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| Roxie Munro & Julie Gribble shooting Ready Set Draw! |
By
Roxie Munrofor
Cynthia Leitich Smith's
CynsationsIn August of 2014, I traveled from my Long Island City studio to downtown New York City, lugging
KIWiStorybook frames and rolled-up giant walk-in picture books, about to be the first author interviewed for the media start-up,
KidLit TV.
The film crew, lighting technician, makeup artist, sound engineer, and Julie Gribble, founder, and interviewer Rocco Staino, of School Library Journal and the Huffington Post, were ready.
Four hours later we had a wrap, edited into a lively eight-minute piece, which aired that November, launching one of the most original concepts in the world of children’s literature in years.
That popular interview feature of KidLit TV is called
StoryMakers. Every month Rocco chats with several prominent authors and/or illustrators, like Paul O. Zelinsky, Pat Cummings, Hervé Tullet, Sophie Blackall, Tim Federle, Mo Willems, Rosemary Wells, and Aaron Becker. We get a peek into their creative process - making mistakes (and fixing them!), creative tricks and habits, childhood inspiration, and exciting news about upcoming projects.
Although most of the content is accessible to any literate person, there can be a lot of fun esoterica. For example, librarians may talk about how award committees work or recommend seasonal books; for the 2015 StoryMakers Holiday Special, Maria Russo (New York Times), John Sellers (Publishers Weekly), and John Schumacher (Scholastic) discussed their favorites with Rocco. Other children’s literature movers and shakers are featured, like Lin Oliver and Stephen Mooser, talking about founding
SCBWI, and Judy Blume and Neil Gaiman discussing censorship.
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| Jerilyn Williams of TLA interviewed by Rocco Staino |
Aimed specifically at children is the
Read Out Loud show where authors engage kids with lively readings from their books. On
Ready Set Draw!, illustrators inspire viewers to do art and show details on how to draw characters from their books. Dan Yaccarino taught kids how to make Doug from “Doug Unplugged”; Nick Bruel drew Bad Kitty; I showed children how to
draw the owl from “Hatch!” and how to
make a maze.
Children send in their own drawings based on the videos, and KidLit TV posts them online in their new
Fan Art Gallery section, using #ReadySetDraw to share fan art.
KidLit Radio is launching podcasts for children, filling an important niche. Radio is as popular as ever, and podcasts are gaining ground. Audio is an important medium – many children learn, and are entertained, by listening. Recently Barbara McClintock and Peg + Cat creators Jennifer Oxley and Billy Aronson did podcasts.
KidLit TV also covers events under their Red Carpet feature, like the Eric Carle Awards, interviewing such luminaries as Jerry Pinkney, Roaring Brook’s Neal Porter, and Hilary Knight. The most recent Field Trip is a six-minute video of the
4th Annual 21st Century Children’s Nonfiction Conference, with uber librarian and reviewer Susannah Richards doing the interviews, including one with Steve Sheinken about his process and his next book.
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| Founder Julie Gribble & Dan Yacarrino |
All of this content is found on the main KidLit.TV site; there’s also a robust social media presence and an extensive
YouTube channel. It’s the go-to place for kid friendly videos about favorite authors and illustrators, book-based crafts and activities, and to check out content dear to the hearts of children’s literature aficionados. Not to mention how to draw a Great Horned Owl!
So how did this come about? Well, multiple Emmy-award-winner and Stony Brook Children’s Literature Fellow, Julie Gribble, who worked in the television industry for years, founded KidLit TV to create fun new ways to reinforce an appreciation of reading that children will carry with them for the rest of their lives– it’s the first online resource of its kind for kids, parents, librarians and teachers. She’s an author in her own right, with
Bubblegum Princess, illustrated by Lori Hanson (NY Media Works, 2013)(based on a true story about Kate Middleton) and another picture book out soon.
Julie’s KidLit TV family of teachers, librarians, authors, illustrators, and tech folks are all deeply committed to working together to bring great books to kids.
Cynsational NotesRoxie Munro, Julie Gribble, and
Sarah Towle (Time Traveler Tours & Tales) will be doing several pro-grams, including “Promoting your Library Community through Social Media & New Technology: Cutting-Edge Techniques,” at the
Texas Library Association Conference in April 2017 in San Antonio.
In addition, Julie and Rocco Staino are doing a KidLit TV presentation. KidLit TV will cover the conference, doing author and librarian interviews, live-streaming events, and attending award presentations. Come visit Booth 2301!
And Roxie has contributed a piece to
TLA’s Disaster Relief Coloring Book, which will be available at the Conference.
I’ve so enjoyed reading this current Teaching Author series on how to make a living doing what you love. And, of course, JoAnn’s timely
wisdom about taking a break during the busybusybusy making is especially important.
The internet has changed the nature of business, especially publishing. It has made this business so much more complex. Like it or not, writers now need to take charge of their own promotion. And for some of us Luddites who use pen and paper to write drafts, use notecards to make outlines, and stick purple postnotes on a manuscript to highlight changes, the task of internet promotion is a daunting, downright squirrelly endeavor.
Now I have to cross-platform? What? Do I have to twit now? Jane Friedman defines cross-platforming as creating visibility, establishing authority and reaching your audience. The strategy involves presenting content across new and different media.
I joined Facebook. But apparently Facebook barely scratches the surface. In fact, as Michael Alvear suggests
here, Facebook won’t necessarily help you sell books, at least not directly.
That’s just nuts. What’s a Luddite to do? I so admire
Roxie Munro. She’s the author and illustrator of more than 40 books, including the wonderful Inside/Outside picturebooks. She is also an all-around gizmo-wizard, creating a slew of interactive apps and speaking about how artists can use the internet to their advantage. And, according to Roxie (
here) most of us are already disseminating content across media formats, and we don’t even know it!
Really? Really? Even me?
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Every writer has (or should have) a website these days, even those who have yet to find the perfect publisher. What a cracked catch-22: You want to build a presence in order to convince your publisher that you can build a presence, even before your book comes out! Likewise, most every writer is connected to a blog, sometimes an individual blog, a group blog (like Teaching Authors), or several group blogs. Roxie also highlights several online projects that use videoconferencing, connecting authors and illustrators with librarians and schools to talk about their work.
While Facebook may not directly sell books, it does reinforce and can sustain important relationships. And these connections can lead to further opportunities, all of which can influence sales.
Other social media sites include Goodreads, an amazon company with a base of 20 million members. There’s also Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LibraryThing, Youtube, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and so many more. It’s enough to drive one nutty trying to figure out which site is the best. Natalie Sisson breaks down the demographics (
here) to the different social media sites, so you can see which one might suit your needs. However, as she warns, focus only on your top three choices, and create a plan that will help you maintain these connections. If you tackle everything at once, it becomes overwhelming, and then you're up a tree.
From these connections, writers join teachers, librarians, parents and reviewers (and children's literature enthusiasts in general) to engage in blog tours and scavenger hunts and book giveaways. They share information, classroom activities, resources and ideas, all the while making even more connections. Some enterprising and clever sorts pool together their internet resources to create marketing co-ops, unfettered by geography. Such co-ops help members build their online presence even as they also help market books.
Sylvia Liu and Elaine Kiely Kearns highlight
here ten top signs that you are building a successful platform.
And look! Look! You're doing it, too!It seems that you are limited only by your imagination. And writers, as we all know, have great imaginations.
What do you think?
Bobbi Miller
P.S. No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. All squirrels courtesy of morguefile.com.
The Irma Black award, designed by Maurice Sendak
The kids have spoken!
The Irma Black Award, given by The Bank Street School, is unusual in that children are the final judges of the winning book. This year’s award went to Big Mean Mike, written by Michelle Knudsen and illustrated by Scott Magoon. More than 7,500 first and second graders around the world voted Big Mean Mike as their clear favorite.
There were three other Irma Black honor books, also chosen by kids themselves:
The Cook Prize medal, designed by Brian Floca
Children also choose The Cook Prize winners, sponsored by The Bank Street School: The best science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) picture books published for children aged eight to ten. This year’s winner is:
The honor winners are:
Congratulations to all the winners!
Every so often a friend of mine who works in the children's book industry tells me about something interesting he or she is doing, and I get to write about it. For the next three days I am going host a blog event that is about an iPad app that my friend
Roxie Munro helped to create. Roxie is well know for her deliciously detailed picture books, several of which have mazes and seek-and find elements in them. On April 1st, an iPad app called
Roxie's a-maze-ing vacation adventure was launched. It brings some of Roxie's illustrations to life, and it provides people of all ages with a very intriguing interactive experience.
I am going to begin this three day event by giving you a review of the app, which both my daughter and I had a blast playing with. When you open up the app, the first thing you need to do is to choose a little car, which is what you will use most of the time to get around the interconnected scenes (there are many of these) in the app. Then you are presented with the first scene, which is a gorgeous layout showing a town from above. There is a zoo, houses, a river, streets and so much more. In this scene you have to collect parts of a star, and you also have to find a bunch of balloons, an ice cream truck, the number one, and a penguin. You collect the parts of the star by driving to them, or walking to them (you have to park your car first).The rest of the things you have to search for in the artwork. Once you find them, you tap them with your finger and the app registers that you have complete the task. You need to collect star pieces and find items in each of the scenes that you encounter in the adventure. In later screens you will collect star pieces by, among other things, flying a plane, rafting on a river, skiing, and flying in a hot air balloon.
The pieces of the star are pretty easy to find, but they are not always easy to get to. There are one way roads and roundabouts to negotiate, and it is not always easy to find parking places, just like in real life.Sometimes you have drive into the screen above, below, to the left or to the right to find the right road that will allow you to come back and get the piece of the star.
Once you have completed all the tasks for one screen, you simply drive into another. The next one I went to had a residential area and a sports stadium. Above the sports stadium was a blimp that had my name written on it. When I tapped the stadium, a soccer ball came flying up towards me. I soon found that you could make all kinds of things happen by tapping on them. In a rural scene that I discovered, flowers bloom when you tap the fields.
Each scene is very different, and players will enjoy exploring the coast scene, the amusement park, the city, the wild river, the snowy ski mountain, and more. You can purchase the app through
iTunes, and I guarantee that you will enjoy it.
Tomorrow Omar Curiere who works at OCG Studios - the company the created the app - will be telling me a little about what it was like to create this app, and on Wednesday I will have something for you from Roxie Munro.
Last week I asked children's book author and illustrator, Roxie Munro, to tell me what it is like for her to start a new project. I know from personal experience that facing a blank page can be rather off-putting, to say the least. If the first sentence for a picture book is in my head already then I am alright, but if there is nothing there, then I stumble around trying to find a way to get that blank page to become less blank. I suddenly find a million and one little jobs that need to be done, and I start tidying things that really don't need tidying!
This is what Roxie had to say about her 'getting started' process:
Dear Through the Looking Glass:
I’ve been asked to write about how it feels to start a new project, in my case, a new nonfiction picture book about bugs, kind of a follow-up to “Hatch!” (out from Marshall Cavendish in Feb 2011). The new book is due in April 2011, and will be out spring 2012.
Well, as Hemingway once said, when asked how to write a novel, “First you clean the refrigerator.” In other words, even the most disciplined writer procrastinates. Maybe that’s why one is given deadlines and financial incentives.
But in my case, I kind of do first clean …that is, my studio. I really do a thorough job, because as my project - be it a series of oil paintings for a show or a book - progresses, my studio gets messier and messier, with uncleaned brushes and dirty palettes, stacks of notes and books and drawings, boxes from supplies shipped, etc.
I have already spent a couple of months this summer working on the proposal, sketches and dummy, so have done quite a bit of research, and bought books or checked them out (renewed several times) from the NYPL Science Library. But until I get the okay, and then the contract, it isn’t officially a project. So, got and signed contract, and spent a week wrapping up a couple other small jobs. Gave myself a starting date. On that day, I actually did start - cleaning the studio that is.
Sports, or even military, metaphors occur to me - I’m “in the trenches”; “getting to first base”; even, “shifting into first gear.” Because it is a slow warming up. You feel guilty that you’re not plowing ahead full steam. But, knowing oneself, that accelerates toward the end of the book. And not necessarily because of deadline pressure, but because of momentum - you’re then in 3rd and 4th gear, warmed up, in the “flow.” I start dreaming about the subjects in the book - colors, images, patterns - about the dinosaurs, the birds, the bugs.
For me, images come first, the writing second. So, although I do make notes about the text all along, only after the sketches are okayed, and the art well on its way, do I write, shape and refine the text.
The hardest part is now, beginning - creating the approach, solving visual problems, research. I do rough, and then increasingly detailed, sketches. Each page may have 3 or four stages. Midwa
I just got an email from Roxie Munro, a wonderful artist, writer, and a lovely lady. This is what she told me.
Dear Marya:
I'm thrilled to announce that "EcoMazes: 12 Earth Adventures" has received a Starred review in School Library Journal (June 2010), which says "... This is truly a complete package: it’s engrossing and interactive, featuring finely and accurately detailed art and covering the basics of an organizational concept that is central to our understanding of the natural world."
What wonderful news! Getting a Starred review in SLJ is a big accomplishment in the book world. Here is my review of Ecomazes.
By:
Bianca Schulze,
on 3/31/2010
Blog:
The Children's Book Review
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Aw, what the hey. I like Ms. Munro's style. Observe the following:
Seminar Details At-A-GlanceSeminar: Mastering the Maze
Date: April 20, 2007
Time: 11 a.m. Eastern Time [10 a.m. CT, 9 a.m. MT, 8 a.m. PT]
Format: This is a Web-based seminar. Registered participants will receive participation instructions, log-on information and a toll-free number to dial in for the audio portion of the seminar upon payment of the registration fee. Seminars run for one hour.
Cost: $50 per person
Discounts are available for group registration.
To Register: send name and contact information to:
[email protected]
Man has been creating mazes for at least 4,000 years. Early mazes were used for rituals and processions - and were not puzzles meant to be solved as they often are today. Educators and librarians use mazes in activities that encourage creative problem-solving, build math skills and improve concentration - and simply because they are fun.
In this online seminar, award-winning author/illustrator
Roxie Munro will discuss the techniques she developed for her well-known books which include
Mazescapes; Amazement Park; Wild West Trail Ride Maze; The Inside-Outside Book of New York City, a
New York Times Best Illustrated award-winner; and
Mazeways: A to Z to be published in August 2007. She will explore the history of mazes and show how mazes occur in real life. She will also talk about how to create mazes and games that can be adapted for children's and YA library programming.
Ms. Munro is the acclaimed author/illustrator of 27 books for children. She also creates oils, watercolors, prints, and drawings, primarily cityscapes, which are exhibited widely in the US in galleries and museums. Fourteen of her paintings have appeared as covers of
The New Yorker magazine.
Congrats! Whew, too!
Thanks!
These are indeed MOST excellent things! Congratulations!
Good things happen to good people...and about time too! *hugs*