VERO BEACH — Leslie McGuirk is a genius at reinvention. Last year, the island children’s author turned a collection of blobby beach rocks into a coffee-table alphabet book that sold 10,000 copies. Now, she has signed with a Canadian firm to produce interactive books for the iPad.
In May, McGuirk and a Canadian company took the first in her series of cardboard flip books for toddlers and turned it into an interactive e-book app for children. Five more conversions are in the pipeline.
Later this month, McGuirk and an earlier collaborator, famed New York restaurateur Alex Von Bidder, are releasing another children’s e-book on the San Diego Zoo.
Meanwhile, a feature film is in the works for another of her books. In November, her very first effort, a children’s book she wrote at age 23, is finally going to be published as well.
The Pip the Penguin flip book series, which sold 600,000 copies worldwide in multiple languages, has been out of print since early 2000.
With the help of Skywriter Media, an independent Canadian TV producer and content distributor, McGuirk has resurrected one of most popular characters, who now appears through an iPad app called “Draw Along Pip,” tidying up a household with his young reader’s interactive help.
McGuirk was put in touch with Skywriter through an entertainment lawyer, a longtime friend and associate.
She is now listed as the Toronto-based company’s author-in-residence with its new e-book division, Skyreader.
Meanwhile, Skyreader is also producing a series of interactive iPad ebooks on the zoo.
Von Bidder, co-owner of New York’s Four Seasons restaurant and a longtime friend of McGuirk’s, is sharing authorship with her on “Wiggens Makes Friends at the Zoo.”
The lead character is Wiggens, another McGuirk creation. The same chocolate lab puppy romped through “Wiggens Learns his Manners at the Four Seasons Restaurant,” a paper book published in 2009, and earned himself an appearance – along with Von Bidder and McGuirk – on the Martha Stewart Show. An article on the book also appeared in Town & Country magazine.
Von Bidder recorded the voice for the character of a blue-and-gold macaw who flits through the zoo book. He said he pitched the idea for the book series to the San Diego Zoo through a personal connection.
“It’s to promote the mission of the zoo of animal preservation and conservation,” he said. He expects five more books to follow.
The Von Bidder and McGuirk collaboration takes place mostly by phone and e-mail. He has visited Vero Beach to promote the “Manners” book at the Vero Beach Book Center.
In February, he and McGuirk judged the tailgate competition at the Charity Polo Cup at Windsor.
“It’s hard to tell what comes from whom,” said Von Bidder, after spending three days touring the zoo last summer with McGuirk to come up with their narrative.
Describing their collaboration as “seamless,” he said, he and McGuirk share the “quirky humor of a 7-year-old.”
“It’s a new process for us inasmuch as the editing,” said Von Bidder. “It involves more people and takes a lot shorter time than what they call ‘analog’ books. The animation is fabulous and the layering of the story is great.”
McGuirk said children can tap the screen to go to zoo information or videos imbedded inside of the story.
In May, Skywriter CEO Kevin Gillis appeared with McGuirk on a Canadian TV morning show to promote “Draw Along Pip.”
Together, they prompted the show’s host to tap and outline on the iPad screen, causing sound effects, animation, and words highlighted as a child’s voice narrates.
“It’s the most exciting thing I’ve worked on in my career,” said Skywriter’s head of marketing, Andrew Jackson, whose 8-year-old son recorded the narration for Draw Along Pip. Another son, 5, helped with testing.
“I could take home pages to them at night and show them what we worked on,” said Jackson.
Interactive features dreamed up by Skyreader’s technical team include making faucets turn on, causing fish to fall off the print of a fabric then tossing them back into the sink or tub, and brooms and brushes fallen on the floor that can be picked back up and hung on hooks.
The proprietary platform is based on enhancing the original work of authors, Jackson said, as opposed to a wholly-designed app written by technicians.
“They stayed very true to my art, and I had final approval,” says McGuirk.
The latest successes for McGuirk once again bring the long-time Summerplace resident onto a stage far broader than Vero, where she moved in 2000.
Recently named to the board of McKee Botanical Gardens, McGuirk, 51, is a passionate lover of nature. She said her dream was always to be a game warden in Africa. But because the zoo book concerns how children make friends – and animals are the vehicle for the message – they decided to call in an expert beyond zoologists.
“We hired a child psychologist on this one,” she said. “The first book was on manners, and Alex is an expert on elegance and manners. But we wanted to make sure we were telling a story that really reflected what happens if you’re a new kid in school and you have to make friends with children who are different.”
The zoo story uses animals to represent those differences.
Wiggens, the pup, is led by his fictional grandpa, a golden retriever based on a real dog whose presence calms the anxiety-ridden cheetah in the zoo.
The challenges include befriending the enormous elephant (the elephant, urged not to play rough, shrinks with a stroke of the iPad screen); the pandas who speak only Chinese (the dogs charm them by playing a bamboo flute); and the distracted meerkats, who ultimately are left alone.
The lesson there?
“Sometimes you have to just walk away,” says McGuirk.
The collaboration between authors and zoo officials was “very intense,” said McGuirk. “In a children’s book, there’s got to be humor on every page and the book has to make sense. At the same time, the San Diego Zoo is the best in the world. And I had to do something that matters to the zoo, teaching respect for the animals and conservation issues.
“One of the problems with zoos is that children want to go see everything but they don’t read the little signs, so they’re not getting the idea of what the animals are all about.”
The zoo visit included a tour of the kitchen where meals for the animals are prepared.
“They have a freezer full of mice and rats with a menu of all the different styles they serve them in – pinkies and fluffies and rat-sicles and mice-sicles,” said McGuirk.
That kitchen is now a painting in gouache, along with a dozen other zoo scenes spread across the worktable in her upstairs studio.
McGuirk draws and then paints entirely by hand – she does not use computer drawing software.
Meanwhile, another project not yet published appears to be on track to become a feature film, also produced by Skywriter.
As for the children’s book she wrote when she was 23, it is at last being published by her long-time book publisher, Candlewick.
“The Moogees Move House” is scheduled for release in November.
“I’ve always loved it and now it’s finally getting published. I think it’s one of my best books.”
