Wow! I hope you’ve all been watching this year’s World Series! In case you haven’t noticed, BOTH teams in the series are teams that Kate and I visited! We went to Kansas City first, to see the Kansas City Royals, and later on, we went to San Francisco to the see the Giants.
We had such a good time in both places that we can’t really pick our favorite team–so Kate’s rooting for one team, and I’m rooting for the other! I can’t wait to see who wins!
Zilpha Keatley Snyder isn’t a name that rolls off your tongue when someone asks you to name a children’s book author, but she’s one of the authors that I loved as a kid, particularly a book of hers called Black and Blue Magic, which tells the story of a boy named Harry, stuck at home in San Francisco over a long, boring summer. It was a book about magic that sparked magic in me–fostering a love of reading, and eventually opening me up to the pleasures of writing children’s books.
Last week, Zilpha Keatley Snyder passed away at the age of 87, after having published many, many books, and garnering Newbery Honors for some of them. One of the most famous books, The Egypt Game, sits in my pile of to-be-read books.
To honor her memory, I’ve pulled out some passages from an essay (A Summer Full or Reading) that I wrote for the Nerdy Book Club last year about the books that influenced me and the Ballpark Mysteries books:
But Black and Blue Magic by Zilpha Keatley Snyder was one book I returned to again and again. I remember reading it for the first time in early summer, lying on the floor of my two-level tree house. The book tells the story of Harry Houdini Marco, stuck at home in San Francisco with his mother during a long, boring summer vacation when his friends are all going off to do something interesting. What starts out as a dull summer quickly turns into a series of nighttime adventures after the mysterious Mr. Mazeeck gives Harry some magic ointment that enables him to grow wings and fly. That summer, reading Black and Blue Magic enabled me to fly over the hills and streets and bay of San Francisco, into Golden Gate Park and beyond.
Black and Blue Magic is the book I had in mind when I started writing book 7 of my Ballpark Mysteries chapter book series. The San Francisco Splash (obviously set in San Francisco) covers much of the same geographic ground, including San Francisco’s famous hills and its beautiful bay. Initially I hoped to pay homage to Black and Blue Magic by having a magic ointment be part of the mystery or by naming one of my main characters Harry. But as the plot developed, it was clear the story was going in a different direction.
In the end, while I wasn’t able to work in a reference to Ms. Keatley Snyder’s work, I was able to pick her book back up when I finished with mine. This time, I didn’t lie out in my tree house to read it, but I did sit back and let her book transport me once more to a summer full of mystery, adventure, and surprise.
Want to go behind the scenes at the Ballpark Mysteries? Check out the interview I did with Matt’s Bats, an MLB blog run by a very friendly, and very smart ten-year-old kid named Matt. I kinda think that Mike from the Ballpark Mysteries is getting a little jealous!
Okay, this is too weird. This spring Random House Children’s Books released Ballpark Mysteries book #8 – The Missing Marlin.
The book is set in Miami, and features the really cool fish tanks in the Miami Marlin’s baseball stadium. An important part of the plot relates to a character who is stealing and trafficking in stolen fish and turtles. But my character is no match for this guy in Detroit, who tried to cross the border with 50 (yes, 50!) turtles strapped to his body….
Why would anyone want to steal turtles? Kate and I never thought about stolen turtles until we took a trip to the Miami Marlin’s neat baseball stadium with huge fish tanks. You can read about it in our book The Missing Marlin.
But we couldn’t believe it when we read a news story recently about a guy who tried to cross the boarder into Canada with more than 50 stolen turtles strapped to his body! Hopefully, they weren’t SNAPPING turtles!
These days, authors don’t just sit home (or in a coffee shop) and write. If you’re a children’s book author (or any type of author, for that matter), you not only have to write (or write and illustrate) your book, but you have to go out and promote it. For example, last spring I did a series of Skype school visits to share the latest editions of my Ballpark Mysteries series with children. And although Skype visits ended up taking a moderate amount of time to arrange and deliver, they were really successful in connecting my Ballpark Mysteries books with children all over the U.S.
But marketing your books isn’t a one-shot deal. It’s an on-going task that authors should continue to focus on and learn more about. That’s why I’m always interested to see how other children’s book authors do everything from Skype visits to school visits, and why I kept tabs (via Facebook) on what bestselling author and illustrator Brian Lies recently did to promote the launch of his latest “Bats” book, Bats in the Band (which is, of course, about bats that get together in a deserted theater to make music).
To get out and share his book with potential readers, Brian created a completely unique marketing vehicle. And I mean a vehicle–Brian not only customized his car with a colorful “Bats in the Band” wrap, but he also built a Blue Man Group-like set of plastic tubes that fans could play using flip flops.
He even created bat musician figures that perched on top of the vehicle (when it was stopped…).
Brian clearly spent a lot of time putting together a unique book tour and creating new ways to engage with his audience, so I thought it would be interesting to learn more about his book tour process. Luckily, Brian was willing to share his experiences and he generously responded to some of my questions.
When did the book come out and when did you do the tour?
BATS AT THE BAND had an August 5th pub date, and we planned our events so they kicked off on that day.
How many bookstores/libraries/places have you visited as part of the tour?
So far, we’ve worked with Eight Cousins Books (Falmouth, MA), Where the Sidewalk Ends (Chatham, MA), Brewster Books (Brewster, MA) and Titcomb’s Books (Sandwich, MA) on Cape Cod. Next was a sprint down the Maine coast— Sherman’s Books and Stationery in Bar Harbor, Boothbay Harbor, Camden, and Portland, and Maine Coast Books in Damariscotta. We also did an event at Barnes & Noble in Augusta, and signed store stock whenever we stumbled on a Barnes & Noble. I’ve got several more book events coming up in New England, and a Fearsome Foursome in the Midwest: Red Balloon in Minneapolis, Anderson’s outside of Chicago, the Riverside (IL) Public Library (which is the setting for BATS AT THE LIBRARY), and Reading Reptile in Kansas City, Missouri.
How did you arrange the visits?
Some of the events are ones we set up ourselves, calling the booksellers we’ve worked with before and asking to get on their schedules. Some, such as the Midwest tour, were set up by the marketing department at my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It really depended on whether we had connections with the booksellers or not.
Did you do them back-to-back or spread out over different weeks or weekends?
We clustered dates in areas where we needed to travel and stay overnight, but we now have dates around New England that are just several hours’ drive so those can be one-day trips.
You used a giant/blown-up version of your picture book—how did you create that?
We actually launched BATS IN THE BAND two weeks before the pub date, with a concert for Family Day during the Duxbury (MA) Music Festival. You can see images of the concert—and all of our other tour dates—on our Facebook page, “Bats in the Band.” We knew that the Family Day concert typically brings in 300 participants, and so we knew that we needed something big to read from, something that 300 attendees would actually be able to see.
So we asked Dan Easter at the company that did our vehicle wrap (Kingston Sign-a-Rama in Kingston, MA) if he had any thoughts on building an enormous book. He took on the challenge and engineered the whole thing—printing the enlarged images on styrene sheets, then creating a heavy-duty tape and bolt spine for the book. It’s amazing.
I love what you did to your car for the tour. How much work did that take, and what’s the “payoff” (for both you, the author, and the fans).
I built a PVC pipe organ (like the ones that Blue Man Group play), which attaches to the car so people can actually play the car, and I built two three-foot-tall fiberglass bats to attach to a box on the top of the car. Everything was built by hand, and took me more than two months. The payoff is really just something that’s whimsical and fun to park in front of a bookstore, and also something interactive, so that kids and families can go up and play the car.
Lots of book signings are just boring things, with a card table and a pile of books. We try to break that mold and give kids and parents something fun to do while they’re waiting to get a book signed.
Author events can attract people of different ages. How do you approach an author event with children (or fans) of different ages and attention spans?
We don’t really think of the ages of the attendees when we’re putting things together. My books are picture books, so the attendees are likely to be anywhere from 0-10 years old, plus parents and grandparents. If we can find crafts or activities that will amuse both those kids and their grownups, that’s best. But keeping kids happy for twenty minutes almost automatically keeps their parents happy!
What worked well?
The PVC pipe organ seems to have (pardon the pun) really struck a note with people who come to our book events. It’s something you play with no rules—just grab up a flip-flop and bang away at it as you want! And the big book has been a hit—it’s so large that it makes you feel small next to it, like one of those over-sized chairs you see in some roadside attractions.
Anything you’d do differently next time?
Every book promotion is different, and it’s impossible to see what difficulties you’ll run into in advance. The Batwagon this time around was pretty complicated, with two sections of PVC pipe organ and the rooftop bats, all of which detach and get stowed for driving. I originally hoped to be able to engineer a rooftop device that I could basically unfold from a compact box into the final, elaborate car—and I think that’s possible, but I didn’t have enough time . . . or a machine shop, to be able to fabricate parts I would have needed. If I had to build the whole thing over again, I’d be able to do it in half the time, because most of my time was spent on feasibility tests (“will THIS work?”) and building as I went along. Now I know how to do one of these, and what won’t work, and the process would be streamlined. But I won’t ever build another!
Do you have any recommendations for other authors planning a book tour?
I think the most important thing is to be creative about it—look at the theme or setting of your book, and think of how you can elaborate on some of the things in the book. Does the book feature some kind of food? Maybe you can serve that food at events, or get attendees to make that food. What crafts can you build on the theme of the book? Where’s the natural place to hold your book event? If it’s a book about basketball, see about doing something at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA. If it takes place on a beach, think about getting booksellers to agree to selling books at a sandcastle contest on a beach. If it’s music, as in BATS IN THE BAND, get people playing music. You were creative enough to write the book in the first place—you’re creative enough to come up with fun things to keep people busy while they’re waiting for you to autograph your book for them!
(images courtesy of Brian Lies)
Mr. David A. Kelly just sent me and Kate a copy of the first book he wrote — Babe Ruth and the Baseball Curse. He wrote it in 2009, but a new version of it just came out. It’s got neat new facts in the back about the Red Sox and Babe Ruth. See for yourself:
The new version of the book has a new cover. Instead of a painting of Babe Ruth, it has a cool picture of Babe Ruth just after he hit a baseball. I’ll bet it’s a home run!
(I keep trying to pretend I’m Babe Ruth but somehow the balls don’t go that far when I hit them.)
Kate and I really like this book. After we got back from our first adventure to Boston’s Fenway Park, I took it out of the library to read up on Babe Ruth. Kate read it when I was done. Then she came up with the great idea of asking Mr. Kelly to write about how we helped Boston’s Big D find his missing bat. Since then, we’ve let Mr. Kelly write about our all adventures at baseball stadiums. That way, we get to have fun, and he has to do all the work!
Babe Ruth and the Baseball Curse was the first book I had published. It was released back in 2009, and it was thrilling to have it published by Random House. However, it wasn’t the first book I wrote. The first book I wrote was an early draft of the Ballpark Mysteries book 1–The Fenway Foul-Up. However, Jennifer, my great editor at Random House, felt the mystery story needed work. But she really liked how I wrote the non-fiction section “About Fenway Park” in the back of the first Ballpark Mysteries book, so she asked me if I wanted to write a non-fiction book.
I didn’t have to think too long before replying to that email. “Yes! I’d love to write a non-fiction book,” I emailed.
The rest isn’t history–but it was my first book–Babe Ruth and the Baseball Curse, a story of Babe Ruth (who’s a great character–the kids LOVE it when I tell them sometimes he didn’t even change his underwear for a whole week!). The book came out in 2009, with great illustrations and a cover by Tim Jessell:
However, earlier this year Random House decided to reissue the book with updated material in the back and a new cover. Here’s what the updated book looks like:
I’m thrilled with the update, and love that I now have another chance to share the story of both Babe Ruth and the incredible 2004 Red Sox season.
Kate and I just received this great video from Luke, one of the Ballpark Mysteries biggest fans. He’s happy to be reading the Ballpark Mysteries and has a suggestion for us on what ballpark we need to go to next…
Great video send in by the father of Luke, a young Ballpark Mysteries reader. Stick around until the end (don’t worry, it’s a brief video) to see his request for a Mets Ballpark Mysteries book–it’s very, very cute!
Luke also followed up with another fan video. In this one, taken back in the spring, he’s waiting for Ballpark Mysteries #9 – The Philly Fake – to come out. But watch out, because he also reveals a spoiler for book #8 – The Missing Marlin!