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Continuing our exploration of the world of e-books for children, we’re asking practitioners and people on the ground about some of the challenges and triumphs for them personally, as well as for the children’s publishing industry as a whole.

Today we have with us Janet Wong, former lawyer turned children’s book author of numerous books, including A Suitcase of Seaweed, Me and Rolly Maloo, Twist: Yoga Poems, and Once Upon a Tiger, an illustrated e-book poetry collection about endangered animals, as well as three e-poetry collections, co-designed and edited with Sylvia Vardell: Poetry Tag Time, p*tag and the recently released Gift Tag. Janet’s many awards include the International Reading Association’s “Celebrate Literacy Award”.

We first interviewed Janet in 2008 and it’s great to welcome her back to PaperTigers to talk here about her experiences with e-books.

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What was your inspiration for writing e-books? Was that your intention from the get-go, or was there an evolution in your creative process?

Sylvia Vardell and I hatched our PoetryTagTime project one year ago at the NCTE convention with one simple goal: to make poetry an impulse buy. Poetry books are too often neglected, left to collect dust on bookshelves. We wanted people to hear about our books, read a sample poem, click “buy” (for no more than the cost of a cup of coffee)–and fall in love with poetry!

Children’s books, particularly picture books, present specific challenges to the e-book industry in terms of faithful reproduction of art and story. They also present exciting opportunities for new forms of interaction. What limitations or challenges, expected or unexpected, have you personally experienced creating e-books for children, and in turn, what benefits have you discovered as compared to printed books?

Designing for the small black-and-white screen of the Kindle isn’t easy, especially since you can’t know what size font a reader will choose. A child who chooses a large font might end up breaking a poem’s lines in places where a line break might be, well, ugly. For our third PoetryTagTime venture, GIFT TAG, Sylvia came up with the name “Kindleku” to describe the form that we “invented” for the Kindle screen. This form allows a maximum of 10 lines and 25 characters per line (including spaces)–the most that will fit on a Kindle screen when it is set at Font Size 6 (though Font Size 4 is, in my opinion, the best size for reading most e-books). Douglas Florian called this form the “Kindlekuku” and we acknowledge in the intro that it was cuckoo to limit our poets to 250 characters per poem–but we think the poems are terrific!

Particularly in English-speaking countries, a common concern is the lack of diversity in children’s books. How do you think e-books might address such concerns, and how has your work engaged with issues of multicultural children’s books? 

More and more people are discovering the authors in themselves and soon will be using e-books to make their voices and stories heard. This is such an exciting time to be involved with books. There will be lots of awful books, just as there are lots of awful YouTube videos–but there will also be indie-pub

Howdy Campers!

Carmela did a fine job of wrapping up our First Annual Ten Days of Thanks-Giving this week.  Yay, Carmela!

Today was my monthly hike with the women I've fallen in love with as we leaped from rock to rock to cross creeks, dripped sweat up impossible hills, walked quietly under arched tree ceilings, and been photographed with in front of waterfalls, oceans and boulders.  So today I write a thanku to the universe for giving me my hiking buds:

Friday, I posted my poem "After the Storm" from PoetryTagTime, the fun, inexpensive (99 cents!), teacher-friendly e-anthology of the 30 poems from Sylvia Vardell's Poetry Tag feature for National Poetry Month.

Yesterday, at the PoetryTagTime Tips blog, Sylvia posted some great teaching tips for teachers to use with my acrostic poem, including a Poetry Performance idea. I love this! When I present at schools, it's all about getting kids involved in the reading. Kids love poetry even more if they can act it out, dance it, devour it! 

Sylvia's doing this all month, posting easy and imaginative lessons/activities to go along with every single poem! So for 99 cents, teachers can download the e-book, share a poem each day with their kids, and even find online tips to help make the poetry accessible to everyone (kids and intimidated teachers alike). Cool! I need to go back through this whole blog and read all the tips--I'm sure it's going to give me some ideas to add to my own Poetry Performance bag of tricks:>)

National Poetry Month is held every April in Canada and the USA to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American and Canadian culture. Schools, literary organizations, communities, businesses and more celebrate National Poetry Month with a plethora of events including poetry readings, festivals, book displays, and workshops. The kidlitosphere is sure to be active with bloggers celebrating the month – and one blog that you definitely don’t want to miss out reading is Sylvia Vardell’s Poetry for Children!

Sylvia is a professor of children’s and young adult literature at Texas Woman’s University, author of Poetry Aloud Here! Sharing Poetry with Children in the Library (ALA Editions, 2006), Poetry People: A Practical Guide to Children’s Poets (Libraries Unlimited, 2007), and Children’s Literature in Action: A Librarian’s Guide (Libraries Unlimited, 2008). She is co-editor of Bookbird, the journal of international children’s literature, co-editor of the annual review guide Librarians Choices and is also the poetry columnist for the American Library Association’s Book Links magazine.

Our April 2008 PaperTigers’ Poetry issue featured a reprint of Sylvia’s article Pairing Poems Across Cultures (which offered insights on the similarities and differences in poetry from parallel cultures) as well as a reprint of an interview that Cynthia Leitich Smith did with Sylvia in 2007. In 2010 we were thrilled to meet up with Sylvia at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and had a great chat with her.

Last April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, Sylvia played a game of Poetry Tag on her blog. Poets shared original poems, tagged another poet who shared a poem connected with the previous poem, and on and on. It was such a success that it led her and author Janet S. Wong to compile an anthology of 30 e-poems by 30 e-poets called PoetryTagTime.  This first ever electronic-only poetry anthology for children has new poems by many top poets writing for young people, and can be purchased for 99 cents here.

For this year’s National Poetry Month celebrations Sylvia says :

I’m sticking with my “tag” th

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Tag--you're it!

I’m so excited to be part of PoetryTagTime, a poetry e-book! It’s a groundbreaking project from Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong.

As so many of us despair about getting poetry published, getting it into the hands of kids, Sylvia and Janet took action and created a fantastic e-book. They planned out the PoetryTagTime event for Sylvia’s April poetry project, but then they took that project digital. Teachers and poetry lovers of all stripes will be able to download the book and share 30 never-before published poems, each one connecting somehow to the one before and the one after. I wrote my poem after one by anthologist, poet, and inspirer (Seeing the Blue Between, Hey You!, and a million more) Paul Janeczko, and I tagged witty, wry poet, Robert Weinstock (Can You Dig It?, Food Hates You, Too). It's as much fun to read about the connections as it is to read the actual poems!

Here's the scoop:

Just in time for National Poetry Month, look for the first ever electronic-only poetry anthology of new poems by top poets for children (ages 0-8), PoetryTagTime, compiled by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong and available for only 99 cents at Amazon. This collection of 30 new, unpublished poems range from the humorous to serious, about tongues, turtles and toenails, in acrostics, quatrains, and free verse written by 30 of our best children's poets. And the “connections” between poems as the poets voice how their poems are interconnected in this game of poetry tag adds another layer of fun and meaning. You'll be able to share brand-new poems and poetry tips with children all month long for pennies a day!

Even if you don’t own a Kindle, you can download the free Kindle app for a number of devices, including your Windows or Apple computer, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android-powered phone. Also, be sure to check out our web site (PoetryTagTime.com) and companion blog (PoetryTagTime.Blogspot) for strategies for sharing each of the 30 poems in the book, rolling out one per day throughout the month of April.

For more information:

http://poetrytagtime.com

Also, Sylvia's blog features poetry book reviews and teaching ideas all month! 

So, yesterday I downloaded the Kindle app for my iPhone and bought PoetryTagTime. Thanks, Sylvia and Janet, for bringing great poetry to more kids, for putting me in an anthology with so many poets whose work I love, and for, ahem, forcing me to finally actually read an e-book:>)