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Lin Oliver’s humour and engagement with the writing community connected everyone at the huge SCBWI LA Conference winner.

Love Lin and Henry Winkler’s (the Fonz) NY best seller series Hank Zipzer series.

Gary Paulsen was riverting – the maveric who turned his tragic early years into wild independence, crashes and ultimately couragee and an independence that had led to powerful award winning books.

Verla Kay, a dynamic,really generous writer has established a kids’ literature writing community  that gets 1 million hits a month – everyone in the community is welcome – www.verlakay.com

Katie Davis an engaging and delightful speaker and author gave great insight into how to promote your book – her online talk radio gets over 2.6 million listeners every month [email protected]

Leonard Marcus – the guru of children’s literature; Ellen Hopkins – best selling YA author of edgy verse books; Bruce Hale -brilliant speaker and best selling author; Allan Silberberg – award winning humorous author; Frane Lessac – award winning illustrator; Henry Winkler – the Fonz and best selling author …. and more are all part of the SCBWI International celebration of children’s literature in LA.

Today we are joined by children's and SF author, Bren MacDibble, who has kindly dropped by to answer seven questions. Welcome Bren! 1. Tell us a little about your publication credits. If you have none, tell us about the genres you prefer to write, and your current projects. I started out in 2000 with a nice illustrated educational fiction book for Nelson ITP (now Cengage). This contained two

My Session #2: Keeping Current Roundtable...

After the agent panel, I had a breakout session that was part of the Published Authors track called Keeping Current on Market Research: A Roundtable Discussion. Instead of doing all the talking myself, I started by asking the audience questions. I wanted to know whether they do anything different in terms of market research now that they're published. I wanted to know what their concerns are. And I wanted them to share information with one another--and they did. The audiences included several SCBWI RAs and authors like Susan Patron, Linda Joy Singleton, and Verla Kay.

Verla talked about the boards on her website that registered members can access, such as the agent boards and response time boards--really useful stuff.

We actually ended up talking a lot about promotion. We discussed MySpace and using it as a means to connect with readers. We talked about getting mentioned on blogs and doing blog tours, and in fact had an author in the audience, Tina Nichols Coury, who interviews tons of authors and illustrators on her own blog.

Someone mentioned Library Thing, a site where you can enter books and be connected to others based on the books you share--a way to find readers reading your own books.

I really enjoyed this session and felt like I learned a lot from the participants and got some ideas for CWIM. Thanks to all who attended and share information and asked great questions. Please remember to email me if you'd like a handout.

One of the largest challenges with serving “the public” is that you’re answerable to the public for your decisions. So when a conservative think tank issues a report that says your libraries are full of extremist literature and you reply that you’re trying to achieve a balanced collection, how do you think people are going to respond? This news story reminds me of this post to the library_mofo group on LiveJournal (sorry, if you’re not a member of the group you won’t be able to read it, but membership is free) where a newly minted MLIS grad starts a job in a Catholic school library and has to figure out what to do with the well-meaning but seemingly inappropriate donations (hate speech, graphic anti-abortion flyers) she receives from library patrons. If you’re seeing that the connection is having a good collection development policy and effective communication with the media and your library administration, you’re most of the way there. In the work I do over at MetaFilter, our last resort to people unhappy with policies is to tell them “well perhaps this isn’t the right community for you, you are welcome to leave at any time” but this is a much stickier issue in a public library, even though we do see libraries doing this from time to time. [thanks eoin]