At this years Star Wars Reads, I’ll be talking about A New Hero, the book that I most recently finished. The book is aimed toward a younger audience, but that’s never been any sort of a barrier for readership. What I’ve always noticed is that adults collect these books, read them with their kids, and treasure them just as much as the kids do.
I recently reviewed A New Hero, and I loved that original concept art was used to introduce all of the Rebels characters. I’m a fan of preproduction artwork and I was glad it was made available in this way.
Yeah, I think it was a great way that it all came together. We were able to showcase that art, and kids love to see that stuff, but they may not purchase a behind the scenes book at this point. I think that a storybook that introduces the characters is a much easier way to dive into this stuff, and as you say you get to experience the art as well.
The nice thing about Reads day is that it’s actually encouraging kids to pick up a book and read it…and that’s never a bad thing.
To me, that’s just continuing a tradition. I’ve been reading Star Wars books since I was 3 or 4 years old, and the interest of it being Star Wars basically gave me the encouragement to continue reading stuff that was even beyond my grade or age level just because hey, that’s Star Wars on the cover. I want to read it, I want to explore it. I think it really gave me a leg up on reading, because it gave me a subject matter that was instantly irresistible, so I had to increase my reading skills in order to keep up with the stuff that I wanted to buy and have as part of my library. It’s a big galaxy with a lot of entry points, and again when I was a kid it didnt matter who the “intended audience” was, I just wanted to have it.
One of the cool aspects of Reads Day is that bookstores and libraries are being encouraged to invite local costuming groups to their Reads Day events.
We’ve always had an incredibly great relationship with the fan community. We’ve got costume groups like no other fan community out there. The amount of effort put into the authenticity and creativity of the costumes is pretty amazing, and our publishers knew that from having book signing events. Without having to reach out to these groups, the groups would just kind of show up because of their interest in Star Wars. With Reads Day, we knew that there was a group of fans out there ready to celebrate. Our events like Star Wars Celebration or movie premiers has proven that fans are always looking for an opportunity to get together and celebrate Star Wars. To show the world out there the kind of magic that comes when you have a bunch of people with a shared interest. These groups can use this as a recruiting opportunity or just the celebration of Star Wars. It’s fantastic that we have such a great relationship with these groups, and it just keeps getting stronger and stronger each year. In the case of Star Wars Reads, it’s just this great way of amplifying the event. Star Wars will turn heads even just with signage, “Oh look at that, that sounds interesting.” but the second you add a Storm Trooper, Jedi Knight, or an X-Wing Pilot, all of a sudden you’ve turned a book store or a library into a little piece of a galaxy far far away…and that just gets more people excited and interested in the event.
Can you talk about the decision to go clean slate with the Expanded Universe being a part of the Star Wars canon? I know there was a lot of material, like the Zahn books that fans were upset to see go.
Well it wasnt a trivial decision or anything but because were all fans. The books that you mentioned were books that I loved as well, and read on numerous occasions, and I’m sure I will continue to read in the future. What it ultimately came down to is that the fundamental arrangement kind of changed. Before this new future of new movies came about, we had always worked very carefully and diligently to try to make the books as authentic as possible. The ultimate difference was that you had storytelling coming out of two different camps. You had the storytelling coming out of the publishing world, and the storytelling coming out of the production world. The production world was the world that George was involved in, making movies and television. We did our best to make everything sink up, and when things didn’t it was a result of the stories coming from two different places. The thing that fundamentally changed when Kathleen Kennedy came aboard, and we knew that our future was going to be full of promising new story telling like new television and new movies, is that she wanted all the storytelling to come out of one centralized place, one coherent place. This way, the folks involved in the production would have the ability to influence what was happening in print, and the people involved in the publishing world would have the ability to influence and work with the folks that were in production. From that point of view, it was such an exciting opportunity to do what weve always wanted to do in a much better and clearer way. I think any sort of difficulty that might have been felt was overshadowed by the promise of this new opportunity. There’s just more opportunity to collaborate. The thing that we found in particular in the case of A New Dawn, is that the author had been very open to it. A lot of writers have welcomed the collaboration because writing can be…I don’t want to say a lonely endeavor, but it can be a very singular endeavor, and the opportunity to work with other people and spring off ideas can be very exciting, especially with the knowledge that what you’re working on is going to be reflected in other media.
Do you have any new projects in the works that you’d like to talk about?
I do have a number of ideas, and I’m fortunate that I’m just down the hall from the publishing team. I could pitch them not necessarily for me to write, but I often approach it as “Heres a book I want to see.” and sometimes those will come back to me and say “you know what, we want to see that book too, and we want you to write it.” I cant get into any details like that, but I will say that were having lunch every couple of weeks, and were saying you know, what do you want to see on the shelves? I’m really fortunate to have a seat at that table and be able to throw out those suggestions.