Where Will I Find My Next Lit Podcasts?

This weekend most of the cooking I did was for a birthday lunch. It wasn't a binge, which is much more of a cook-like-a-maniac-for-no-particular-reason thing. In addition, the podcasts I was listening to weren't working for me. What I want now is to listen to short stories and essays from lit magazines. I've got to hunt for some more before the next true binge strikes.

In the meantime, you can enjoy my past posts about podcasts and cooking all collected in one pretty Pinterest board.

Today I'm taking part in the Weekend Cooking meme at Beth Fish Reads.

August Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar

We're having a very good summer for children's lit appearances here in Connecticut. Libraries have been great these last few months as far as bringing children's/YA authors in is concerned. And then there was Barnes & Noble's Teen Book Festival in June. August will be the quietest month for us, and it's not that bad. 

Sat., Aug. 6, Jessica Haight and Stephanie Robinson, Groton Public Library, Groton 3:00 PM

Sun., Aug. 7, Julia Denos, R. J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 3:00 PM 

Sun., Aug. 7, Nancy Cote, Bank Square Books, Mystic 1:00 to 3:00 PM

Wed., Aug. 10, Sara Levine, Guilford Free Library, Guilford  2:00 PM

Thurs., Aug. 25, Karen Fortunati, Shannon Parker, Rebecca Podos, and Kate McGovern, The Lucy Robbins Welles Library, Newington  6:30 to 8:00 PM

Sat., Aug. 27, Karen Romano Young, Byrd's Books, Bethel 4:00 PM

Have You Read The Summer "SCBWI Bulletin?" I Have.

Hard as it is to believe, the Summer 2016 SCBWI Bulletin arrived just a couple of days ago, and...I have already read it! I know! I sometimes get a couple of issues behind.

If you are a SCBWI member and your Bulletin is floating around the house, here are some  articles I recommend:

10 Ways to Gear Up for the Coming School Year by Alexis O'Neill. There were a couple of things new to me. One of them being the Five-Year Rule.

On Series by Bonnie Bader. What I found so interesting about this article is that Bader says that series are a great way "to hook kids into reading." This is a different spin on series Betty Carter's in the March/April Horn Book. Though she was more concerned with series' impact on reading competence than whether or not they encouraged children to read.

Art Tips by Manuela Pentangelo. It's about Pinterest.

And my writers' group colleague Jane Sutcliffe has a big part in the Bologna Children's Book Fair story about Melissa Stewart's Feathers. That's an interesting article, too, even if you don't know Jane. Or Melissa.

Time Management Tuesday: Pick Just One Thing

You'd think I had a house full of toddlers the way my personal life bleeds into my professional one during the summer. Family members visiting...having birthdays...planning trips. Then there are extra rooms to take care of, the sun room and two decks. And what about that entire alternative universe that sucks up time with a straw? The yard. This summer I have two conventions (I actually watch a little convention coverage late in the evening) and the Olympics to distract me in the evening when I usually do content marketing. And, also, it is hot. Heat is like a tropical disease to me.

Just a little of the alternative universe.

2 Decks, 1 Summer Yoga Sanctuary

What to do when the boundary between work life and personal life is thinning or bulging one way and then the other and could rupture any minute? Not much.

That's my theory. That's my plan. Whatever time I can scrounge together for work will be devoted to one project. That, I think, is my best chance for making much progress on anything. It will be progress on one thing.

That strategy isn't always going to work, of course. Someone working with multiple deadlines, prepping for some appearances, and/or getting ready for marketing a new publication all while dealing with summer family fun is going to be on the brink of some kind of psychic snap. But I have the option of sticking to one project as much as possible for the next few weeks.

Oh, and I'll be able to report here how it went. won't I?  Love when that happens.

"Kill The Boy Band." Now That's Different.

Kill the Boy Band by Goldy Moldavsky has one of the most unusual stories I can recall seeing in a YA book.

Yesterday Salon published an article on the decline in popularity of the YA movie genre.  "The trouble with YA adaptations is that they’re awfully samey," Nico Lang writes. "How many times can you watch teens topple dictatorships, wistfully battle cancer, romance the undead, or discover that they have very special powers that mark them for a greater purpose?"  The YA movie adaptations are samey because a lot of YA books that become movies are samey.

But Kill the Boy Band is a terrific break from fantasy, problem stories, romances, and the apocalypse. It is dark, but not dark depressing. It's more of a dark humor-type of thing. And, according to this review, I didn't even get a lot of the humor, because I didn't get the 80s movie references. I don't know where I was in the 80s, but I wasn't in movie theaters.

So what's happening here is four teen girl fans ("fan" does not begin to describe these people) of a boy band manage to get a room at the hotel where the boys are staying. One of the girls happens upon one of the boys in the hall. Things get out of hand.

As much as I liked the story, the characters, and the writing, I found the first half of the book a little slow. At which point it becomes what I think could be described as a thriller. Yeah. Picked up after that.

I'm not sure we ever know the narrator/main character's name because she gives a different one whenever she's introduced to someone. (They may be the names of characters from movies I haven't seen.)  But she's what passes for normal in that crowd. Every now and then she describes the joys of fandom, making it sound logical. Well, maybe not the fandom those four practice.

I have no idea if the fan world described here in an over-the-top way has any basis in reality. But it certainly works in the the world of  Kill the Boy Band.

I described this book to a family member this weekend. Oddly enough, we started trying to come up with people to play the fangirls in a movie. (This was before I read the Salon article I linked to above.) Melissa McCarthy was mentioned. Rebel Wilson. Mila Kunis. Everyone we thought of was wonderful, but too old. Hollywood would have to find an entire new generation of power actresses for this project.

Hmm. Tatiana Maslany might be able to play young. I think I read the clones on Orphan Black are her first adult roles. She always played younger people before.

But, you know, except for maybe her, they'd need all new people.

The Weekend Writer: Submit, Submit, Submit

A few months ago, I did a Weekend Writer post on creating a writing portfolio before submitting. But once you've done that, submit. Years ago, they used to say "Nothing gets published, if it's sitting in your filing cabinet." Now we'd probably say, "Nothing gets published, if it's sitting on your hard drive."

Earlier this summer Kim Liao's essay, Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year, got a lot of attention on Facebook and Twitter.

"Set rejection goals. I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.”

The point here is that you can't get rejected, if you don't submit. And, of course, you can't get accepted, if you don't submit.

Submission Chart

There may be something going on here with odds, too. The more you play, the better your chance of winning. The more you submit, the better your chance of acceptance and publishing.

While I don't have any expectation of making one hundred submissions this year, I have been making an effort to submit. I've done eighteen so far, with two more planned for next week.

And I do have a better way of tracking submissions than that board on a cupboard. But a board on a cupboard is fun. I'll be going on to the second board soon.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? July 18 Edition

Goal 1. Adhere to Goals and Objectives. Oh, July, you are kicking my butt. And you're not done yet.

Goal 2. Prepare Mummy Hunters for Submission. Ah...ten minutes?

Goal 3. Generate New Short Work/Programs. Found a new place to make a submission.

Goal 5. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding


My eBooks Sales Post--Promoted blah, blah, blah
Time Management Tuesday Post--Promoted blah, blah, blah
Environmental Book Club Post--Promoted a couple of times
Goodreads Blog Post published.
Call for CCLC
Began work on CCLC

 Goal 6. Generate New Work: Submitted the picture book I've been talking about forever.


Have I used anything from the NESCBWI conference in April? Why, yes. I used something from the workshop on writing cover letters. Also, I used something one of my colleagues in in writers' group learned at the conference. Thank you, Nancy.

The Environmental Book Club

My favorite EBC selections all together on a Pinterest board.

Time Management Tuesday: Did I Waste Weeks Of Summer Evenings On Pinterest?

I've written here before about the time issues involved with social media. Yes, social media is important for marketing writers' work and for marketing themselves. It can keep your name alive between publications. But it's important to remember that you don't want to be spending more time marketing your work then you do on creating it. That's particularly important to keep in mind as new social media platforms are created. We should have a logical reason for jumping to something new, a logical justification for the time we're spending learning how to use the new platform and then maintaining it.

How I Got Excited For Instagram

 

An entire year ago, the artist who did the cover illustration and design for the Saving the Planet & Stuff  eBook told me I should be in Instagram. He suggested I build a presence around my author appearances. In addition to being an artist, he was then working at an advertising agency in New York. He was a mad man, as a family member said. We're not talking one of the neighbors raving about Instagram. I began to feel enticed.

It took  nine or ten months to get fully there, though. What little I knew about Instagram suggested that it is all about images, making it different from the other social media platforms I use that are primarily about text. Even Twitter is built around text--very little text, but text nonetheless. Images are important for blogging, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter because the images attract people to your text. But IF I understood Instagram, image came first there.

That would make Instagram different from other social media I use.

But would Instagram be a way for an author to reach a new group of people, people who are interested in image first? I liked the idea of using pictures from author appearances in some way, and I also had an idea for using photographs from the author homes I like to visit and have written about here. And could I link blog posts to Instagram, drawing new people to the blog? To me?

Well, So Much For Instagram

I was pretty psyched for this Instagram thing until I actually looked at it. It just appears to be a mass of pictures. I may be wrong about that, of course, but there was a bigger issue. My reading and questioning indicated that you post to Instagram from smartphones. That would have been fine for the future, but I wanted to use pictures stored on my hard drive. There was probably a way to manage the job, but there was a limit to how much time I wanted to commit to this job.

Time. If this couldn't be easy and fast, I didn't think I should be doing it.

But by that point, I was really pumped for doing something with my literary tourism pictures. I can't remember what made me think of Pinterest, which I believed to be image heavy.

But I Did Think Of Pinterest

Okay, so I looked into Pinterest. The two issues I considered:

• Can writers use it for marketing?
• Is it easy to use? 

Well, I haven't been able to find much about writers using it for marketing, and I wasn't able find many writers there. But I was able to figure out how to use it. And, it turns out, there is a curation aspect to Pinterest that attracts me.

So for many, many evenings this summer I played with Pinterest. I spent a lot of time on this shiny, new thing.

What I'm Doing On Pinterest

So what I'm doing on Pinterest, besides looking up recipes and weird historical boards, is pulling content out of my 14 years of blog posts and repurposing it on Pinterest boards. The Gene Stratton-Porter's Cabin board you see here is an example. These literary tourism boards are made up of photographs, but there's also one pin from my blog. Thus the littourism boards do have the potential to draw, or drive, people here to Original Content and, thus, to me.(Yeah. I am the blog.)

Here is a key thing with Pinterest and me--pinning my blog posts is easy. Look down to the end of this post. You'll see a row of icons representing various social media platforms. My posts can be shared with any of them. And, yes, they can be pinned to a Pinterest board.

Once I realized how easy it is to do that, I began thinking of all kinds of Pinterest boards to make with my blog content.

• Favorite Environmental Book Club selections
• Connecticut Childlit Author Appearances
• Podcasts in the Kitchen

All I need is blog posts with images and an organizing theme.  I can go on and on with this!

But So What?

Well, there's the time management question. Am I going to get any bang for my time spent? For Pinterest to work for me, it will have to promote me, just as this blog promotes me. However, because there are now so many, many blogs, I have to promote it to attract attention. I expect to have to do the same for Pinterest.

Let me repeat that in bold:

• These days, I have to promote the blog, which only exists to promote me.
• I expect to have to promote my Pinterest boards, which only exist to promote me. 

If there are people on Planet Pinterest because they prefer images to text, I may be able to reach them there. I may be able to make myself known to them. But maybe I won't.

I'm gambling here, people. While I'm gambling with my time, you'll be seeing Pinterest boards here from time to time. Hey, they'll be images for the blog, right?

This is why I don't care for casinos. I do enough gambling with my life, thank you very much.

So Children's eBooks Do Sell

G. P Putnam

Published by moi

I have four eBooks out in the world. Three were published by G.P. Putnam's Sons at the same time the company published the hardcover editions of my last three books. I published the fourth one, an eBook republication of one my earlier out-of-print books from Putnam. Nonetheless, my impression has been that children aren't big eBook readers. I've heard speakers say eBooks are the next big thing for children. But when visiting schools, speaking with librarians and parents, and in give-and-take on-line, I haven't seen it happening. In fact, I've read that eBooks are very much a middle-aged woman reader thing. Not a kid thing, at all.

G. P. Putnam

Then last month I received my most recent statement from Penguin Random House.  They've revised the statement, so it's a little easier to read. (Hey. It's not just me who has trouble with those things.)  I was surprised to discover that I've  sold a few copies of each of my eBooks during the period the statement covers. What was more surprising was how many eBooks I've sold overall.


Now, we're not talking bestselling numbers here. The numbers are just higher than I expected. When I told a family member how many eBooks of Happy Kid! have sold...Well, let's just say I got a reaction. Our expectations were that low.

G. P. Putnam

Of course, children don't buy many books of any kind. Adults buy books for them. No doubt adults are buying these. Are they buying them for their children's e-readers? Are they buying them for their own e-readers, so they'll have some child reading available for child reading emergencies in cars, doctors' offices, etc.? (I can see myself doing that.) Are they buying them for themselves to read? (I have done that.)

Whatever the reason, someone is buying these particular children's eBooks. I assume that means they're buying other children's eBooks, too.