Teen literature, entertainment company wants YOU

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If you’re a fan of the CW or Blake Lively, you’ve probably spent a lot of time sitting on your couch watching tween TV shows such as ‘Gossip Girl’ and movies such as ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.’

Those and many of today’s most popular teen properties are the brainchild of Alloy Entertainment, a New York book packager that churns out books and movies even faster than Carolyn Keene wrote the Nancy Drew series. The movies ‘Sex Drive’ and ‘The Clique’ came from Alloy books, as did TV shows such as ‘Privileged’ and ‘Samurai Girl.’ (Don’t pretend you don’t watch them; we know you do.)

The company takes the romantic notion of authors writing novels in a garret and stomps on it, producing books by committee with a team of editors and writers who brainstorm ideas and make edits.

Now, Alloy is reaching out to those crazy authors in garrets by launching the Alloy Entertainment Collaborative, which plans to acquire 12 partial or complete manuscripts a year in the women’s fiction, young adult and middle grade books category. That means that in addition to the manuscripts the packager develops internally at staff meetings, it will also package books written by outside authors. Win one for literature?

Alloy has been increasingly successful at making its books into movies and TV properties, expanding its Hollywood presence last year to better make deals with studios. It will retain the rights to each Collaborative property in the event that a book is produced in film or TV and the author will get some money to furnish -- or maybe even move out of -- his garret.

So if you’ve had an idea for a tween movie or book about girls with too much money kicking around, maybe you’ll want to submit it to the Collaborative, which will polish it up and ship it out in no time. This time next year, you might be sitting on a much nicer couch, watching Blake Lively on your show on the CW.

-- Alana Semuels