Gossip Girl must have been delighted by the news that Owen, Baby and Avery Carlyle were staying in New York indefinitely. They certainly make life interesting. Will Avery become the most popular girl at Constance, or will Jack Celine have something to say about it? Will Baby get over her heartbreak, or is she destined to be the Upper East Sides tragic heroine? And how will the messy Owen/Chloe/Rhys triangle be resolved? Can two boys who are in love with the same girl really stay friends? As long as there are juicy stories to tell, Gossip Girl will be here to tell them.

Gossip Girl creator Cecily von Ziegesar. Photo: Roger Hagadone.

It is a familiar venue for the author, who grew up in New York City and attended a school much like the novels’ fictional Constance Billard School for Girls. “There is a little bit of me in the characters, but the books are definitely fiction,” explains von Ziegesar. “My life was nowhere as glamorous or exciting as the lives of these characters, though I did have some incredibly wealthy friends. They may have gone to fabulous benefits, but on a daily basis they were going to school, wearing uniforms and doing homework, just like I was. To make the novels more exciting, I elaborated and added elements that made things more current than when I was in high school in the late 1980s.”


Cindy Eagan, editorial director of Poppy, recalls being instantly attracted to the initial Gossip Girl proposal, which ironically—given its title character’s penchant for communicating on the Internet—was one of the first book proposals she received via e-mail. “Cecily’s writing was unapologetically catty, funny and incredibly descriptive,” says Eagan. “She seemed to have caught onto trends before they happened, with Gossip Girl being what was initially described as a ‘Web mistress,’ before the word ‘blogger’ was known. I jumped on the book right away.”

Though the publisher originally signed a contract with the author for four books to be published simultaneously in mass market format, that plan was scrapped. “When Cecily started writing, it became clear that the books would be more complex, more fleshed out, than we had anticipated,” Eagan explains. “They would take her longer to write and we knew it wasn’t going to be possible to get four out at once.”

And it soon became clear that the popular series, which debuted in 2002, would extend beyond four titles. There are more than five million copies in print of the 12 earlier Gossip Girl books, and a spin-off series, It Girl, has sold a million copies since its 2005 launch. After the first It Girl novel and the ninth Gossip Girl book, ghostwriters began to contribute to both series, Eagan says, though von Ziegesar continues to plot out each story and helps shape the drafts and characters.


Eagan reports that sales of Gossip Girls remain steady, though the publisher did see a spike when the TV show debuted last fall and Poppy published tie-in editions of the first two Gossip Girl novels. “The biggest change we see as a result of the show is that Gossip Girl is becoming part of the pop-culture language,” Eagan observes.

Although von Ziegesar is not part of the writing team for the Gossip Girl show, she does spend time on the set and says the show’s creators are doing “a terrific job,” noting, “I had thought that they might change everything so the books would be unrecognizable, but instead the show is close to the heart of the novels.”

Did von Ziegesar ever envision that her novels would ever make their way to the screen? “I didn’t think anyone would want to read the books, let alone watch the stories on TV,” she replies. “I really was nervous that this was such a privileged group of young people in Manhattan that no one would care about them. That was my challenge—to make people care.”

Source: Publisher’s Weekly