Because I was away for so long, I couldn't receive my author copies of SURF MULES before it came out. But guess what arrived today!



Books and CDs!

Woo hoo!

One of the things I love about Florida is your relationship with nature. I have seen, with fair regularity: manatees, pink spoonbills, giant sandhill cranes, snakes of all kinds, vultures, armadillos, giant wolf spiders, stingrays, and the like.

On Sunday, I was at the beach and saw two creatures I have never seen before in real life:

A seahorse!

I've only seen them in aquariums but never in a real life situation!

and, 10 minutes later, a sea hare!
(see here:)

I never knew sea hares existed until one swam in front of me. So cool!

This is a lovely little film about the Lee and Low book BIRD. I love the voice here.

More good practical advice from PWs Elizabeth Bluemle....

 

June 25, 2009

First, the bad news: we read fewer than 10% of the email promotions we receive. The good news: sometimes even an unread email leads to sales. (More on that in a bit.)

Just like everyone else in this information-overloaded world, booksellers are inundated with page upon page of electronic mail to assess and dispatch. Our inboxes are overflowing, and the problem just keeps getting worse. So how do you, publishers and authors, better your chances of getting read and building buying momentum via email?

There are a few tips that hold true in our store, so we'll share them and let other booksellers share their approaches to the glutted-inbox dilemma.

FOR AUTHORS

Subject headers should introduce a title or author, not make a claim.

Whet our interest with the book's subject matter, not your certainty that the book will sell in our store. Not to be unkind, but we pretty well know what will and won't sell well in our stores. Also, human nature leads even the most accepting of readers to automatically suspect unproven claims. Something that links the author with the store is effective: Possible title to carry / Vermont author was perfect, if not colorful. It was modest; "possible" indicates the author knows enough to know that we can't sell every book, and "Vermont author" sealed the deal; we'll always look at books from people in our state, because we love supporting local authors. Truly professional authors spend their precious "get our attention" the subject headers on less bluster and more plain information.

Do not use subject headers like this: Guaranteed bestseller just released! or Move over, John Grisham! Generally, there is an inverse relation between the size of the claim and the actual success of a book. Also, avoid words like "important," as in "an important new work." Literary importance is earned over time and is conferred by readers, not authors. Basically, do not evaluate your own book. Just tell us what it is about, in as brief and interesting a way as possible.

Today, we got an email with this title: New LGBT Children's Book "Oh The Things Mommies Do!" That header gives me enough information to figure out whether or not I wanted to open the email and learn more. (I did; always interested in new LGBT titles for families.) Another recent, perfectly practical header was this: New book: Carve Your Own Road - Do What You Love & Live The Life You Envision. It's enough to get us to open the email if we carry advice books, to take a further look, but also easy to delete if that isn't our metier. No exclamation points (the one in the first example is part of the book's title, so is exempt from the subject header prohibition), no exhortations, no attempts to tell us why we would be idiots not to read the advertised book. Instead, a simple alert to a new title and its subject matter. Perfect.

Do not address your email, "Dear Gentlemen..."

In addition to being an outmoded form of address for feminist reasons, your email is overwhelmingly likely in this field of children's bookselling to be read by a woman. The men are vastly outnumbered, sorry to say. So you would most likely be inaccurate, as well as distressingly sexist, to adjure only "gentlemen" to purchase your book.

Let your book stand on its own merits instead of trying to ride the coattails of successful books.

Do not compare your own book to Harry Potter, The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte's Web, or any other published title, for that matter — especially to claim that it's that book's equal or better. Authors and publicists who go this route actually undermine their books. Since it's very unlikely for a new author to outdo bestselling blockbusters and titans of literature, booksellers trust that if that is the case, established review sources will bring it to our attention. These claims read as amateurish, even desperate, attempts to get the attention of buyers, who are savvy, well-read experts in their fields. Such comparisons not only make the book less credible, they make it less likely to get read. You must trust that if your book truly is good, it will get read and be appreciated. This is not to say you shouldn't believe in your book ardently or do your best to get the word out, but do it with dignity, honesty, modesty, and a realistic sense of the marketplace.

It's probably best to forget attachments.
No bookseller I know ever opens attachments from an unknown source; we're all virus-wary. I'm afraid that, no matter how good that flyer or teaser of a first chapter is, it won't get read as an email attachment unless it's sent from someone at a publishing house who knows the bookseller and personally recommends it—and sometimes it won't get read even then. Even worse, booksellers often delete (without opening) any email with an attachment from an unknown source. Without an attachment, an email has a better chance of being opened.

FOR PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS BOTH

Do let us know about local (or national) media coverage of your books

It's so helpful to know when your book will be featured in the newspaper, on the radio, or on television. A very brief message with a clear subject header to this effect often leads to a beef-up in our stock. One of our customers, Bill Schubart, is a local author and fantastic, uber-professional promoter of his book, The Lamoille Stories. His subject headers are simple, clean, and informative: Upcoming Publicity for The Lamoille Stories by Bill Schubart. Seven Days Review & VPR. He even sent out a copy of his commentary on Vermont Public Radio that focused on the importance of supporting local bookstores. His emails are relevant and speak to our needs as booksellers, not to his needs as an author. That's effective promotion.

***

I promised at the beginning of this post to explain how an unread email can still sell books. When a subject header gives us enough information, we make a note of that book even if we haven't read the accompanying email. We have even been known to add its proffered book to a distributor or publisher order right then and there (mainly if we're already familiar with the author, or a trusted rep who knows our store has sent the email). It would at the very least lead us to look up the book on one of the store databases, where we can take a gander at the cover and read any reviews. For instance, the subject header New book: Kerplunk! Swimming Holes in Northern Vermont (not a real title, sadly) would immediately go to the ordering shortlist and its credentials checked out pronto.

By the way, I hope none of these Do's and Don't's columns make anyone feel embarrassed. Every single person reading this column has made rookie mistakes or misguided efforts in some field or other, including and especially me. And booksellers don't have enough room in their brains to remember who sent what email they just deleted. You can make your mistakes in comfortable anonymity, as long as they aren't giant enough to stop us in our tracks and take notice. This blog offers such a wonderful opportunity for communication between booksellers, publishers, editors, marketers, publicists, and authors that it seems useful to raise the questions of what, from our end, is most helpful and effective. Please weigh in with your thoughts.

Posted by Elizabeth Bluemle on June 25, 2009 | Comments (14)

Since I'm in P.R. mode, my publicist Deborah Sloan forwarded this very useful, handy-dandy how to effectively market to booksellers guide. Some good, practical info here from Elizabeth Bluemle ...

Marketing departments at publishing houses have a daunting task, figuring out how to use shrinking budgets to create promotional materials that are actually effective for the publisher and useful to the bookseller. So what works? What do we love seeing in our bookstores? What gets tossed out without a further glance? Whereas a centralized bookselling corporation may have one buyer to please, indies range in size, scope, and individual buyer preferences.

Here are a few do's and don't's Josie and I have put together from our perspective. Other booksellers' mileage may vary, and we hope the comments section will fill up with feedback that helps you hardworking publishing folks. (Note: the format makes this post sound really bossy—Do this! Don't do that!—but of course nothing in publishing and retail is that black-and-white. These are just observations and suggestions based on our experiences over the past 12 years. There's always room for imaginative promotions.) So, our wish list for promo items, taken in alphabetical order:

ACTIVITY SHEETS & TEACHER KITS AND GUIDES

Do: Allow us to re-order the kits if we run out.
Don't: Give us so few we can't share with the customers most likely to want them.
Consider: Letting us decide what promo items we want and not just sending boxes willy-nilly. That's very expensive for you, and good kits can end up going to waste needlessly. Also consider creating a web page listing all of your available activity kits and teacher guides for booksellers to reference when planning events and helping teachers.

AUTHOR EVENT MATERIALS
Do: Send event posters, if possible. We also like press releases and hi-res images of the author photo and book cover (300 dpi), so that we can use them in ads and our own event flyers. Another helpful attachment would be a complete backlist for that author, which keeps everything in one place and makes event ordering easy.
Don't: Make us fill out extensive author-request grids. (Okay, wishful thinking.)
Consider: Creating a flyer template (8.5" x 11") for touring authors' new releases that bookstores could download and display. All we'd need to do is add our store name, date, and time. A professionally designed flyer usually trumps bookstore efforts, though not always, and it's a very easy promotion.

BOOKMARKS

Do: Send appealing bookmarks. Designers, think like a consumer: would you choose that bookmark out of a jar? Would your kids? Great bookmarks have appealing front-side images without a lot of text; no one ever picks up a cluttered bookmark that is obviously only a marketing tool. There's nothing in it for the customer. Less is more with bookmarks, truly. Do put on-sale dates, backlist information, website, and/or author info, on the back; the back is fair game for any text you'd like. Again, think like a consumer, not a marketer. What would you or your children actually pay attention to? It's often not quite the same thing that a marketer wants to get across, but it can still sell a book or series. An author's signature can be a draw, and does double-duty as a giveaway at school events where not every child can buy a book.

Don't: Design very dark or black bookmarks; for some reason, no one takes them. A pirate or vampire book could get away with a black bookmark, if it were  handsomely designed and had white and bright accent colors. Otherwise, a no-go. Other bookstore mileage may vary.

Consider: Trifold bookmarks for series books. Scholastic had a great promotion for its Weekday Fairies series: it was composed of several connected perforated bookmarks, one for each book in the series. Kids loved these and we sold a lot of Fairy books. Children also love quizzes and mazes; tie in a back-of-bookmark game to the book and kids might hang on to the bookmark for quite a while.

BOOKS

Do: Send autographed copies we can use for prizes or raffles. We love that, and usually build a promotion around it. Sells books! Do encourage reps to put post-it notes on galleys they particularly love or want to draw our attention to: "Boys will LOVE this!" or "Great summer read" are helpful, as well as more specific praise: "Rep top pick. I couldn't put this one down." Holly Ruck was our first rep to do this, and we always paid attention. OH! And these two are crucial: Do put release month and year on the spines of ARCs. Many publishers have started doing this and we love you for it. Also, please please please put series numbers on the spines of your books, in easy-to-find, easy-to-read type. You would not believe how much time is spent by customers and frontline booksellers trying to track down which is the next book in a series.

Don't: Tie ribbons around galleys or gift hardcovers. It immediately conjures images of overworked interns or reps, and all we do is reach for the scissors. The ribbons get mashed flat in transit anyway. Truly not worth the time and effort. And please don't send them in the kind of envelope that explodes in a shower of newspaper pulp. Don't worry about trying to find a doo-dad to throw in with the book; unless it's a very clever tie-in, extremely cute, or useful, it just gets thrown out. We've seen a lot of Oriental Trading Company kinds of things; they really don't add interest or value for booksellers, so save that money to use elsewhere, maybe on better envelopes. With ARCs, please don't make us actually have to open the book to find the release date. Most of us shelve them by month for easy access, and when you're trying to sort stacks of galleys, it's a pain. And if the date is only on the back cover, pretty please make the type large enough for middle-aged eyes. Someone in the art department should make his or her mom try to read the info before approving it.

Consider: This is as nitpicky as it gets, but for those of you who list an author's books in the front matter, please do two things: include all the titles (don't do the old-fashioned thing of omitting the book the person is holding from the list), and list them in order.

CARDBOARD DISPLAYS, STANDEES, MOBILES, ETC. — We haven't seen nearly as many of these in recent years, but man, can they be effective. Customers love seeing a life-sized Olivia greeting them at the door, or a little Skippyjon Jones countertop standee. (I made up the latter as an example; I don't think that was actually a promo item.) We had a beautiful Angelina Ballerina cardboard display that we kept in the picture-book section, always fully stocked, for years. Now, that's effective marketing!

Do: Put as much thought into the shipping as the design and printing of these items. So often, they arrive with whole sections bent or creased, which undercuts the sharp appealing new feeling you're trying to create with the piece. Also, make sure they (a) assemble correctly, (b) have clear directions, and (c) are sturdy enough, something a toddler would have a hard time pulling over.

Don't: Send anything made of materials you wouldn't let a baby chew on.

Consider: Displays for six titles. These work so well on counters at smaller stores.


CDs & DVDs
Do: The multi-book samplers are usually well done, but we rarely listen to them, probably because a taste of honey's worse than none at all. (You can quote me on that.) Single-book samplers with an author interview are better.
Don't: Send us your catalogs on CD unless you know we want them. I think this practice has died out in favor of websites and online catalogs, but in case you do these, don't waste your resources on something that will get thrown out.
Consider: Sending a complete audiobook for titles you love. Nothing sells audiobooks in bricks-and-mortar stores like a recommendation from the bookseller. Also, any chance the prices could be a little more affordable for the common man? We hate losing sales to online vendors.


CONTESTS — Many booksellers do more with contests than we do. Our most successful contests have been generated from within the store, so we'll let other bookstore folks comment on these.

DOO-DADS & GIVE-AWAYS

Do: Send sticker sheets. These are always, always popular, especially when the book cover is one sticker and the rest of the stickers are cute images from the books. Creative pairings are wonderful; Harcourt's promotion of Little Miss Matched socks with Linda Urban's MG novel, A Crooked Kind of Perfect, was imaginative and attention-getting, and did our work for us; the display practically created itself. Pins and magnets can be great, if they're terrific-looking; otherwise, they tend to get tossed.

Don't: Send bottles of glitter, body powder or other dust-type things. Inflatables and other items made of that vile-smelling plastic seem hazardous to your health and I wouldn't let a child near them. (I might blow one up and suspend it from the ceiling if I love the character enough, but even that's iffy.)

Consider: Less packaging for all promo items, and doing away altogether with those trinkets that make a person feel like factory workers overseas are being exploited for an item that won't even get used.

IMPRINTED ITEMS

Do: Send pencils, pens, or crayons, in enough quantity to actually give away. A great T-shirt always makes a terrific raffle item, too.

Don't: Send three pens on a light-up lanyard. The staff probably won't think to wear them, and there aren't enough to share with a teacher.

Consider: Writing implements or erasers with your book title or cover image on them.

LUXURY PACKAGES

Do: Send good candy. We love it! We still remember the delightful "Fudge Bucks" from a Judy Blume promotion. And Workman had a golden ticket promotion that came with a gigantic Hershey bar perfect for sharing with your staff at 4:30 when everyone needs a little boost. Or send something that lasts beyond the promotion terms. Candlewick gave out a pretty painted wooden Maisy coin bank 10 or 12 years ago, and we still use it.

Don't: Use way more packaging than you need. Large boxes with few galleys and lots of pretty packing material come off as wasteful and needlessly expensive. In addition, a lot of fancy packaging gets banged up in the mail, so it often doesn't reach your booksellers in great condition.

Consider: Attaching something value-added to your promotion. We'd all rather get a plain old ARC and 2% than a cute imprinted carton. Honest.

POSTCARDS — [Edited to clarify: here I'm talking about single postcards sent through the mail to alert buyers to a new release.] Bookseller opinion on these is mixed. Some booksellers hate them, but I actually do pay attention to postcards, though some get recycled immediately while others make it to a to-be-ordered stack. Here's why:

Do: Make it pretty (i.e., well-designed) and keep it brief. Follow the bookmark rule: put a great image on the front and save the text for the back. Most effective text? ISBN, on-sale date, one-line teaser, and two or three great review quotes. That's enough. A small, handwritten personal note instantly makes the "okay, I'll take a look" stack. These often come from authors; it's amazing what a difference a personal touch makes.

Don't: Put too much text on the back; that makes a bookseller's (and a reader's) eyes glaze over. 

Consider: Choosing the larger-sized postcards; they do stand out in a crowd and allow for a cleaner, more readable, back side. Consider collaborating with authors more often, helping them with design, printing, and postage; let them add a note and signature before sending. It's a relatively inexpensive way to get the word out about a release.

POSTERS

Do: Ship them with adequate protection. Crumple-edged or crunched posters are a waste of your design, printing, and postage money. (This is why I never take posters from booths at trade shows; the chances of them making it home are practically nil without a tube, and I never think of bringing a poster tube with me. Hmm, maybe this year....)

Don't: Fold them. Teachers will take folded posters because any poster is welcome, but for a key spot on a bookstore or school wall, rolled is best. Don't waste your money on posters created more as marketing tools than art, i.e., posters with a few different books and a lot of text promoting them, and the publisher's name in huge type. (Award books are an exception to the several-book-covers rule; those are good. But, a simple label like "Newbery Books," accompanying the covers is best, with the publisher info tastefully at the bottom in a slugline. The poster is more likely to be placed in a prominent location and looked at, and the books will sell on the basis of their covers, titles, authors, and reputation. Kids and their parents don't tend to ask for books by publisher.

Consider: Is this a poster you would put up in your child's room? Classroom? Library?

TOTES are a mixed bag, literally.

Do: Make them as eco-friendly as possible. And pretty / handsome. The ones with great children's book art get used again and again and again. They are expensive, but probably pay off in the long run for books you're hoping will sell solidly well into the future.

Don't: Bother with the junky stuff. Better to spend your money elsewhere than have crummy totes, the weird ones that feel like environmental hazards, have handles too short to sling over your shoulder, and/or feel creepy to the touch. We also dislike plastic bags with book cover art sent in quantities for the checkout counter, but some booksellers love them. (Poll a few of your accounts?)

Consider: Imprinting recycled paper bags (with soy ink; it's everywhere now) instead of plastic. Not for trade shows, but for in-store promotions.

ONE LAST IDEA:

We got a terrific promotion from a publisher that had all the right elements, and all in a very small bubble envelope (no waste and inexpensive to mail): good bookmarks, a one-page sheet with an author interview on one side and an ordering promotion on the other, and — this was brilliant — a sheet of small square stickers listing release dates for that season's titles. Booksellers could pop them onto our calendars and plan ahead so easily.

Thanks for letting us share our preferences. Now we'd love to hear from publicists and other booksellers. What have we left out? What floats your boats?

Posted by Elizabeth Bluemle on May 15, 2009 | Comments (27)

My wife has recommended many books to me. However, I tend to go with what grabs me and not what's given. I want to read those books but they keep piling up. So when she gave me Michael Perry's book Population 485, I put it on my pile of Things I Really Want to Get To. When I came across Perry's newer book TRUCK: a Love Story, I got it for her on a whim. However, a strange thing happened. I started perusing the book and what struck me was: this guy can WRITE. Not in a high falutin' pretty prose kinda way, but in a honest to goodness, you know good when you see it and this was it kind of way.

The true story of a man (himself) and his truck (a 1951 International L-120 pickup) and his hermitic ways of never finding love, the book is an ode to America of old, of things cherished and lost, and the preciousness of guys and their trucks. “All I wanted to do,” says Michael Perry, “was get my old pickup truck running.  That, and plant a little vegetable garden.  Then I got distracted by this woman…”

This guy is the real deal. Check it out; you won't be disappointed.

Excerpt:
In an effort to help me arrive at the age of eighteen alive and financially solvent, my parents quite wisely forbade me to buy my own car while I was in high school. Which meant I did a lot of dating in the F-100. By the time I got my license, the truck was entering its second decade of hard labor. The side panels were ragged with rust and flapped like buzzard wings. When you gained speed, they flared. The truck pulled drastically to the right. I'd hang off the left side of the steering wheel to keep it moving on a straight line. The transmission, originally three-on-the-tree, had been replaced at some point and converted to a stick shift accessed through a hole cut in the floor. No one is clear on why, but the mechanic put the new transmission in backward so that the gear selection pattern was reversed. You had to go far right and back for first gear and shift against your intuition. There was a gap in the floorboards beside the clutch through which you could gauge your speed based on the road-blur. When it rained, my pant legs were mud-spittled. On the sharper turns, sheep ear tags and fencing staples shot across the dash. The brakes were inconsistent. Sometimes the pedal was soft as squishing a plum. Other times the brakes caught so abruptly empty vaccine bottles rocketed from beneath the seat and smacked you in the ankle bone.

Naturally, the windshield was cracked.

The heater was passable, but in the summer you'd rely on what a laughing bus driver once described to me as a "2-80" air conditioner: "Roll down two windows and go 80 miles an hour!" There were vents on either side of the cab at shin level, but to open them was to unleash a cyclone of alfalfa chaff and dehydrated horseflies. Picture your date perched beside you on a summer's day, her lips glistening with Bubble-Gum LipSmackers and the cab charged with the scent of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific! You're running fifty miles an hour down a gravel road when she grows over-warm and bends down to crack a vent. When she rares back, she appears to have emerged from a polluted wind tunnel. Her hair is frosted with feed dust and she's got pine needles stuck in her banana clip. Her lips are dotted like twin strips of flypaper, and there is a june bug in her braces.

You're young. You kiss her anyway.

For those parents out there who've been surrounded by kid toys like Lil' Ponies, Carebears and the like, this one's for you! If Hollywood continues it's Transformers trend, this is what we might see in the near future!

</div>

Okay, sure it's fantasy...but wouldn't it be nice if we could all get one? (that's enough for you, Mr. John Green). At the Eva Perry Mock Printz Book Club, Surf Mules has been put on the list for consideration.

Now if I could just get that mock Oscar for Best Actor...

MOCK PRINTZ BOOK CLUB

Along with the book release, there is also a Surf Mules audiobook from Listening Library!  While I was on vacation, my sister in law showed up with it and I was able to give it a listen.

Anyone who's had their book made into an audiobook knows it is a very strange sensation listening to an actor interpret your vision. Especially as a former director. So I just had to let go and appreciate his interpretation.

You can hear a sample here!
And what the heck, I am giving away one or two free copies to anyone who can recommend to me the best YA book they've read in the last 2 months! So if you like listening to books (and who doesn't get tired turning those pages!), you can win one here!

The second part of our road trip took us to Montana and Wyoming for an extended family reunion to celebrate my parents 50th wedding anniversary. When you see scenes like this, you are humbled.


Vast meadows with gentle streams.

The view from our cabin.

Not a bad piece of property to own.

We staryed near a place called Earthquake Lake, which was created by a massive tremor which split this mountain in two!

Lots of geysers and mystery steam.




And animals! Like this giant bear which stood in the hallway of our cabin along with stuffed elk, badgers, fish, and moose horns. Honestly, I can't understand the urge of seeing some of the greatest animals in nature and wanting to kill them.

But here's the real thing! Moose!


Bison! So many bison that at one time our car was surrounded by about 50 of them with10 babies. We saw so many that day, that on the way out of Yellowstone, we passed a gorgeous meadow filled with about 150 teaming bison and shrugged "eh, saw that..."

Grizzley! Hope he wasn't related to the bear in our cabin...


All in all, a great trip! Now I just have to catch up on everything I let go for 2 and a half weeks....

But this time it was a real road trip, with family, to celebrate my parent's 50th wedding anniversary in Yellowstone! So for 2.5 weeks, we drove through and stayed in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

And let me be the first to say: those states are beautiful. Just look for yourselves!




Wife and daughter appraoching a double arch!

                                                       ^ Me, very small, waiting for this very big rock to fall.

Like, this is not even Monument Valley...it's just some random valley!

Giant elephants and phallic symbols of rock!

Weird prehistoric sea animals!

Daughter Zola's first time seeing snow! (hey, we live in Florida!)

River guide looking alittle too worried about those rapids coming up...

Wifey looks at big rocks.

Ant piles...oh wait, those are people...

No one shall pass!

Zola and largest dandelion ever!

And finally this, spotted in the only supermarket in the desert town of Moab: 2k7ers Jay Asher, Carrie Jones and fellow Penguinite Laurie Anderson. Now that's outreach!

Coming up--Part2: Yellowstone!

It's official:

Sold: Author and illustrator team G. Neri and Jesse Joshua Watson's high concept young adult novel, GHETTO COWBOY, based on a real-life community of African-American cowboys in Philadelphia, at auction to Andrea Tompa at Candlewick, by Edward Necarsulmer IV at McIntosh & Otis (world English).

Yep, during all the craziness of our NY tour and the release of Surf Mules, my newest book went to auction and we ended up at Candlewick! Definitely like the vibe over there and Kate DiCamillo even signed her new book to me with a kind message about the editor we now share. Very cool stuff!



Ghetto Cowboy is the third in my urban trilogy stories that included Chess Rumble and Yummy. Based on the true neighborhood of black cowboys in Philadelphia, I have been trying to crack this story for years and finally figured out how to do it. Check out this video of the real deal and my research page that has more articles and such. Fascinating stuff and I can't wait till it all comes together. This is my Sounder, a timeless tale of a boy who goes to live with his estranged cowboy father and the horse he comes to love--a modern day western set in the inner city land wars of today's Philadelphia.


Many thanks to my agent Edward and my new editor Andrea. Yee-haw!

So good, so good. Here I am on my summer vacation, travel through Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming... and I find this little gem, like it was meant to be read by the side of a lake or a swimming pool or by flashlight late at night as my family sleeps in our motel room.

The book is Surface Tension by Brent Runyon (The Burn Journals), a Novel in Four Summers. Like a Same Time, Next Year for teen boys, Surface Tension perfectly captures the pivitol teen years of Luke, a young man who each summer goes away with his parents to their rundown lakeside cabin. Told in four chapters, one for each summer from age 13 to 16, this is a great concept that pays off with its lovely details of summers long past. Each year Luke's world gets darker and more complex as he yearns for the simplicity of his early years on the lake, at the same time diving head first into the unknown of the murky depths of life. Like a real life vacation, you wish it would go on forever but deep down, you know that all good things must come to an end. A perfect summer read.

Sorry Orlando, I'm a Laker at heart....

SURF MULES is out today and to celebrate, here is the premiere of our video trailer!

Here are the latest reviews:

"Harrowing... Neri delivers a powerful story that doesn't flinch... Sometimes brutal, but always realistic, this will find an audience among teens looking for gritty contemporary fiction."  - Booklist

"The tortured but loving friendship between Logan and Z-boy proves poignant and heartbreaking.  Logan's agonized wrestling with morally ambiguous choices and his flawed yet appealing family and friends should find a wide audience." - Publisher's Weekly

"Intense, funny, and exciting...readers will be hooked on this fast-paced, interesting adventure... it's a definite buy."  -School Library Journal

"I loved it-- I was totally hooked... a gripping and meaningful tale with some beautifully literary moments." -Literacy for Teens

Check out my cool downloadable flyer!


Two years of waiting...man....do you get a parade or something for surviving the wait?

Teenage readers are gravitating toward even grimmer fiction; suicide notes and death matches

By KATIE ROIPHE for the WSJ

Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today’s landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.

Jay Asher’s “Thirteen Reasons Why,” which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience—the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.

For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there’s Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay,” which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film “Twilight.” The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family’s bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one’s parents and forge an independent identity?

Of all of these adolescent confrontations with death, Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games,” which has sold over 120,000 copies since its September publication, is one of the more sophisticated. The story is set in a postapocalyptic future, in which a malign government takes one teenager from each district and pits them against each other in a televised arena until only one remains alive. The casual brutality of “Gossip Girl” and its ilk takes riveting form: the alliances formed and broken, the desperate feeling of being on one’s own, the relentless competition. Every moment of the sick, macabre game is being broadcast, and much energy is spent on the clothes and the sponsors: it is a stylish postmodern “Lost” in direct collision with “Lord of the Flies.”

Perhaps the most grueling of today’s crop of dark books is Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Wintergirls.” The author is no stranger to bleakness—her 1999 novel “Speak,” about a deeply miserable girl who is raped at a party, was a National Book Award finalist. Her new book conjures the terrifying delusionary inner life of a girl in a very advanced stage of anorexia. Lia starves herself in a fierce, paranoid state after her best friend dies of bulimia. While starving herself might seem an eloquent enough expression of self-hatred, Lia is also involved in cutting: In one brutal scene she sits in a darkened movie theater and carves little lines into her hip with razor blades, and later she cuts her chest with a knife as her 9-year-old half sister walks into the room and sees her. The book is at once riveting and repulsive to read, half Sylvia Plath, half diet manual.

To understand this recent wave of desperation lit, it’s useful to consider the history of books read by young adults that traffic in death and cruelty and mental illness. Think of Mary going blind in “Little House on the Prairie” or the ultimate institutionalization of Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye.” Teenagers have historically shown a certain appetite for calamity; they like a little madness, sadism and disease in the books they curl up with at night.

Right now, though, the motif of impending disaster—about a job that will be lost, a house that will be foreclosed, a case of swine flu that will sweep through the nation—looms large in our culture, and it may be no coincidence that the dominant ambiance of young-adult literature should be that of the car crash about to happen.

Unsettling as it is, there is a certain amount of comfort to be gleaned from the new disaster fiction; it makes its readers feel less alone. What is striking in the response to these books is how many teenagers seem to identify with their characters, even though their experiences (suicide, car crashes, starvation, murder) would seem to place them on the outer fringes of normal life.

It might appear to adults casually perusing “Wintergirls” and “Thirteen Reasons Why” that the kids and experiences within their covers are fairly uncommon and overwrought. But it seems that the extreme and unsettling situations chronicled in these books are, for many teenagers, accurate and realistic depictions of their inner lives. Your whole family may not have died in a car wreck, but it sometimes feels like they have. Everyone in the school cafeteria may not be plotting to kill you with bows and arrows, or knives, or mutant killer insects, but it feels like they are. In the theater of adolescence, with all the sturm and drang of separating from parents, with the total stress of just having to be yourself in the hallway at school, perhaps these books feel, at times, like a true and reasonable representation of daily life. It may be that the feverish drama of a 15-year-old’s private universe finds its natural form in these tales of destruction and death.

Given the grim story lines, not to mention absence of designer shoes and haircuts that readers of lighter young adult titles are accustomed to, it’s easy to assume that this new batch of young-adult books peddles despair. In fact, the genre is more uplifting than the fizzy escapism that long dominated the young adult marketplace. Today’s bestselling authors are careful to infuse the final scenes of these bleak explorations with an element of hope: The heroine wins the hunger games and does not die, Lia is headed toward recovery at the end of “Wintergirls,” Mia decides to live at the end of “If I Stay,” and Clay reaches out to another desperately unhappy girl in “Thirteen Reasons Why,” in the hope of saving her from Hannah’s fate.

There is, embedded in all of these grown up, gritty, unsettling books, the classic fairy tale reversal: the happyish ending. Ms. Anderson, in many ways the doyenne of this disturbing genre, says that ending on an encouraging note “is part of my moral code. Teenagers need to see a model of hope and growth.”

As alarming as these books are, there is in all of this bleakness a wholesome and old-fashioned redemption that involves principles like triumph over adversity and affirmations of integrity. In the end, these investigations of personal disaster are much less depressing than the “Gossip Girl” knockoffs which initially seem frolicky and fun but are actually creepy and morally bereft and leave you feeling utterly hopeless.

Here are a bunch of today's top illustrators paying tribute to Sendak's masterpiece. See them all here.

Two concierges working at the front desk. One turns to the other, befuddled. "Hey, how do you spell concierge?"

True story.

A fabulous new exhibit called Beyond the Page brought together some of today's best artists and illustrators to reinterpret some of our favorite stories and comics. Here are a few examples, then click on the link below for more.


Where the Wild Things Are



Velveteen Rabbit


The Giving Tree


Alice in Wonderland



The Little Prince

Goldilocks and the 3 Bears




Calvin and Hobbes

See the whole show here: