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Marvelous Marketer: Cynthia Leitich Smith

(Author of Eternal and Tantalize)


Hi Cynthia. Thank you for joining us today. Before we get into marketing, tell me a little about yourself.


I’m the author of three contemporary Native American children’s books— Jingle Dancer (Morrow, 2000), Rain Is Not My Indian Name (HarperCollins, 2001), and Indian Shoes (HarperCollins, 2002)—as well as two humorous picture books - Santa Knows (Dutton, 2006) and Holler Loudly (Dutton, TBA) and numerous short stories.

However, I’m best known for my young adult Gothic fantasies — Tantalize
(Candlewick, 2007), Eternal which hits stores next week (Candlewick, 2009), and Blessed (Candlewick, TBA). I also have a graphic novel adaptation of Tantalize under contract.

Beyond that, I’m agented by the brilliant and gracious Ginger Knowlton at Curtis Brown in New York, and I’m a member of the distinguished faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

More personally, I count myself lucky to be part of sunny Austin, Texas’s booming youth writing community. I live near downtown with my husband and sometimes co-author Greg and our four dedicated writer cats.


Tell me a little more about Eternal. I know it is releasing next week! Congratulations!

In alternating points of view, Miranda and Zachary navigate a cut-throat eternal aristocracy as they play out a dangerous and darkly hilarious love story for the ages.
With diabolical wit, the author of Tantalize revisits a deliciously dark world where vampires vie with angels — and girls just want to have fangs. Eternal is set in the same universe as Tantalize , so you can look forward to a more direct re-entry into the Dracul tradition--and more global insights into its vampyric society. To find out more, you can check out the reader's guide on my web site .or read an interview posted at Not Your Mother's Book Club.


Can't wait. Now let's get into Marketing. Do you have a website/blog? When did you start it and who manages it?


I have a main web site features links to my Cynsations and Spookycyn blogs (which I started in November 2004). My site launched in 1998. Last year, it attracted more than 2 million unique visitors. Its focus is not only my own work, but also children’s-YA adult literature as a whole, including resources for writers and related to publishing.


In your opinion, how important is social networking? Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, GoodReads)

For outreach to teen readers, it’s a great idea because the Internet is so much a part of their lives. My one caution is to keep in mind that you’re joining a community of thoughtful readers, not simply advertising at them. Think of it more as a way to make a meaningful contribution to the conversation of books and to encourage reading.


Did you think about marketing before your book was published? Did you start prior to getting an agent or selling your book? If so, when and what did you do?

I have undergraduate degrees in news/editorial and public relations, so my academic and young professional background had already prepared me to dive in.

But no, I didn’t worry about that aspect of the book until the manuscript was under contract and the book in production.

My first sale was Jingle Dancer, a children’s picture book. At the time, it was unusual to find a contemporary Native girl and community featured in youth literature. My publisher, HarperCollins, handled the big stuff—the catalog, major reviewers, teacher/librarian conferences, etc. So I focused on niche marketing, getting the word out to the Native community and our friends. I sent copies to Native media and museum gift stores and those with an interest in Native and/or girl-powered stories. I also wrote a few articles about contemporary Native themes that appeared in institutional market magazines, and before long, that led to speaking opportunities.

My approach has also been big picture. I care about my books, and I make every effort to champion them. But kids need to read a lot of books. Since Jingle Dancer was published, I’ve made an ongoing effort to raise awareness of multicultural children’s literature.

More recently, with my YA Gothic fantasies, I’ve made an extra effort to feature author interviews with folks whose work will appeal to my own YA readers. If time allows, I also book talk related new releases when I speak to, say, public library groups. I hand out bibliographies and keep a Web page celebrating such books regularly updated.


Do you feel it is beneficial for authors to team up and promote books as a group? Why?

It depends on the group. On one hand, cross-promotional efforts can create a sense of community between the authors and allow for a trade off of skills that’s beneficial to all. Multiple voices may be able to attract more attention than one. On the other, it’s important that everyone be on the same page in terms of expectations—the most important of which being public behavior. If you brand yourself together, for better and worse, what reflects on one to some degree reflects on all.


What other advice do you have for authors/writers regarding marketing?

When I started, author Jane Kurtz gave me the best advice I’ve ever heard. She said to do at least one thing a week, no matter how small, in support of your books. It could be something small like a blog post or stopping to say hi to a newly hired librarian. Or something huge, like throwing a launch party with a couple of hundred guests.

Consistency is more important than an all-out blitz. Sure, you’ll probably want to shout it from the rooftops when you finally hold that new novel in your hands. But in the long run, it’s more important to look for regular ways to highlight it as long as it’s in print.


What creative things have you done to promote a book?

Probably my most successful, out-of-the box thing was the giveaways of the Sanguini’s T-shirts (Sanguini’s is the fictional vampire restaurant in Tantalize). They were designed by graphic designer/artist Gene Brenek and tie in beautifully to the book. The YAs and YA librarians loved them. I sent them out with bat finger puppets from Folkmanis, which were equally popular.

Thank you for sharing your marketing strategies with us. We wish you the best with your new book.


Remember to join us Monday for Krista Marino (Editor, Delacorte)

The nominees for the 2008 Turner Prize for art have just been announced. Every year the prize courts controversy, with many traditional art lovers saying that the pieces aren’t art at all. Previous winners of the prize have included Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, and the transvestite potter Grayston Perry. Interpretating art, then, seems to be a minefield: one person’s trash is another person’s masterpiece. With this in mind, today I bring you an excerpt from Cynthia Freeland’s 2002 book But Is It Art?

Interpretation: a case study

Although no one interpretation is ‘true’ in an absolute sense, some interpretations of art seem better than others. Let’s consider an artist whose work inspires interpretive disputes, the prominent Irish–English expressionist painter, Francis Bacon (1909–1992). Bacon painted people who look tortured and despairing. His figures are distorted, their mouths screaming—observers said Bacon made humans look like slabs of raw meat. One gets this initial impression just from looking at the paintings.

For example, consider Bacon’s monumental Triptych of 1973. In the centre panel a male figure sits on a toilet, while beneath him oozes a bat-shaped puddle of ominous blackness. The images look dark and disturbing; they almost reek of death. But here, as in other canvases, formal features counteract the visceral emotional impact. The triptych format itself recalls religious icons and altarpieces. Pain is offset by the almost static composition and use of deep, unusual colours. Reviewer Mary Abbe comments on these tensions in Bacon’s work:

“[F]or all their nastiness and brutality, there is something undeniably beautiful, even serene in these paintings. . . . Bacon . . . achieved a kind of lyricism that makes even his most horrific subjects compatible with the drawing rooms in which many of them hung. Backgrounds of boudoir pink, persimmon, lilac and aqua combine with the calligraphic grace of his fleshy figures in images of stylized elegance.”

Critics assemble interpretations using diverse approaches. Some people downplay emotion and pursuit of meaning and focus only on compositional beauty. The formalist critic David Sylvester, an early defender, emphasized Bacon’s use of abstraction in the face of many objections to the canvases’ harrowing contents. Especially when first exhibited, Bacon’s work (like Serrano’s Piss Christ) overwhelmed viewers; so it was necessary to point out how these paintings really did manifest form. Sylvester went too far, though, by de-emphasizing the visceral emotional qualities of Bacon’s work. Sylvester saw Bacon’s ‘screaming bloody mouths . . . simply as harmless studies in pink, white, and red’. I would call Sylvester’s early criticisms inadequate, then, as an interpretation of Bacon.

To correct Sylvester’s overly formalist approach, some critics go to the opposite extreme and provide a psychobiographical interpretation. Because Francis Bacon had a horrendous relationship with his father, who whipped and kicked him out as a child for his homosexuality, he is ripe for Freudian theorizing. Perhaps other aspects of Bacon’s life are reflected in his art. His horrific imagery may reflect his experiences in cleaning corpses out of bombed-out buildings in London during World War II. Bacon led an unusually wild life of heavy drinking, gambling, and constant S&M sexual escapades.

Bacon himself rejected readings of his work in terms of either his personal obsessions or the supposed angst of the twentieth century. He claimed his work was only about painting. He was obsessed with other painters, especially Velázquez, Picasso, and Van Gogh. Since Bacon recreated some of their famous works in his own distinctive style, it seems that his works are indeed about how to paint in a new and different era. Still, I don’t quite believe Bacon completely, nor would I rule out his biography altogether; it somehow provides background context for the raw urgency and harrowing content of the paintings.

Another critic, John Russell, helps us see that the blurred figures in Bacon’s works had sources in the animal movement studies done by photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The earlier artist’s time-lapse photos gave rise to Bacon’s images of running dogs and wrestling men. Russell explains that Bacon sought to blur the boundaries between representation and abstraction. In a sort of competition with abstract artists like Jackson Pollock, he used photography in a new way—almost as if denying the upstart medium’s challenge to painting as the medium of realistic depiction.

Critical disagreement about the meaning of Bacon’s work is typical of debates in the artworld. I do not think that such conflicts are insoluble. Critics help us see more in the artist’s work and understand it better. Interpretations are superior if they explain more aspects of the artist’s work. The best interpretations pay attention both to Bacon’s formal style and to his content. In interpreting Bacon, I would not ‘reduce’ his art to his biography, but some facts about his life seem to reveal things about how he painted people. For example, biographers explain that the image we have been considering, Triptych of 1973, was ‘about’ a particular death: it was both exorcism and commemoration of the suicide of Bacon’s former lover, George Dyer, who died in their hotel bathroom in Paris just before the opening of a major exhibit of Bacon’s paintings. Knowing this, one looks at the work differently—it still seems horrifying (perhaps more so), but is an even more impressive achievement of artistic transformation. But content is not everything, either. Bacon’s forms, compositions, and artistic sources are also relevant.

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Check out Scott E. Franson's blogpost about Lookybook. Lookybook seems to be an online site that allows whole picturebooks to be viewed, page by page. I haven't read any more other than taking a short peek at Scott's post. It's fascinating, but I hope there are clear copyright protections in place before books are posted.