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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
Sanctity of Truth
MONDAY, MAY 18, 2015
ARTS & DESIGN
Getting Online Fans To Buy the Real Book By ALEXANDRA ALTER
Max Brallier didn’t have realistic career goals as a child. “I wanted to be a Jedi,” he said. That didn’t work out. But Mr. Brallier, 31, has found a more pragmatic way to channel his “Star Wars” fanaticism. The result is “Galactic Hot Dogs,” his new book about a boy who battles giant mutant worms and zombie space pirates with his sidekicks: a robot, a rebellious princess and an alien. The story, which Mr. Brallier described as “a goofier ‘Star Wars,’ ” is undeniably silly. His publisher is treating the project very seriously, though. Aladdin, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Millions of children have read ‘‘Galactic Hot Dogs’’ online. Children’s Publishing, bought “Galactic Hot Dogs” in a lucrative three-book deal. The company is printing 500,000 copies, and began promoting the book more than a year ago. Simon & Schuster has solid reasons to be bullish about “Galactic Hot Dogs.” The book has taken off on Funbrain.com, a popular gaming website for children that has been an incubator for some of the biggest blockbusters in children’s book publishing. Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series began as a free book on Funbrain and now has more than 150 million copies in print globally.
“Dork Diaries,” a middle-grade series by Rachel Renée Russell, experienced improved sales through a story-based interactive game on Funbrain’s sister site, Poptropica, and has more than 20 million copies in print. “Galactic Hot Dogs” seems to be on a similar trajectory. More than six million children have read chapters of the book on Funbrain. More than a million have played a story-based “Galactic Hot Dogs” game that went live on Poptropica two months ago. Like many books that have thrived on the site, it appeals to 8- to 12-yearolds who appreciate its hammy underdog hero, Cosmoe, and its slapstick humor and comic-stripstyle illustrations. In the last few years, multiplatform books with online gaming components have become crucial tools for children’s book publishers seeking to reach young readers who are migrating to digital and mobile reading. Sixty-seven percent of American children between the ages of 2 and 13 read e-books, according to a report released in January by Digital Book World and PlayCollective. To the uninitiated, Funbrain and Poptropica might look like a publisher’s worst nightmare, the sort of online activity that parents and teachers worry is chipping away at reading time. But authors and publishers have discovered that the sites often steer children toward books. Scholastic’s multiplatform game and book series, “39 Clues,” which started in 2008, has more than 17 million copies in print. Even though more than six million readers have already seen “Galactic Hot Dogs,” Mr. Brallier seems anxious. He dreads public speaking and is about to go on his first book tour. “I’m terrified,” he said. Shortly after college, he took a job in publishing at Penguin, and then St. Martin’s Press, where he worked in marketing. That experience has made him keenly aware of how unusual it is to have millions invested in promoting his book. He said, “It’s really exciting, but also super scary.”
RENE LION-CACHET, VIA JFC CLARKE
The story of Nukain Mabuza, shown in the 1970s, inspired a play written by Athol Fugard.
Tale That Is Written in Stone By ROSLYN SULCAS
Five years ago, Athol Fugard, the great chronicler of South Africa’s apartheid past and its post-apartheid present, heard a surprising tale. It was about a farm laborer named Nukain Mabuza, who had spent about 15 years, in the late 1960s and ’70s, painting vivid designs on the boulders and stones in the eastern province of Mpumalanga. Mr. Mabuza’s name and work are largely unknown, and Mr. Fugard, then living in California, was intrigued, particularly since “The Road to Mecca,” his 1985 play, had taken another outsider artist, Helen Martins, as its subject. “Here was a man who unquestionably had an individual vision, who spent decades of his life creating this incredible mountain of stone flowers,” he said. The outcome was “The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek,” a new play written and directed by Mr. Fugard, 82, that recently opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York. “Strange as it may seem, I consider myself an outsider artist,” he wrote in an email. “When I started working in theater, it was an all-consuming passion — I wrote the plays, directed them, acted in them, built the set and designed the costumes. This was also because my situation in apartheid
South Africa during the formative years of my writing was one of relative isolation.” In his initial try at the material, though, he was unable to make anything of it. When James Houghton, the artistic director of the Signature Theater, which programmed a full season of his plays in 2012, asked him to write a new work, Mr. Fugard found his draft. “I saw a way which meant that in the second act I would bring back two of the characters from Act I, and now they would be in the new South Africa,” he said. The story of Mr. Mabuza, who committed suicide in 1981 after abruptly leaving his home and painted garden the previous year, is a sad one. Born in Mozambique, he moved to South Africa in the 1950s in search of work, eventually settling on a farm called Esperado in 1965. He began to decorate his dwelling and the stones around him. The rocks, visible from a passing road, became a tourist attraction, though Mr. Mabuza, who lived alone, never charged people to enter or to take photos. “The idea of outsider art didn’t exist at the time,” said J. F. C. Clarke, whose book “The Painted Stone Garden of Nukain Mabuza” is the only comprehensive written and photographic account of the work, which is now badly sun-dam-
aged on a derelict site. “He was a humble man, but completely obsessed in a way that is different from the obsession of a mainstream artist. ” Mr. Fugard knew the basic facts and had seen Mr. Clarke’s photographs when he began to rework the draft. Essential elements are drawn from the facts, including the setting, the re-creations of the rocks and details of Mr. Mabuza’s life. But the depiction of the artist and the characters who share the stage with him are, Mr. Fugard said, fictional. He has written in a distinctively South African idiom, mixing Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans words into the text. Mr. Fugard said he never ceased writing for a South African audience. He moved back to South Africa about two years ago after the 2010 opening of the Fugard Theater in Cape Town, where four of his recent plays have had premieres. “I realized, my God, why am I spending so much time out of this country, where I belong?” he explained. In the new play, Mr. Fugard’s Mabuza faces one last undecorated rock, and falters. “There must come a point in an artist’s life when you have to confront the possibility that it is all over,” Mr. Fugard said. “I thought, this wonderful virginal rock is his last painting, and maybe this is my last play.”
Fans Pay for Musicians’ Second Acts By JOE COSCARELLI
Twenty superfans of De La Soul, the hip-hop trio, recently paid $300 each for a Skype video chat with the group. Another spent $1,500 on a vintage boom box from one member’s “personal collection.” The perks were offered in exchange for financial support as the act raised money to make its eighth studio album. In a monthlong Kickstarter campaign, De La Soul raised $600,874 from 11,169 backers — far more than its goal of $110,000. Kickstarter, once seen chiefly as a tool for emerging acts, has also proved to be fertile fund-raising ground for established artists. This year, the surviving members of TLC, the ’90s R&B
group, raised $430,255 to make its “final album.” It followed acts like Toad the Wet Sprocket ($264,762) and Kenny Loggins ($121,797). But this money often comes with expectations. De La Soul offered “And the Anonymous Nobody,” its first album since 2004, and one the group promised would be free of the commercial constraints that come with a traditional record deal. “A lot of times labels don’t even know what they want,” said Kelvin Mercer, one-third of De La Soul, who is known as Posdnuos. Michael McGregor, a Kickstarter spokesman, said that for a well-known act, the “history and the connection they’ve al-
ways had with their fans” comes through in a crowdfunding campaign. Members of De La Soul, which had its debut in 1989, are music “lifers,” he said. Before fund-raising started, De La Soul — which also includes David Jolicoeur, known as Dave, and Vincent Mason, or Maseo — had spent about $100,000, recording more than 200 hours of jam sessions to sample on the album. Some career musicians see the exchange as crass. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, Morrissey called crowdfunding “a desperate measure, and insulting to the audience.” Amanda Palmer, the punk-cabaret singer who raised a record $1.2 million for an album on Kick-
Even experienced musicians are turning to crowdfunding. The hip-hop trio De La Soul raised $600,874 for a new album. CHAD BATKA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
starter in 2012, said the funds can go fast. From manufacturing to shipping, “all of the risk and responsibility is in the artist’s hands, whereas it used to be the label’s problem,” Ms. Palmer said. Ms. Palmer acknowledged that crowdfunding was not for everyone. “No artist wants to feel like a charlatan salesperson,” she said. “Nor do you want to simply hide behind the system and hope that the fans and the money show up
magically at your doorstep.” Mr. Mercer said that De La Soul was “very unsure” about the arrangement until the group saw the success of veteran artists, like the director Spike Lee. “There were definitely labels interested in De La Soul,” he said, but now the group will be held accountable by only its longtime fans. That brings different pressure. “There’s no one in the way,” he said, “and no one to blame.”