Book readings are the best way to see the reaction of an audience to your work, especially for a children's writer. Reading to a critique group of adults is great for the writing process, and scanning a review once in a while, well, that's a mixed bag. Too many reviews are much too brief to be of any help. But reading to a group of kids can tell you a lot about how your intended readers will respond to your story. I wrote my book, Roll Up the Streets! while reading it a chapter at a time to fifth-graders at Holmes elementary school in Spokane, Wa. Every Friday I'd sit down over lunch and read a new chapter while watching the kids chomp on whatever horrifying public school lunch was offered that day. The whole idea of centering my story around evil corndogs came from those lunch readings as well as half the gross passages in the book. I owe a lot to those kids. I'm holding a book reading on Oct. 9 at the Tinman Too children's bookstore in Spokane on Oct. 9. It...
You may have heard about the upcoming April 3, release of Apple's new Ipad, the world's most expensive feminine hygiene product. But in case you haven't been keeping up with the computer company and seller of the iPhone's attempts to recreate the very nature of reading and writing, here's the most recent news from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. (AP) April 1, San Francisco: Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs announced today in advance of the release of the company's newest gadget, the iPad, that "henceforth, publishing and writing will be a totally different experience, an experience completely controlled by yours truly." The publishing industry has been rampant with rumors over the past year in expectation of the impact of the iPad on their business models, and today they were given the word from Jobs. "Publishing as we know it is dead," Jobs intoned. "The dinosaurs of the business have just been hit with a comet called the iPad and the i...
For aspiring authors the question of how an author sold his/her first book is always of great interest. They're looking to do the same thing, so of course they'd like to get the ins and outs from someone who has been there. At all the writing conferences I've attended, this question is tops when the panels convene to answer queries from the audience. Writers working diligently to get their creative genius down on paper aren't always the best at selling, so any tips can help. There are lots of blogs out there giving advice, most of it useful to a certain extent. But one can only be told to spell correctly and use proper grammar so many times. Another popular tip is telling people to "develop a unique voice." But again, that's not much in the way of advice, everyone knows that already. And no one I've yet heard has ever been able to define a "unique voice," let alone explain how you develop one. So in the end that particular piece of advice i...
Good Luck!
ReplyDeleteRich Bladek of Sparta, NJ