These are original stories generated by the authors – their intellectual property, told their way, with their characters and their sense of humor. This is not like using a ghost writer or ‘assistant writer’ to write my ideas. I am not writing the books and I don’t tell the authors what to write. No! My job is to help edit the books where it seems appropriate, to offer advice and guidance where I can, and to promote the great books we publish. (*And when I use the term myth, I use it in its first and most basic sense: a traditional story about gods and heroes, not in its later, more secondary connotation as something false or made up.)Īre the Rick Riordan Presents connected to Percy Jackson’s world? Let them tell their own stories, and I would do whatever I could to help those books find a wide audience! Much better, I thought, to use my experience and my platform at Disney to put the spotlight on other great writers who are actually from those cultures and know the mythologies* better than I do. Over the years, I’ve gotten many questions from my fans about whether I might write about various world mythologies, but in most cases I knew I wasn’t the best person to write those books. Our goal is to publish great middle grade authors from underrepresented cultures and backgrounds, to let them tell their own stories inspired by the mythology and folklore of their own heritage. In other words, they will probably be some type of middle grade adventure, with lots of humor and action, and probably draw on myth or folklore in some way. All these will be books that my editor Stephanie Lurie and I feel will appeal to kids who like my books. We aim to publish about four books a year.

Rick Riordan Presents is one small branch of the Disney-Hyperion Publishing family. What is the ‘Rick Riordan Presents’ Imprint?

The city of the plague god