Think twice before pitching to children’s editors and publishers (in strange places)

Just before the editors and agents panel were rolled out at SCBWI’s pre-Bologna conference last April, organiser Lawrence Schimel made a little plea to attendees to remain calm and avoid the urge to grab an editor and pitch their manuscripts. “No sliding manuscripts under bathroom doors,” he cautioned.

Some attendees were a bit miffed by the warning, refusing to believe that wannabe children’s writers would do such a thing. Well, I recently checked out this Publisher’s Weekly link from Janet at the excellent Wordpool forum about how children’s editors get pitched ideas in the weirdest of places:

Beverly Horowitz, v-p and publisher, Bantam Delacorte Dell Books for Young Readers: My mother was close with her brother. He’d been seriously ill and finally died. Everyone from our family, of course, was at the funeral. We went from the service to the cemetery, and when it was over and people were starting to head back to their cars, I was walking with my mother when a woman she knew came up.

“I’m so sorry, I knew you were very close,” she said. Then she asked, “Is that your daughter, the one in publishing?”

When my mother said yes, it was, she said, “I thought I’d see her here with you. That’s why I have with me the manuscript I have always wanted to give to her.” She took it out of her purse and handed it to me.

I was totally taken aback. As she smiled at me I said, “Excuse me, I was just taking my mother to the car.” She held out an envelope.

I said, “I don’t really think I can take it. I might lose it.”

“No, you won’t,” she said. “You can fit it into your handbag.” At which point my mother said, “Just take it!”

After she left I told my mother, “I usually empathize with aspiring writers, but for this one, even if it’s Proust, I’m going to reject it!”

Read the article Weddings Funerals and Everywhere in Between by Diane Roback.

My father-in-law was a gynecologist, another occupation that invites unwanted attention. But he perfected a strategy for dealing with strangers seeking free medical advice.

"I am a doctor," he would admit. Then as the stranger prepared to launch into a detailed description of a medical problem, he would add: "I specialise in venereal disease."

Interestingly, from that point, you could always rely on all conversation of a medical nature to wither away.

Why competition from the internet means children’s writers must get web savvy

My 15-year-old son read three novels last week. Perhaps no mean feat for some, but it sure gave me a warm feeling inside. Normally, the boy would rather be downloading iTunes than flicking through a wedge of bound paper.

What made this reading binge possible? We had no internet access while on holiday in a remote part of Ireland.

Comes the headline ‘Book sales a page turner’ in the Daily Telegraph:

Despite ever greater competition from television, the internet and iPods for people’s free time, book publishers are enjoying a resurgence in British sales.

Stephen Seawright
The Telegraph, 11 Aug 2006

It was a report on strong results for UK publishers, improvements that hopefully signal a recovery in the depressed book market. Cause for celebration? Oh yes, especially for us unpublished writers desperate for a break. But wait – it was not all good news.

Ofcom reported last week that young people (16 to 24 years old) were forsaking old media (books, landline telephones, TV, radio) in favour of a multitude of new technologies. You can read the relevant part of the Ofcom report under section 1.2.2 ‘Young people are moving away from old media’.

Broadband has been key to this sharp change of allegiance – with the number of connections increasing by a humongous 63 percent and the price of broadband falling from £41 a month to as little as £16 a month.

The Ofcom report only describes 16 to 24-year-old media use but we are all painfully aware of how precocious the younger members of this tribe can be. Know your reader, they say in all the How To books on getting published and writing for children. Well, for goodness sake, according to Ofcom, the kids are even switching off the TV – reading’s traditional rival – to get online!

Are writers for children losing their readers to the internet?

Know Your Enemy

Well, do you? Do you know why the internet is such a turn-on for kids? Or do you shuffle into a dark corner and mutter about the youf and bloody new technology? Do you mourn the days when it was enough to take a pen to paper?

But there is no time to moan.

The longer we delay, the further we will be left behind by the internet juggernaut that even now is evolving into something bigger and more pervasive than we ever could have imagined.

You only have to look at a few authors’ websites to figure it out. Most are merely flyers about the authors’ work or, worse, CVs that might as well be on a printed page for all the interactivity they offer. And sadly, a few are only out to impress their mothers, close friends and former associates looking them up on Google.

Now look at what our market is into. You may think you know Ebay and Amazon. The teenagers we write for are into blogging, Flickr, Friendster, Technorati, del-icio.us, wikis, podcasting, YouTube. No time to explain here what these sites are all about except to say it’s all about social networking. Their Web is not just about Google, email and newsgroup discussions, it’s about sharing not just words but images, sounds, videos and authorware programmes. They are not only literate but transliterate.

The transliterate person has the ability to read, write, create and interact across multiple platforms. A simple example might be understanding the variations between reading the print edition of The Guardian newspaper, and reading the online edition - each have their own physicality and navigability, to name but two of many features worthy of discussion. Or the difference between communicating a sequence of events by drawing in the sand with a stick versus oral storytelling versus hypertext.

These are our readers. And when it comes to How to Use the Web they really get it. If you write for younger readers, don’t worry, they will get it too.

So you – we, all of us – writers need to get with the Web or lose out.

Get with it

“If email once eclipsed the letter, it now sits in the shadow of the social Web,” writes Daniel Anderson a teacher at the University of North Carolina in his blog I Am Dan.

Anderson, in a blog addressing teachers of writing and their students, makes the point that “writing can be a social act”, citing blogging as evidence of a significant shift in the way people are writing. He quotes Pew Report figures showing that 12 to 19 year olds blog more than twice as much as older bloggers.

“Writing is moving into social Web space. And Web writers compose with multimedia,” Anderson says, offering a list of suggestions about “what you need to know and what you need to do to write today”.

To write today you need to:

Conceptualize networks,

Find and move materials,

Make rights decisions.

Edit images,

Edit sounds,

Use a movie or authorware program,

Compose prose,

And what else?

You need to spatialize the net. Understand computing metaphors, established (desktop, server) and alternative (bus stop, kitchen sink). Know about files and applications. Understand and shape your computing environment. Find archives and databases. Compose searches. Get into the public domain. Know not to be thwarted. Capture. Screen shot. Exercise your fair use. Make decisions. Give credit. Know about layers. Resize. Crop. Add text. Move among media. Compose with a timeline. Fade in. Say something. Shape it. Fade out.

But how?

Here's how the Telegraph report said publishers were responding:

Despite the recovery in British sales, publishers still realise they need to adapt to the internet. Penguin is starting to provide e-books and podcasts to compete as more people move online. In a recent interview, Random House chief executive Gail Rebuck said she was looking forward to the day when she could read a variety of titles in one e-book.

So these publishers seem to think readers want to read books on the screens of their PDAs or listen to them on their iPods. But I would argue that our readers want much, much more.

The good news is that for once we can do something about this problem – unlike scary stuff over which we lowly authors have no control like sinking book sales, publishers not publishing new authors, accountants dictating publishing decisions.

I recently blogged a report YA Voice: Slang and Teen Vernacular based on a workshop by YA author Scott Westerfeld. I was amazed to very quickly get comments from Scott’s readers and, checking out Scott’s blog, I found that he was getting up to a hundred comments a day from teenagers who had discovered his books.

How did he get such a following? Well, apart from the excellence of his prose (I thought Uglies was great!) Scott really knows how to talk to his readers. He publishes their drawings, links to their websites and comments on their comments. It’s a wonder that he gets any writing done at all.

I’m no expert but it’s all new territory anyway – so here are some ideas on how to get with the Web game, with thanks to Scott for showing the way:

Published or unpublished, you can practice talking to your audience through a blog. Check out Scott’s blog to see how he does it. Or try developing a character by putting all his thoughts in a blog. Here's Wilf's blog - wilf being a fictitious boy who admires Buzz Aldrin and loves inventions. Here's another fictional blog by Atyllah the Hen, a chicken with Attitude from the planet Novapulse, here (a la Mork of Mork and Mindy) to research the human condition. Or why not go the whole hog and blog your novel - that is, if you can bear to be critiqued in public!

If you are setting up a website, think interactive – can you update it regularly? Ask your designer about designing for a CMS – Content Management System – an example is Macromedia Contribute which claims you only need word processing skills to update your website. But the quick, cheap and easy way to set up a website you can update is to set up a blog (see Blogger)- it's not hard if you've got the bandwidth.

It’s the social networking that young people enjoy. If you’ve got a website already, is there a space for your readers to publish their own drawings, photos, comments? Here is a teen video collage homage to Scott’s Uglies book and Scott’s homage to their homage.

Have your readers got a reason to return to your website?

Set up an entry for the lead character of your book in Friendster or MySpace. Check out the MySpace page for Scott Westerfeld fans Or how about a blog? Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events) had a short-lived blog as part of the marketing campaign for the movie version of the bestselling books. Not the most brilliant example but you get the idea.

You can learn a lot from looking at DVD bonus materials. When you’ve published your book, what will your ‘bonus materials’ be? Examples – podcasts, historical background, anecdotes about The Making Of, the true stories behind the fiction, roughs of illustrations, etc. etc.

If your book is still a work-in-progress, you can whet the appetites of readers with tantalising background stories about the process either by blogging or participating in relevant chatroom discussions. Here is Scott Westerfeld’s blog on the book he is currently writing And, taking a cue from the movieworld,
this is the week by week production diary kept by director Peter Jackson while making King Kong. Hmm. We could use that idea.

Visit the newsgroups and chatrooms where your readers hang out. Post a notice when you’ve got new entries and not only will they come to check it out, you increase the ranking of your Google listing!

Good luck - we'll need it.

Do write in if you've got more ideas on how to exploit the Web or links to more examples of authors using the Web to their advantage.

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Update! Publishing News (24 Aug 2006) reports that London-based independent publisher Gravity Publishing is developing a new e-reader that bypasses the internet. By cutting out the web, the e-reader overcomes the rights issues associated with the internet.

The use of reading matter differs greatly from the iPod model of music consumption. When you realise the lack of rights security comes from expressly delivering texts into computers and computer-like machines that can talk to the Internet, all else follows.

But doesn't all the talk of e-readers miss the point of the internet? Surely getting people to read off monitors and expensive little electronic devices is not the best use of the web. people are connecting to people, not to display formats.

Radio Roundup on Children's Writing

Here in the United Kingdom, radio is a wonderful resource for those interested in writing and books. BBC Radio broadcasts many programmes on books and reading – Open Book, A Good Read, Book Club, and Front Row are the main ones.

My problem has always been that I tend to listen to radio only when driving or as I'm getting breakfast for the kids. These days, nobody sits down of an hour to listen to the radio. But it is so worth it, especially if you are an aspiring writer looking for inspiration.

Here are some radio highlights so far this year on the subject of books for children – do have a listen ... they're all available online:

• The picture book writer and illustrator Bridget Strevens Marzo and Penni Cotton, a specialist on children's literature, discuss how mothers are portrayed in picture books. This was a Mother's Day special on Woman's Hour – it opens with the voices of small children comparing their own mothers to the mothers in books like Dogger by Shirley Hughes, Goodbye Mog by Judith Kerr, The Sad Story of Veronica Who Played the Violin by David McKee and Really Really by Kes Gray and Nick Sharratt. Listen to Mothers in Picture Books item, aired on 24 March 2006.
• Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses was discussed by an audience that included teenagers on Book Club (click on 'Malorie Blackman April 2006' on the 'Listen Again' column on the right hand side). Blackman was in great form and it was touching to hear the thoughtful questions of teenagers.
• Open Book interviewed illustrator Quentin Blake about the Lester stories he wrote in the seventies, which he read aloud and illustrated on the children's television programme Jackanory. Listen to the programme featuring Quentin Blake, aired on 30 April 2006.
• Open Book also interviewed novelist Philip Reeve on completing his Mortal Engines quartet. Listen to the Philip Reeve interview, aired on the 12th of March 2006.
• Chocolat author Joanne Harris is not a children's author, but I really identified with this Open Book programme where she talked about why Ray Bradbury, one of my favourite childhood authors, may have made his name in sci-fi but deserves a place in the pantheon of really great storytellers and wordcraft. Listen to the Joanne Harris feature, aired on the 26th of February 2006.
• Front Row interviewed Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), who will be ending the highly successful Series of Unfortunate Events with the 13th book on Friday the 13th this October. Unfortunately, the programme will only be kept online until the 14th of June but if you read this before then, go to Front Row and click on Wednesday. If you don't catch this piece on time, here are some quotes from the interview:

  'I enjoyed writing for children's books .... you never love a book the way you love a book when you are 11. It's been exciting to meet so many 11 year olds who have my book in their heads.'
  
  'It is strange (writing adult novels again) because after writing so many children's books, one thinks of the audience a lot – not necessarily because of commercial success or that kind of expectation – but I myself kept returning to my own childhood memories again and again (to remember) what I liked to read and what kind of experiences I had ... what I thought was frightening.'
  
  '(Pleasing the audience) is something you don't hear a lot of adult novelists discuss. They often say, 'This was a story that was important for me to tell, or there was this historical detail that I found so fascinating or important ...'

Stay tuned, as they say.