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Molly Idle is the Caldecott-honor winning author and illustrator of Flora and the Flamingo. 

She talked about the collaborative work that bookmaking is, and how she uses stage and improvisation techniques to boost her personality.

Keeping an open mind is the key to successful collaboration, she says.

In improv, there's a game called "Yes, and."

The first player kicks out an opening line. For example, "Did you remember to clean out the cat barf from Uncle Billy's car?"

Your job as a player is to accept that and add AND, she says. So you'd reply, "I did remember, and I think the smell is going to linger for quite some time."

"It sounds so simple, but it is so easy to do just the opposite and block," she says. "We are born to 'Yes.' We are born instinctively to be creative. To express our boundaries both real and imaginary."

She uses stage techniques a lot in her work. When she's figuring out how to lay out characters, she thinks about and experiments with many things ... putting characters center stage, even not having them react at all (which is the second-most powerful thing you can do on stage).

She encouraged us to push out of our comfort zones and keep many choices as possibilities. "It's the only way to come up with new ideas."

We have to ask ourselves, "How can I push my creative comfort zone out?"

The answer? You have to know your bit. This means know your lines. To really know a line is to know why you say it. You need to know the line before that. And the line before that. And why you're in the scene in the first place.

"You have to know the whole play to know your bit. If you know the whole play, you can jump in and help," she says. 'You know why you're supposed to be there."

Molly knows the editor's job. She knows the art director's job. She knows the designer's bit too—and the printer's. This means that in the end, the book will be a better book.

Molly Idle's website
Follow Molly on Twitter

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Mem and Allyn

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Daniel Harmon has been working in book publishing since 2003—first developing history projects at Greenwood/ABC-Clio, then acquiring pop culture books for Praeger Publishers, and most recently overseeing the publishing program at Zest Books, an independent publisher of nonfiction books for teens and young adults.

Since joining Zest in 2012, Daniel has acquired Zest’s first book to sell in excess of 25,000 copies, developed Zest’s first three projects to receive starred reviews, and launched Pulp, a new imprint for older readers. He is also the author of the book Super Pop! (which Kirkus called “weird, witty, and endlessly entertaining”).

Daniel shares that the Zest approach to publishing is

franker

fun, and

from cover to last word, working to keep teen readers interested.

He speaks of how they've moved into doing more middle grade, and doing books for all ages. Their tagline is

Books for young adults of all ages.

Explaining what "all ages means," he says

Doing books explicitly for teens is a great way to make sure you get no teen readership.

They're trying to create books teens will want to pick up and adults will want to pick up, too.

He explains their efforts to add art (primary source materials, photos, infographics...), try to figure out where their books will be placed in bookstores, if it's librarian-bait or more tailored for the gatekeeper/blogger world, their new imprint Pulp that's aiming more new adult, their teen advisory board and much more.

Talking us us through a variety of Zest's titles, he explains that

"You don't need to dumb things down to make it teen-friendly."

Two upcoming titles:


Unslut
the author's middle school diary of being bullied and shamed for being the school "slut" alongside her contemporary perspective, and



Plotted
A literary atlas, literary maps of treasured books, like Huck Finn and Watership Down.

"Really what we're trying to do is stay surprised ourselves. Doing a book that actually adds something."

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Adam Rex is a ridiculously accomplished illustrator and author. His books range from PB to YA, and his illustration style is a bit like what Norman Rockwell might have produced after a Jolt Cola bender.

In this session, Adam talked about techniques for drawing memorable characters.

He showed us some of his early art, including a decent Rembrandt knock-off (though his Santa is definitely questionable, and arguably looks more like Krampus).

Some best quotes: "I think we can get you one butt." (From his editor regarding The Dirty Cowboy.) His reply: "I didn't even take the butt."

He talked about what it looked like to see his characters from The True Meaning of Smekday as they'd been translated by the Dreamworks team for the adaptation. (The movie Home and the forthcoming TV show were based on the book.) It was disappointing at first to see the changes, but he got used to it quickly and even liked some of the changes, especially the design of the Gorg.

His techniques are so cool—he often builds models of characters and sets he uses for reference.

Some tips:

• Understand anatomy of character design (the human body is approximately seven heads high, but in character design, this varies);
• Knowledge of real human and animal anatomy (which have strong similarities) can help you design fantastical creatures; 
• More stylized and simplistic characters, such as Charlie Brown, sometimes have more universal appeal; and 
• Letting a body sag into a shape or move somehow makes it seem more like a character and less like a doctor's office illustration.
• Don't forget draw through. For example, if you have a character holding the shield, make sure the body behind the shield makes sense. 

Follow Adam on Twitter

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The room is packed tighter than even a polyamorous sardine would be comfortable with, but for good reason! We are soooooooooo lucky to have both Eric Rohmann and Candace Fleming here! They are sharing seven simple fixes for the picture book text, here are a few:
1. With picture books you are limited to 32 pages, so get to the problem of your story as soon as you can. You can have a few pages of set up, but if your story doesn't start by page 10, you're in trouble.
As an example, go read Clever Jack, there are a few pages of set up, but the problem is introduce by fourth spread.






Whereas in Oh No! the problem is introduced on page 1.



Read your story draft and mark out page by page, which text goes on what page to help remind you of the structure of your story as you write. (Candace reminds: when you send your manuscript to the editor, don't paginate, send a clean, unpaginated version for submission)


2. Something that helps Eric and Candace in their writing of picture books is they think in terms of small scenes, not just sentences per page. Each scene should move your story forward, not just words and sentences. Eric and Candace recommend looking at your manuscript and marking off the scenes, where the beginning and end of them are. Then count them—if you only have 4 scenes and they are very similar in length, rethink your pacing.

Clever Jack has about 9 scenes, Oh No! has about 12.

Finally, take a look at the first and last words of your scene, they should be really good and interesting words.

3. Eric does an exercise on his manuscripts, he takes out all the adjective and adverbs. Candace says then ask yourself, which ones do I miss? Because some do improve the language and rhythm of the book, but for many, you'll find those words will be taken care of by the illustrations.

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Jenny Bent founded The Bent Agency in 2009; the agency now has nine agents. Her authors include SE Green, Tera Lynn Childs, AG Howard, and Lynn Weingarten.

Jenny advices networking while writing your novel, otherwise known as, making new friends. It's more organic to create an online presence before your book is published rather than when your book is coming out in order to promote it.

Be helpful. The more you give back to this community, the more you have to gain.

Make use of every opportunity to learn more about your craft. Be at this conference is where we all need to be. Go to every workshop on craft you can find.

You shouldn't write to trend, but you should be aware of what's happening in the industry with trends. Don't chase them, but know what they are. Read the New York Times bestseller list every week. Know what's selling in your genre.

Jenny suggest one simple way to find an agent. Read the deals. See who is selling what. When you find people who are selling what you write, cross reference what you learn to be sure it's a good fit. It's a great way to find a great match for your work.

The Bent Agency has a great blog: Bent On Books. Once a month, each of the agents shares what they are looking for right now.

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Varian Johnson is the author of four novels, including The Great Greene Heist, an ALA Notable Children’s Book Selection, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and a Texas Library Association Lone Star Reading List selection. His novels for older readers include Saving Maddie and My Life as a Rhombus. Varian holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and currently lives outside of Austin, Texas, with his family. His newest Jackson Greene novel, To Catch a Cheat, will be released in spring 2016. You can follow Varian on Twitter @VarianJohnson or visit www.varianjohnson.com.

"It's hard.
It's supposed to be hard.
But it doesn't have to be impossible."

Varian offers us tips and advice, including:

Claim it.
If you're doing the work of a professional writer and illustrator, you deserve to be part of the conversation.

He shares the story of getting the idea for his second novel, and pushing off writing it. But he learned he had to

Do the work.
Make a schedule. Writing's a job, and deserves to be treated as such.

And five years later, "My Life As A Rhombus" was published.

He shares how he juggles writing with family, a day job and life, how the first draft is for you, and subsequent revisions are for the rest of the world.

And then Varian talks about dealing with failure.

When a book contract was cancelled and things in his career seemed at their lowest, he actually wanted to quit writing, but his agent Sara Crowe wouldn't let him - she pushed him, challenging him to write something new. 100 pages of a new novel in six weeks. And he did it.
And that got him writing again. And he got an idea for something else. And he wrote it in four months.



And "The Great Greene Heist" was his most successful novel yet!

which leads us to another great lesson he offers us:

Find a support group
find someone who believes not only in your work, but who believes in you.

And the crowd gives him a standing ovation!

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Meg Wolitzer is a novelist whose books for adults include THE INTERESTING, THE TEN-YEAR NAP, THE POSITION, ADN THE WIFE. She is the author of a novel for middle grade readers, THE FINGERTIPS OF DUNCAN DORFMAN, and, most recently, the YA novel, BELZHAR.

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Dan Yaccarino is not only an author and illustrator of children's books . . .

He is the creator and producer of several children's television series . . .










And he speaks at schools, too . . .



We were lucky to have him hear at #LA15SCBWI . . .

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Jordan Brown is an executive editor with the imprints Walden Pond Press and Balzer + Bray at HarperCollins Children’s Books. In the ten years he has been in children's editorial, he has been fortunate enough to work with such esteemed authors and illustrators as Jon Scieszka, Anne Ursu, Gris Grimly, Steve Brezenoff, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Chris Rylander, Erin McGuire, Laura Ruby, Kevin Emerson, Christopher Healy, Greg Ruth, Dan Wells, Lois Metzger, M. Sindy Felin, and many others. Amongst the books he’s edited are New York Times bestsellers, ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults, an NPR Backseat Book Club Selection, and a National Book Award finalist, in addition to other accolades. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Your voice is the way you distinguish yourself as a writer.

With everyone hanging onto every word, Jordan defines voice as what comes between the objective facts of your novel and your readers. He leads us in exploring

what voice does,

the elements of narration that define voice,

tasks and challenges to help our voice stand out,

and some examples that do voice well.

Three highlights:

1. Readers want to feel the character they're reading is emotionally real. And the way to get that authenticity is by being specific.

Authenticity = Specificity

2. Think of voice as a camera in a movie that chooses certain things to focus on over others, like leaving the room with one character while leaving the others behind.

3. The idea of psychic distance. Using five sentences from "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, Jordan walks us through the different distances of voice, from the helicopter view that's the most remote and objective to as close as it gets, no outside world at all. Each distance has its own feel and strengths and things to be aware of. And the point isn't to choose one level and stay there the whole book.

"The key is to know when to make moves between levels within your manuscript."

The session is packed with information and tips, covering first versus third limited points of view, how knowing something your character doesn't can disconnect readers from your story, the benefits and retraints of present versus past tense, and much, much more.

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Michelle Knudsen is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 40 books for young readers. She won the 2015 Sid Fleischman Award for Humor for her YA novel Evil Librarian, and she talked to us about world building.

She started with a definition: World building is the physical world and the cultural world your characters inhabit.

All kinds of novels require world building. Fantasy and speculative fiction have other kinds of requirements, because you can't pre-suppose knowledge on the part of your reader. "Nothing can be taken for granted. You need to tell your readers everything they need to know about the world in which it takes place."

"The world of your fantasy story is just as important as your characters are."

As a young reader, she loved the Xanth books by Piers Anthony. In this world, everyone was born with a magical talent—it could range from a tiny skill like projecting a color on a wall to the ability to transform people, animals, and plants into other things. "As a young reader, I wanted desperately to go there. Everything about the world was literally magical."

World building also helps readers believe the things that happen in your world. The belief in the viability of the plot if affected by the viability of the setting (an idea she learned from the poet Julie Larios). Here's a sampling of the craft tips she shared with us.

Effective world building requires consideration of these five interconnected areas:

1. Physical environment
2. Inhabitants
3. Social structure
4. History
5. Beliefs

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Jenny Bent founded The Bent Agency in 2009; the agency now has nine agents, offices in New York City and London, and a strong focus on international rights. Her authors include SE Green, Tera Lynn Childs, AG Howard, and Lynn Weingarten. She is actively looking for new clients across all categories of middle grade and young adult. Her website is www.thebentagency.com and you can find her on Twitter @jennybent.

Highlights of Jenny's comments:

She starts out with mentioning some of her recent debut author sales, saying she has a lot of debut authors.

For YA she's looking for edgy, different, manuscripts that could almost be adult books, that push the envelope.

Calling herself "highly editorial," Jenny speaks of working with her clients on "at least two or three drafts before sending everything out."

As publishers are consolidating, she sees herself as "ever more of a protector," holding onto rights for her authors, and then being active about selling them. (Rights outside the primary U.S. deal like audio, foreign and film.)

"My big thing as an agent is honesty." Jenny explains her clients know when she praises their work that she's being real about it because when things aren't working she tells them about it. "What I'm looking for in a client is someone who will be honest back with me... Respect and honesty on both sides."

There's lots more discussion, about consolidation, social media, and even how her agency posts what they're looking for, once a month on their blog.

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Alexandra Penfold is an agent with Upstart Crow Literary and is building her list, representing very young picture books up to YA (some select adult).  She is also the author a cookbook NEW YORK a la CART: Recipes and Stories from the Big Apple's Best Food Trucks as well as three forthcoming pictures books.

In terms of Alexandra's client list, different clients have different needs so what she does depends on those needs. When she takes on a client, she thinks of it as taking on a life: in good times and bad.

When Alexandra is looking to take on a client it's important to her to have a conversation with them about their career and what they want. It's a relationship and there is a certain chemistry involved, and there must be trust.

There are different paths to sales for authors. Some who have made the right connections with the school and library market might see their sales grow over time. One example is POP by Meghan McCarthy. It didn't explode out of the gate but it keeps being added to state lists and purchased again and again by libraries. It had a slower build and is still doing well.


This is a great community. On social media be authentic and talk about the things you love, including books. Don't use it to only say, "Buy my book!"

When Alexandra reads something and there is an emotional response to it, that's what she is looking for. That is what she wants to open. One example is when she wrote Jessixa Bagley's submitted manuscript BOATS FOR PAPA, she cried.



A brief piece of career advice:
Be a reader. If you have a rich reading life, you will have a rich writing life.

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Barry Goldblatt is an agent with Barry Goldblatt Literary.

He's been an agent for 15 years, representing everything but nonfiction (although he's sold it). His client list includes Holly Black, Libba Bray, Lauren Myracle, Jo Knowles. He also represents writers of adult work (mostly science fiction), and this is evolving.

He recently signed a historical fiction graphic novel hybrid. "It was really cool and really exciting."

Brenda Bowen is an agent with Greenburger Associates, one of the oldest agencies in America. Her list has everything from PBs to YA, poetry, and some adult books (largely illustrated ones). Her clients included Rosemary Wells, Chris Raschka, Mike Curato, Hilary Knight, Samantha Berger, Jo Napoli, Julianne Moore and Nathan Lane (when they write for kids).

She used to be a children's book editor for more than 25 years, and writes books of her own as well—she's written 40 books for kids, and her first adult novel, Enchanted August, came out in June.

What kind of agent are you? 

Barry Goldblatt: Becoming an editorial agent has become part of the territory. Shining something up for editors is part of the job, but he doesn't try to get things perfect because it wants editors to be able to "get their hands dirty." He considers his clients friends, he offers counseling, and he wants to be able to celebrate with his clients.

Brenda Bowen: She's also an editorial agent and does like to do therapy and handholding for clients. The Greenburger agency has lots of support for writers from rights specialists too.

What kind of editorial work do you do? 

Barry Goldblatt: He isn't doing line edits and grammar. He knows every editor he works with is getting 30 more manuscripts that day. The competition is immense. He wants to make sure what he's sending is the best-looking thing it can be—and then they'll want to work on it and make it even better.

Brenda Bowen: An artist often comes to an agent and says, "I'm thinking of doing this style for the book." She talks to the artist about those choices. She also helps, when there are 20 manuscripts to consider, which one to pursue first.

What's a realistic expectation for a client, in terms of time and energy from an agent? 

Brenda Bowen: She'll take a 10 PM call at home from a client. "Not that you should call them from home, but if it truly is a crisis ... I want to talk to them." The expectation is that your agent is really there for you.

Barry Goldblatt: Agenting isn't a 9 to 5 job. He works all the time on behalf of his clients.

What do you look for in a client?

Barry Goldblatt: New writers often misunderstand the power balance in the equation. "When you sign with an agent, they work for you." They give advice and you're free not to take it (but if you don't often, maybe it's not a good match). He gives his clients advice about their career—they get to choose.

Barry's clients once had a mini revolt. By offering them representation, in his head, he was telling them they were the best people. But when he gave feedback early on, he had to learn to reassure his clients. "They need to hear that!" He assumed his clients knew he loved them, but they didn't.
Brenda Bowen: It's a matter of taste. When she opens a query letter, she asks herself if she wants to have lunch with that person. She's a good agent for people she clicks with.

What's the climate in the industry at the moment? What is changing? 

Brenda Bowen: There are a lot of consolidations, but there are still publishers, and publishers have adjusted to the ebook crisis. "We know that an adult ebook is taking over the space that the mass market paperback took." Since 2009-2010, a new normal has been established, so publishing has loosened the reins. They're still selective and want big books, but everyone wants to find that wonderful new thing and take risks. There is also more space for YA crossover. Things are unpredictable, but everyone still wants to capitalize on new opportunities.

Barry Goldblatt: The one negative he's seen that isn't quite receding is the focus in-house on deciding books they can get for $25,000 aren't worth publishing. He wishes editors had the space to buy special books that aren't as obvious of money-makers. "A lot of books are not six figure deals. It doesn't mean they're not fantastic books."

What's your dream manuscript? 

Barry Goldblatt: Once he participated in #MSWL (manuscript wish list chat on Twitter). He regretted it. His most recent sale wasn't something he was looking for, but it was so fantastic. "I couldn't have described this book before I got it if I tried."

The hardest thing is that you can get jaded and think nothing will knock you off your seat. But that's what he hopes for every day.

Brenda Bowen: She fell in love with Laurent Linn's illustrated novel, and even though she was too busy to take anything new on, she couldn't not take it on. She wants a book that "slaps you in the face."

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Lin Oliver moderates the agents' panel, with (from left), Jodi Reamer of Writers House, Alexandra Penfold of Upstart Crow Literary, Kristin Nelson of Nelson Literary Agency, Barry Goldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary, Brenda Bowen of Greenburger Associates and Jenny Bent of The Bent Agency.

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Dan as Daenerys Targaryen, he is a fan of GoT

Lin says it is a wonderfully satisfying and emotional moment to introduce Dan Santat and I agree, he's the super best.

Dan came here in 2001, this Summer Conference is the first SCBWI conference he ever attended. He worried it was too expensive, but that worry was soon put to rest when his portfolio got noticed by editor Arthur Levine, and because of attending the conference,Dan got his first book contract.

In the many years of attending SCBWI events and conferences, Dan's noticed success stories of authors and illustrators, and some stories of people who are still finding there way. Dan says:


One way to ease your trek on the road to publication is to improve your taste: Do you know if you have good taste? Do you know if what you're writing is good? Dan reads us this Ira Glass quote:



Dan lists some of the stories and genres he likes, and thinks improving your work and taste is due to understanding why you like things, don't censor or bias yourself. Dan likes:

Batman and Akira comics. Movies and TV shows like Moneyball, Game of Thrones, Lost, and Breaking Bad. Podcasts like This American Life and Serial. From all of these he is learning story style and technique, observing different points of view. Immerse yourself in life and culture, take these references, says Dan, and come up with a unique spin on things.

You must do a critical review of your work. Dan reads us some 1 star and 5 star Goodreads reviews for Where the Wild Things Are (which has an overall rating of 4.2, by the way). Compare your opinions with others, there are crazy reviewers and there are good reviewers, the good reviews are useful pieces of critical information that can make your work better.

Study the fundamentals, but don't be rigid.

Learn by imitation, but don't become a clone. In art school, Dan copied Wyeth paintings in class because when you paint the strokes a master painter painted, your hands learn what your head doesn't quite understand yet. But be sure to make your art your own, Dan says, try to make work that is original to yourself once you begin to trust your inner instincts.

The exploration comes by doing: You have to make a lot of lousy paintings before you find one you want to put in your portfolio. Dan was working a full-time job when he decided he wanted to be published, so he started working from 10 pm to 3 am on his illustration work and after weeks and weeks of working like this and honing his craft, he'd made himself an illustration portfolio he could be proud of.

Form follows function. Dan shows us how good stories have things happening for a reason, you see it in everything from Back to the Future to his very own Beekle.


A few of Dan's final thoughts: Do what you love, and the work will find you. Don't think about the money, think about the craft, and working on your craft is the only way to improve. And don't give up!

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Joining me and legendary editor Emma Dryden, best-Selling author Ellen Hopkins, art director and debut YA author Laurent Linn, and agent Danielle Smith, about 30 writers and illustrators (including conference attendee and Sid Fleischman and Lambda Literary Award-winning author Bill Konigsberg!) gathered in a large circle to share our questions about and discuss our projects that include Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning characters and themes.

We started out in a circle

As always, it was a safe space with lots of shared encouragement and mutual support.

Some highlights:

"Write bravely because it's going to matter to somebody. ...We have kids who need these books. Still!"
- Ellen Hopkins

"There is a need and a want" for these books with LGBTQ characters and themes, in publishing houses, "and readers who need these books."
- Laurent Linn

"The biggest tool against generalization is characterization. ...We are all more than our gender identification... Gender is not enough. Sexuality is not enough. Go deeper..."
- Arthur A. Levine

on why Ellen's books are successful... "These books are dealing with how kids would really feel in these situations. But if it's not on the page, kids are going to think you're lying to them."

"The question is not what hasn't been done, but what haven't I done?"
- Bill Konigsberg

Both Arthur and Danielle spoke of how in today's publishing environment, having LGBTQ characters and themes are something they cite as a positive about a project, something that helps them in selling/publishing a project.

And spent time meeting and greeting each other

And we'll let Arthur have the final word for this post:

"There's never been a more receptive environment for publishing LGBTQ characters and issues."
- Arthur A. Levine

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Introductions before the discussion of nonfiction and historical fiction for children. Pictured is only half of the group, the social continued to grow over the next hour!

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Following a long day of conference keynotes and breakout sessions, there's nothing quite like relaxing with meditation and downward facing dog pose. And that's just what some conference goers did. Each year at the summer conference, writer Lori Snyder has offered a daily yoga session. Below she writes about how writers and illustrators can benefit from the practice.

Guest post by Lori Snyder

#LA15SCBWI getting their triangle pose on!

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Isn't Lori cute? And so is whoever is photobombing her.

Lori Nichols, author/illustrator, is asked what was it that broke her through to the other (published) side:

"If I had to break it down to two things, it would definitely be SCBWI, I went to my first conference in 2002, I left two small children at home with the flu and drove five hours to a regional conference (where I then got the flu) but I learned so much. I met my agent at a SCBWI conference, and she's the other thing that's broken me through,  my amazing agent Joanna Volpe."

Lee asks Lori about some craft tips: Lori quotes Kelly Light, "Writing is like punching myself in the face."

Lori says, "That quote really spoke to me, for me, I have to show up every day, and sometimes what I write is going to stink. It's the showing up every day and not waiting for perfection. I think part of what makes a beautiful book are the imperfections, maybe a line is too scratchy, so what! Show up to your paper, your easel, your computer, and stay there, do it daily. Study other writers and illustrators, too."

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Rotem shares a few acquisition stories, here is one:

She reads us To the Sea by Cale Atkinson. It's important to be able for an author/illustrator to describe their story in a nutshell because Rotem does the same thing when she's doing a presentation for acquistions.

She asks us how we would position To the Sea, what its key note would be, the audience throws out:

• friendship story
• problem solving
• summer
• adorable characters
• bold illustrations with limited palette
• being seen

From that we get this nutshell: "A touching friendship story with stunning art about finding someone who really sees you."

Rotem then helps the audience hone their nutshells!

At Hyperion, marketing approval is integral to an acquisition. If Rotem thinks marketing might not "get" a potential book, she will do rounds of work on something before it goes to acquisition (that's a big deal given her time demands at work are for acquired books, which means Rotem does this additional

Rotem talks a little bit about the profit and loss statement, the P&L. Which is roughly: The quantity that they think they can sell in the first year + what they think they should pay the author + what the royalties look like ÷ if the book can go into board book eventually and/or ebooks x how other comparable books are doing in the market + the square root of π...

If Rotem is bringing a manuscript to an acquisition meeting, she will also bring her choices for who will illustrate to help the meeting attendees envision the project more fully.

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Patti encourages both authors and illustrators to think of their picture books in terms of music and cinema, there should be flow and rhythm to the book, and you can play with easing the readers along with repetition and then surprising them with something wholly different.

Patti shares Me... Jane which has a very steady rhythm of illustration on one side of a page spread and text on the other, so when we get to a climactic moment in the book, we also see something different on the page—an actual photograph of Jane Goodall out in the wild.

When Patti works on a book, she understands the author/illustrator is focused on the tiny details of every page, but she tries very hard to see things globally and offer guidance there. She encourages the audience to take a step back and get allll of your pages on one page so you can see how everything is working together. She likes CALDECOTT MEDAL WINNER Dan Santat's practice of storyboarding out something successfully cinematic like a Hitchcock movie to understand storyboarding better.

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Alison Weiss is an editor at Sky Pony Press. She was previously at Egmont for 6 and half years.

Missing the Middle Grade Mark: Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Your character is too young or to too old.
• Your voice isn't authentic. 
• Your dialogue doesn't sound natural or natural to your characters. 
• Your vocabulary is too sophisticated. 
• You're putting characters in situations that don't make sense.
• You're writing what you think is a middle grade experience, not what's actually a middle grade experience. 
• Your book lacks conflict.
• Your making choices that will date your book.
• Your book is too long.
• You don't know the market.
• Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
• You aren't asking your questions when you have the chance.

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Adam Rex illustrates.

He writes.


He writes AND illustrates.


He does Board Books,


He does Picture Books,


He Does Chapter books,



He Does Novels,




He even made his own bio laugh-out loud funny:

Adam Rex wrote and/or illustrated all the books you like including the New York Times best-selling Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, the New York Times best-selling Chu’s Day, and also a number of titles about which the New York Times has been strangely coy. His first novel, The True Meaning of Smekday, was adapted this past spring into the DreamWorks feature film “Home.” Having your book get turned into a movie is like that section in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz where the woodsman systematically chops off all his body parts one by one and replaces them with tin. But in a good way? Like maybe with the heart still intact? This isn’t one of Adam Rex’s better metaphors. Visit www.adamrex.com.

We're in for a treat!

Adam starts by sharing how it took him ten years of re-writing his "Moonday" story until he got it to work. From setting out to write something that made him feel the way a dream did to the book that was just published.

How he told a joke at a gathering about a school being afraid of its first day of children, and telling his agent the next morning. And having his agent insist that would be his next picture book. And Adam wrote that in an afternoon. (Here he riffs on the old Picasso quote: 20 years of learning and working and failing most of the time and succeeding more and more and eventually sitting down on one afternoon to write the book. So one afternoon plus twenty years.) "School's First Day of School" which he's written and was illustrated by Christian Robinson.

He talks about the combinations of images with text, and how we've imagined that less pictures means something is more for adults.

"In a mature society... we would have picture books for every age. ...It's not really a form that someone should grow out of."

He shares one of the best books he wrote that he says will never be published, "The Robot That Moe Bought." And tells us how doing that book dummy and one finished spread led to his being hired to illustrate his first picture book.

Adam shares his process for a number of his picture books, even showing us the sculptures he created to be able to draw the same characters, settings, and set pieces numerous times.

"My drawings are always better if I have something real to look at."

So if he doesn't have the ability to photograph a character (like he didn't for Frankenstein) then he sculpts it!

It's a fascinating window into what's similar about his process across books (breaking down the text, figuring out what's going where, thumbnails where he solves problems, sketching where he figures out the characters) and then what's different. And a lot is different – Adam changes styles and mediums seemingly for every book, trying to figure out the perfect way to tell each story.

The slides and Adam's repartee give us a behind-the-scenes look into how it all comes together, and it's so cool.

He finishes with a rap song, having us all snap along.

Great stuff!

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