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Perhaps it is because I’ve just had a dear friend die unexpectedly that I’ve been wondering about life expectancy … of anyone or anything. I know that experts are always talking about this subject as it pertains to plants, some animals, people of certain ethnicities, or those who have cancer or some other disease which may cause their life expectancy to be shortened. I know orange trees are excpected to live aboout thirty-five years. My dog, a Golden Retiever, I belive would do well to survive over ten or twelve years while a Chihuahua should live to about eighteen years. People who have pancreatic cancer are often given less than five years to live.

So I began to wonder what is the life expectancy of a book? I know that a newly published book by a traditional book publisher is marketed and advertised agressively for a year or two and if the sales don’t please the publishing house, it soon loses their interest. Without that backing, I believe many books simply die. In time falling out of print is a books’ natural fate.

What about self-published books, POD books, and books published by small presses? A major difference is that authors who do so much to get their books into print in the first place seem to me to be much more aggressive in marketing their books. They certainly don’t stick to the year or two time line which traditional published adhere to.

Another enormous difference is that they can’t really fall out of print. POD technology is such that they are printable far into the future. I am so happy about Becoming Alice. I know that she will oulive me and then … who knows what can happen?

A few weeks ago, I received a lovely e-mail from a sophomore at a college in Buffalo, New York, telling me how much he enjoyed reading Bull’s-Eye, my biography of Annie Oakley. “I was sitting in the college library the other night at a computer that was located right across from the Education Center's collection of children's literature,” the young man explained. “In a display case for Women's History Month was your book, it immediately caught my eye.” The student, who grew up only a mile or two from Annie’s Ohio hometown, took a break from his statistics homework to check it out. “Although it's a story I've heard thousands of times it felt inspiring and new once again in your book.”

Interestingly enough, just a days before, I had presented Annie’s story to a class of second graders, each of whom received a paperback copy of Bull’s-Eye to take home, courtesy of their school’s PTA. Many of these seven-year-olds immediately opened their copies and started reading.

Besides being great for my ego, these anecdotes are noteworthy because they involve readers who are seven and 19 years old, clearly outside of the publicized audience for the book, stated on the back cover flap as “Ages 10 and up.” So what’s going on here?

I have always known that those labels were arbitrary, provided more for marketing purposes than as a strict guideline. But I am a veteran of the educational publishing industry, including more than a few years in the early 1980s when I regularly had to use readability formulas to “level” my articles for Scholastic’s classroom magazines. Besides being a pain in the neck, it was a practice that I found distasteful and undignified. I love math, but the idea of applying a mathematical formula based on syllable counts and sentence lengths to a piece of writing reduces the art of reporting to a mechanical act.

Good writing, for kids or adults, is based on clarity and rhythm and content, not formulas. If someone is interested in the topic of a book or an article, they’ll read it, no matter what the readability formula says. I doubt that living through those years of “leveling” articles helped me internalize any insights about how to write for kids. Rather, I learned from writing a lot, reading my colleagues’ work, and listening to my editor, the wonderful Carol Drisko, about whom Karen Romano Young wrote a while back in this blog.

Still, those who think writing-by-numbers is the best way to reach kids persist. Four or five years ago, I broke my rule against writing for textbooks by taking an assignment to do an eight-page “leveled biography” for second graders that was to be an ancillary in a California social studies program. The subject was the late Dr. Wilson Riles, a pioneering educator who became the state’s superintendent of public instruction. The job appealed to me for personal reasons. I had worked on a project with Dr. Riles years before, and I liked the idea of learning more about him and presenting his story to young readers. But the guidelines for writing this 500-word “book” were much l

Up to now, the business of publishing has been to make creative content available through the dissemination of print, film, and other forms of recorded materials. The purchase price of the end product gives a cut to everyone involved in the production, manufacturing, distribution, and selling to the end reader (user?). Money is made because of the basic economics law of supply and demand. The greater the demand, the more copies sold and the more everyone makes. The producers of content are responsive to demand and make sure, as much as possible, to meet it successfully. Copyright laws protect the creators and producers of content against non-authorized folk stealing and selling (pirating) their products. (By the way, patents and copyrights have a limited life in protecting intellectual property. The idea is to give authors and creators a livelihood so that they can produce other works. Ultimately the protection expires and the property becomes part of the public domain, one of the principles of our free society.) It all worked quite well but I think that it will soon be the good old days.

Open source is a concept that has long been around in science. Scientists have the ethic that, since there is only one nature to be discovered, the work of individual scientists should to be published for the good of all so that everyone can share and build on each other’s work. Scientists are not supposed to profit from their discoveries. As I learned from writing the biography of Marie Curie, she and her husband had the opportunity to make money from the procedure she developed for extracting radium from uranium ore but they adhered to this principle. Others became wealthy from the process and Marie Curie, after much publicity, received a desperately needed gram of radium for her Institute through the charitable contributions of others.

In recent history, open source was behind the software that was installed on the first personal computers. This meant that the software was free. More importantly, the code it was written in was available for everyone to modify as they wished. The good news was that open source led to a proliferation of successful applications. The bad news: no one was making any money. “Hey… wait a minute,” a few developers cried and suddenly some software became proprietary.

As long as it was somewhat difficult and expensive to copy intellectual properties, copyright worked. But the digital revolution has changed the game. It costs nothing to produce writing, copy it and widely distribute it. Why use a publisher when you can publish yourself with the click of a mouse? It now seems as if EVERYONE out there is writing and publishing, blog, blog, blog… And we’re sharing and rewriting each others’ work. The idea behind a wiki is that everyone can put in their own two cents and remain anonymous if they wish. There are no identifiable authors, no gatekeepers; no arbiters of excellence. The zeitgeist is that all information is free. A kid’s idea of a research paper is to Google, cut, paste, and print, ta da! There’s a sense of entitlement out there. If it’s on the web, it’s ours for the taking.

“Hey…wait a minute,” we writers cry. What about all that time, effort and money we spent to get us to this point where we’re really good at what we do? If something is of value, shouldn’t the world pay for it? How can we make a living if we’re not being paid a salary by some institution? The answer, my friends, is in that law of economics. When the supply is limited, the demand forces up the price. Digital publishing puts no limit on the

14 Cows for America by Carmen Agra Deedy with Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah, and illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez, is a stunning new book from Peachtree Publishers. Its spare lyrical prose tells the story of a young Kenyan Maasai warrior studying in the U.S. who returns to his village after 9/11. He tells the villagers about the suffering of the Americans, and they give their most precious possessions, cattle, as a peace offering, "because," Deedy concludes, “there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.”

I was curious about the genesis of this book and Deedy’s creative process, especially her collaboration with Kimeli Naiyomah, the protagonist of the story and so I arranged an online interview with the author.

When did you begin writing 14 Cows for America?

On April 24, 2002, I stumbled across an astonishing story on page 1A of The New York Times. It concerned a small tribe of Maasai cow herders from western Kenya, who had responded to the attacks on September 11 by offering the United States a sacred gift-- fourteen cows. The article was in-depth, and exquisitely written, and served not only to move me deeply (most Americans were still sharply affected by any reference to the tragedy in the months that followed 9/11), but also to whet my appetite for more information. Were these the Maasai Isak Dinesen referred to in her biography? Were they still the lion-hunters of legend? Were these the same Maasai who now lived on the Mara Reserve? It was clear I had a great deal of reading to do.

Fascinated, I clipped the NYT piece, shared it with friends, and soon began to collect (and to receive from others) a maelstrom of news items, articles, and transcribed interviews. Within months I had compiled something of a dossier on the Maasai, but the true story of their extraordinary gift still eluded me. The first drafts were painfully ineloquent--in truth they were dreadful.

Then, in the summer of 2007, I was offered a writing fellowship at the Carson McCullers House. It was during this hiatus that the story, much as it appeared in the final book, emerged.

When did you begin the collaboration with Wilson Kimeli? How did you communicate?

Kimeli and I spoke electronically at first, and I had to confess to him that I found it odd in the extreme to email and IM with a Maasai warrior. I discovered Kimeli to be in possession of a lovely sense of humor. When we spoke I told him that I had written a story about his part in the gift of the fourteen cows. I wanted him to see it, and let me know if he felt he could give it his blessing. I then sent the pdf and waited. I was overjoyed to hear, in his soft-spoken voice, that he was pleased with the story and would be happy to give it his support.

I invited him, with the encouragement of our wonderful publishing house, Peachtree Publishers, to be involved with the project and write an afterword. He was happy, I believe, to be invited into the process, and the book as a whole was better thanks to his intimate knowledge of Maasai mores, and the accuracy of details he brought to the story. We spoke about the text three or four other times, and participated in creative conferences with the illustrator and the publisher.

How much information did he provide?

Kimeli served primarily as a cultural consultant on the book. In other words, the manuscript was in final draft when it was presented to him. Although he did not write any of the text, he offered suggestions regarding the chronology of events, cultural details, and particulars relating to the Maa language.

He suggested that he be shown consulting with the elders before he tells the story of 9/11 to the tribe as a body--a piece that was absent from any of the news reports. Second, that his cow, Enkarus, be mentioned by name. Lastly, he suggested we use the Maa word, Aakua, in the scene where he is greeted by his mother. I think these were all useful additions. Kimeli served as a cultural consultant as the first illustrations emerged, and provided Tom [the illustrator] with his personal photographs from the day of the ceremony.

What are the advantages/pleasures of working with a collaborator?

This was not a collaboration in which two people hacked out the language of a story together. Rather I brought the writing, Tom brought the sketches, and Kimeli brought his experience as a participant in the story, and as a Kenyan from the small Maasai village of Enoosaen. Together we exchanged views, offered opinions, and listened respectfully to all that was expressed. Then we returned to our separate creative corners to incorporate changes that came out of the exchange.

Kimeli was a wonderful person to work with and I believe his involvement enriched the book. Everyone who took part in this undertaking (from editorial, to art, to marketing) wanted to create something we could all be proud of, in memory of a gesture by strangers who appeared--seemingly from the ether--in the wake of catastrophe.

The Blog Tour

Readers, writers, and publishers have mutated from words printed on paper to words and images on screens in the form of websites, blogs, internet research, do-it-yourself encyclopedias, and you-too-along-with-your-pet-can-be-a-video-star. With these new outlets, fewer bookstores, and anemic marketing budgets, the blog tour has come into its own. Peachtree Publishers has put together a 14 Cows for America blog tour for Carmen Deed and Thomas Gonzalez this week that takes them far and wide in the blogosphere. Think about it–author and illustrator reach thousands of people all over the country the world. True, you can’t autograph books in cyberspace (yet!) but it seems like a great way to launch a book. For the full itinerary of the 14 Cows for America blog tour, go to http://www.14cowsblogtour.blogspot.com/

This month I decided it was high time to query a publisher about nonfiction. My contact at Holiday House prefers to stay anonymous but has graciously provided the following responses to my questions:

What is unusual or surprising about nonfiction vs. other types of books?
The thing that still surprises me about nonfiction is that despite many novel and inspiring attempts, booksellers have yet to figure out how to get customers to buy nonfiction for children that does not include some sort of novelty element.

Does nonfiction seem to be viewed differently than other genres by the reading public? If so, in what way?
The Internet has made the reading public view nonfiction differently. Publishers, authors and illustrators of nonfiction, and booksellers now need to explain to consumers that books can offer things that the World Wide Web does not. It's not just about the information—although that is certainly a crucial part of what nonfiction can provide. We need to figure out how to engage young readers with excellent writing, innovative approaches, critical thinking, and innovative formats.

What innovations in presenting nonfiction have been significant in recent years? (Photos vs. illustration, length of book, graphic design, etc.)
Technical advances have been changing nonfiction for some time, particularly in the area of illustration and graphic design. From pop-ups like Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart to new manufacturing techniques that allow the use of “scanimation” in Gallop! by Rufus Butler Seder to ever more amazing techniques in taking photographs and reproducing them such as in Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator by Sarah and Richard Campbell, nonfiction is constantly becoming more sophisticated, more innovative, and more novel.

Do you receive many nonfiction submissions vs. other genres?
Holiday House is known for nonfiction, so we receive many nonfiction submissions from authors who have done their homework. [See their submission guidelines here.]

How do nonfiction sales compare with fiction? Has that changed over the years?
Nonfiction does well for Holiday House, but it is a specialty for us and consumers look to us for nonfiction. Most of our nonfiction ends up in schools and libraries.

What have been some top selling nonfiction books for you?
There's a Frog in my Throat! by Loreen Leedy and Pat Street, Coral Reefs by Gail Gibbons, and Freedom Walkers by Russell Freedman.

What are the most and/or least popular areas of nonfiction in your experience?
Any topic can be made interesting and popular if the book in inventive enough and extremely well-executed. However, some topics seem to be of perennial interest such as dinosaurs and natural disasters.

Any other thoughts?
Because nonfiction is competing against the Internet and other new forms of technology more so than against picture books or fiction, it needs to be constantly improving in every way possible and distinguishing itself from other ways of getting information.

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Many thanks to Holiday House for a thought-provoking perspective on nonfiction. I just saw the guest post by editor Jean Reynolds and am looking forward to reading the second installment. Hopefully additional publishing insiders will contribute to future I.N.K. posts.

At the risk of blatantly tooting my own horn, I recently attended a banquet for the Florida Book Awards (for Missing Math: A Number Mystery, more info here.) Fellow author Donna Gephart mentioned that she had received a letter from Hilary Clinton about her book, As If Being 12 ¾ Isn’t Bad Enough, My Mother Is Running for President! Her blog post about it indicates that she had sent now Secretary of State Clinton a copy of the book when the latter was indeed running for President.

It was a great idea, wasn’t it? I have to confess that it hasn’t been my practice to think of similar gambits for my own books. Many authors like to think marketing is all up to the publisher, while others do quite a bit on their own initiative and it seems to pay off. Finding ways to reach the niche audiences for a topic seems especially suitable for nonfiction books. In many cases the publisher will be glad to send a review copy to a person or group that seems appropriate. Recently I’ve been making a list of ideas to try; here are a few in no particular order:

1) Find Yahoo groups, blogs, or other online interest groups that are related to the book’s topic. Naturally you have to be aware of their promotion policy, but many groups love to hear about books about their favorite subject.

2) Make book signings a big event. My favorite story along this line is how author-illustrator Brian Lies (Bats at the Beach, et al.) had a graphic of the book’s artwork wrapped around the family car and 12 foot bat wings attached on top. Now that’s making an entrance!

3) Search for specialized awards. I recently completed a picture book about energy, and during my research ran across the Green Book Award. I’ll make sure the publisher knows about it!

4) Dedicate a web site and/or blog to a book using the title as domain name if possible. Include downloadable activities and invite readers to contribute photos, etc.

5) Make a short video that gives the gist of the story to prospective readers. I’ve made two of these so far, for Missing Math and Crazy Like a Fox: A Simile Story, and have gotten enthusiastic responses.

6) Support a charity effort. For example, one author of a book that had feeding birds as part of the plot partnered with The Nature Conservancy, who sold the book as a fund raiser.

7) Create a stuffed animal, banner, or other tangible item that can be loaned to libraries as part of a display about the book.

8) Write a how-to article related to the book’s topic for a teacher/parent magazine.

9) Rent a table at a general public or trade show with your books. For example, my brother is a used book dealer, and recently mentioned he knows someone who does the majority of his annual business selling aviation-related books at one particular large air show.

These marketing tips are just a start, there are many more possibilities. Please add any brainstorms you’d care to share... thanks!