NYC 2011: Sara Zarr gives the speech that she wanted to hear

By Candy Gourlay

Reports from the 2011 Winter Conference of the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators

I didn't manage to get a good shot of
Sara so here's a nice portrait I found
on several blogs

Note: This post has been abridged extensively since it was first posted. I'm afraid my detailed notes threw up some copyright issues and I have had to scale back my piece. Apologies to all.

The best books I've read are the ones that make me go, "OMG that was me. That book is totally who I am."

That's what I felt about YA author Sara Zarr's keynote speech on the last day of the SCBWI conference.

Sara attended her first New York conference in 2001, after five years of being serious about writing. She was frustrated - even angry.

"I wanted something to happen ... seriously, how much longer did I have to wait? I had an agent, I had finished my book ... I came in part to figure out the system and work out an angle; network the hell out of it ..." She was straining to hear that "magic piece of information" that would finally open the door.

Build Your Own Website: The Trouble With Pictures

I created this for my Twitter profile
after an author friend reminded me
how important it was to keep your

book cover on people's minds.
I now use it on Facebook and other
online profiles such as my profile
image when comment on blogs.

By Candy Gourlay

We're almost at the end of our Build Your Own Website series ... there is of course plenty of stuff we haven't covered, but what we have will pretty much get you up and running.

We've talked about audience, we've debated the pros and cons of blogging,we've learned what platforms are out there, and we've learned about bananas and websites. Now here is one of the biggest headaches of running a website: images.

Every website needs eye-candy - images help draw the eye to the important things, images make people stop and stare, images draw people in.

Build Your Own Website: Designing Your Page With Bananas

By Candy Gourlay

Continuing the Build Your Own Website discussion over at the SCBWI message board. We've already discussed WHO you're doing it for ... and we've had a look at the platforms; AND we've talked about blogging ... or not. Now you've got your blog/website, how do you design it so people do what you want them to do?

When you come upon a new website, how many seconds do you hang around before moving to another site? Why do you stay?

Web guru Seth Godin says (and I paraphrase) people on web pages are like monkeys in search of bananas. If they find no bananas, they don't hang around. They just leave.

Check out the design of one of the internet's most successful start-ups, Amazon. The biggest banana of course is the book cover (yeah, why not sneak in a plug about Tall Story, while I'm at it?). But Amazon makes sure to put a bright yellow button on the top right to make it absolutely clear what you should do about the big banana.