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To celebrate twenty years of publishing, Hyperion Books is offering twenty backlist eBook titles for $2.99 from October 10th to October 24th.

The discounted eBooks come from a wide variety of genres such as memoir, thriller, cooking, academic and inspiration. The books include The World According to Mister Rogers by Fred Rogers, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? by George Carlin, Shopgirl by Steve Martin, Home by Julie Andrews and Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox.

Here’s more from the announcement: “Along with our eBook promotion, we’re asking our Twitter followers and Facebook fans to join in. We’ll be Tweeting, with the hashtag #Hyperion20, 1 question everyday for the next 2 weeks, the winner gets 1 free Hyperion/Voice book and everyone who plays gets entered into a pool to win a bundle of 5 Hyperion/Voice books in the genre of their choice! We’re asking our Facebook fans to post a picture of themselves with a Hyperion/Voice book and in return, we’re giving them 1 free Hyperion/Voice book.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Children’s book author-illustrator Jeff Crosby says he came up with the idea for his funny new picture book, Wiener Wolf  (Hyperion) while he was in the shower one day.

For a long while after that he asked his wife author-illustrator Shelley Ann Jackson if she would write the story for him so he could paint it.

Shelley suggested that he try his own hand at putting just the right words together in just the right order to tell his story.

Then he’d be that appealing combination (for some children’s book editors) — an author-illustrator.

Jeff’s response was to put together a little pencil sketch dummy that told the story without any words at all. But later his and Shelley’s agent urged him to add at least a few words to his pictures — to appease that segment of the market that believes that picture books are meant to be read.

The result is Wiener Wolf  about a dachshund who hears the call of the wild and decides that he’ll leave home with granny to run with the wolves.

The release party for the book is Saturday, July 2nd at BookPeople, 11:30 a.m.  (Yes, there is a dog costume contest, but check the store for details.)

For anyone in the Central Texas area Jeff will teach a University of Texas informal class on illustrating children’s books starting Tuesday, June 28 at 6 p.m.

The above video is from a 90 minute interview I did with Jeff and Shelley for students of my online course on children’s book illustration Make Your Splashes-Make Your Marks.

You can see a little more from that interview here.   

And  you can see how their four year old daughter Harper responds to her daddy’s picture book below.

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Mark Mitchell hosts this blog and conducts an ongoing online course Make Your Splashes – Make Your Marks! that teaches how to draw and paint illustrations for books and other media for children.

1 Comments on When kids’ book illustrators go wild…, last added: 6/21/2011