Category: community

Social media/blogging update

- Stacy 1 Comment

A few months ago, I decided to join Tumblr and see what it was all about. I so rarely have time for real blogging nowadays, and most of my newsy things get posted on Facebook or Twitter. However, there are often longer things I’d like to share that I don’t have the time to think too deeply about for a full blog post. Those things have found a home on my new Tumblr, which is called The Other Grimoire mostly because I couldn’t think of a better name for it.*

If you already follow me on Twitter and you’re not into Tumblr, you are already seeing these links–everything I tumble auto-tweets, so I don’t have to do double duty. If you’re on Tumblr, let me know who you are (it’s much more like LJ** in the use of pseudonyms, so I don’t always know that someone I know is on there).

At any rate, I have a feeling that my blogging is only going to go down further in the coming time, because anything Tu-related such as reviews, awards, and author appearances is getting shared via the Tu Books Twitter and Facebook as well as the Lee & Low blog, where I hope to be doing some posts regarding Tu in the coming months. And I still share quite a bit of stray thoughts on Twitter and Facebook (as well as Tu news, but not as much as the Tu streams), though I’m working to really lock down personal stuff on my Facebook more as the number of writers who I don’t know personally grows. I’d prefer writers to follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, to be honest–anything related to books and writing will be mirrored there—but everyone is welcome to follow me on there for public updates. I’d prefer to start to weed down my actual friends list to people with whom I am friends in real life or through significant interaction online; it just gets too unwieldy otherwise (I am the master of lists in FB, but it really does get tiresome to have to remember who is on what list, too).

At any rate, I will continue to share news of Tu and to talk about my editorial process and the running of an imprint when I can. It’s just becoming harder to as my responsibilities grow, so I am looking for ways to make it simpler. Like reblogging interesting quotes and commenting briefly rather than publishing an entire blog post. Tumblr is great for that, so join me over there!

*I can’t tell you how many submissions I’ve gotten in the years since I started this blog on which they address the submission to “Stacy Whitman Grimoire,” and then address me as “Ms. Grimoire.” Where in the title of this blog (NOTE THE POSSESSIVE) did they get the idea that my last name is Grimoire??

**Speaking of LJ, my auto-importer on WordPress seems to have truly died, and I honestly don’t know if any of my last year’s worth of posts have actually made it to LJ. Hopefully those people I connected with on LJ are still connected to me via other networks.

Friends & Family Sale

- Stacy

If you didn’t see me hyping this up on pretty much all social media on Thursday and Friday, here’s your chance to know about a sweet deal for all my books, this week only (ends Friday)—the Tu Books Friends & Family Sale.

This is our way of saying thank you to our supporters over the years, and to celebrate the release of our fourth season of books. Not to mention the 1-year anniversary of the publication of Cat Girl’s Day Off and Vodnik. Whatever you’d like to celebrate (the 1 1/2 year anniversary of the release of Tankborn!), celebrate with us by using the coupon code and by sharing the sale on to your friends and family.

 

 

Feel free to share this on with anyone who might be interested–it’s a great deal for librarians and teachers! Use the code FAMILY at check-out.

FYI, we seem to be having some trouble with the international ordering, but if  you call the office at 212-779-4400 with the coupon code FRIENDS, we can still give you the 35% off your order for international customers (no free shipping, sorry).

#diverselit

- Stacy 1 Comment

Side note: I just realized—thanks to a congratulatory email on LinkedIn, of all things—that I’ve now officially been at Lee & Low Books for 3 years, almost to the day (I believe I started on March 5, 2010, but my memory is fuzzy). YAY for Tu Books! Yay for diversity in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery for young readers!

And to celebrate that—diversity in books for young readers, that is—we’re starting a Twitter chat that we’ve dubbed #diverselit. Tomorrow—Thursday, March 7, 2013—will be our first #diverselit chat on Twitter, and I hope you’ll be able to join us, in which I and my coworker Hannah, who is Lee & Low’s marketing manager, will be talking about Diversity 101, which covers all those frequently asked questions such as:

  • Who can write what?
  • What does “POC” mean?
  • What is privilege and why does it matter?
  • Why is diversity in books for young people a problem, and why does it matter?

If you’re an expert, join in the conversation and give us your perspective. If you’re a newbie to all of this, come to learn. Everyone, come to discuss! I will be tweeting from Tu Books’ twitter, and Hannah will be tweeting from Lee & Low’s twitter, so be sure to follow us both.

If you don’t know how a Twitter chat works, check out this handy guide to hashtag chats. Not on Twitter? You can follow along by searching #diverselit on Twitter itself or on http://www.tweetchat.com, but to participate in the chat, you need a Twitter account, which is pretty easy to set up. Hope to chat with you tomorrow!

It’s organization time

- Stacy 7 Comments

With new titles come new responsibilities, which means more to keep track of. I’m about to overhaul my desk and my task-management system, so before I really dig in beyond cleaning my desk, I thought I’d throw the questions out there:

  1. What’s your favorite task-management program? Preferably one that allows you to set deadlines for tasks and organize complicated subjects while being able to prioritize.
  2. What are your favorite resources for customizing your desk? I’m looking for ideas for using vertical space in a cubicle, in particular. I have some bookshelves I could repurpose, too, if necessary, but I’d prefer to be able to hang something from my cube wall. I’m looking particularly at things like this, but I’m wondering if I might be missing some possibility, particularly something that could hang above the computer and hold more than just paper. And for something that could hold large stacks of 11 x 17 paper (galleys) and such—piles of paper that I generally need in plain sight but not always right on the surface of my desk.
  3. Speaking of piles of paper, slush pile management practices (digital and paper) welcome.
  4. How do you keep e-mail and other digital resources organized? Any particular systems you prefer? (I’m doing much better on the computer than on my desk, but while I’m in this organizing kick, I’m also planning on integrating these ideas into e-organization as well.)
  5. Any resources you go to for office organization, particularly desks and file systems? Links, please!

 

 

How to get in on holiday-discount action at Tu Books

- Stacy 1 Comment

Have you been waiting for the right time—for example, a holiday promotional event—to buy a Tu Book or two? We’ll be sending out a special holiday discount to all our e-news subscribers, so sign up for our e-news to be sure that you’ll be in on the action.

You’ll see on that link that there are four options on the e-news: one for everything, one that is targeted for authors and illustrators—including publishing advice and contest announcements, another that focuses just on the books themselves, and another for teachers and librarians that includes classroom helps and links to resources on our site. You can sign up for all of them, or just one or two.

And the discount coupons don’t just come during the holidays—each e-news comes with discount codes just for e-news subscribers.

A Is for Anansi conference

- Stacy

If you’re in New York City and have the time (i.e., you’re not out volunteering or salvaging your own home) the A Is for Anansi conference at NYU this weekend is still on, despite the university being shut down for the week after the hurricane due to flooding and electrical outages. That is now taken care of and they’re getting back on their feet, and looking forward to discussing literature for children of African descent on Friday evening and all day Saturday.

There’s an RSVP number at that link, but if that isn’t working (I’ve heard there might be troubles with it), don’t worry—just show up. The conference is free to the public, so anyone may come.

I’ll be on the fantasy/science fiction panel on Saturday, along with Nnedi Okorafor and Zetta Elliott, which I’m really looking forward to. We’ll be talking about the  scarcity of fantasy/science-fiction books featuring children of African decent and how we hope to fix that. I hope you can make it!

November 9-10th, 2012

Location for all programs: Kimmel Center-NYU,

60 Washington Square South, E&L Auditorium, 4th Floor

Friday 6 p.m.–8 p.m.

Saturday 9 a.m.–after 5 p.m.

New Visions extension announcement

- Stacy

As I was talking about yesterday, Hurricane Sandy has affected us at Lee & Low—our office is still currently without power—o we understand that it has made it hard especially for those in the path of the storm to get your New Visions entry into the mail. After all, in the middle of all this, a lot of us have more important things to worry about, like electricity and food. Subway and train service is also still a problem, which might be essential for someone trying to get to the post office, and I’m not sure if many affected post offices are back up and running yet.

In light of that, we’re announcing today that we’re going to grant a 2-week extension to the New Visions contest. Our new deadline is Nov. 14. Like the original deadline, that is a postmark deadline. As long as your entry is postmarked by Nov. 14, your entry has hit the deadline. We hope this extension particularly helps those in the path of the storm, but it applies across the board.

All the other guidelines remain in effect. The contest page will be updated when we are able to do so—can’t change it myself and those who can don’t have access right now.

Given that those who need this deadline most might not even have electricity right now, please share this far and wide and please retweet, Facebook, and share on your blogs and other social networks today and perhaps a few times later this week. Please get the word out. Thanks, and for those who are hardest hit by this storm, our thoughts are with you.

P.S. If you’re in another area and wondering how you can help with the hurricane, I’ve heard that they have had to cancel several local blood drives due to the infrastructure damage. If you can donate blood, that might be the best thing you can do, particularly because on the night of the storm they had to evacuate an entire hospital down at NYU. You might also consider donating money to the Red Cross.

Logistics of New Visions due to Hurricane Sandy

- Stacy 1 Comment

I have just weathered the hurricane in relative style—thankfully, my neighborhood came out relatively unscathed compared to other places. I still have power and internet (mostly, though some flickers), and I live on high ground. A friend and I just took a walk around the neighborhood, and the worst most of us got here were some downed trees and branches and some business canopies half-torn off. Down by the river, it’s still high, but thankfully in this neighborhood there’s not much down by the river except a park.

Further downtown it’s not such a bright tale, especially down by the waterfront here in Manhattan and in Brooklyn and Queens, and particularly over in New Jersey, which seemed to have gotten the brunt of it. From the press conference I just saw with Greg Christie, it’s going to be a while for New Jersey to really recover from this. The word “unprecedented” keeps coming up—this was a storm like no other on record in this area. It looked like a Cat 1, but the winds and the storm surge acted more like a Cat 3 or 4, from what I hear.

What that means for the New Visions contest, since I’ve gotten a lot of worried emails in the last couple of days from people worried about their entry either being received on time, or people in the path of the storm who haven’t been able to get out to mail their entries:

The deadline is a postmark deadline of Oct. 31, not a receipt deadline. So as long as you’re able to mail your entry by tomorrow, you’ll be fine.

However, particularly for those in the path of the storm, I understand that you’ve got a lot more on your mind right now than writing, and we don’t know when full services like the subway and the post offices will be back to normal. For today, I’m just going to encourage those of you who can to mail your entries by tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll probably know a lot more about the assessments of damage and timelines and such, and I’ll know whether I can even get in to the office this week. So tomorrow once we know a little more, I’ll announce if we might be able to allow a small extension, particularly for those in the path of the storm, in the greater New York/New Jersey area particularly. I don’t know yet, but I wanted to reassure you that we understand and sympathize, as we’re dealing with this storm as well.

For now, if you can make it to the post office by tomorrow, just go ahead and send your entry that way. No need for any special delivery services like FedEx or UPS—in this situation, it will be *harder* for them because they don’t know when they’ll be able to get back into New York City, so from what I understand they’re not taking packages. The post office will go ahead and take your package, and they will deliver it when they can. As long as the postmark is Oct. 31 or earlier, you’re fine.

Thanks for your patience as we figure out what’s going on in the aftermath of this storm.

 

New Visions Award–deadline approaching!

- Stacy

I haven’t been blogging very consistently, I know—which made me only realize today that despite my many mentions of it on Twitter and Facebook, I haven’t yet talked about our New Visions Award here on the blog yet! With less than a month left before the deadline, I wanted to go a little into further detail about why we’re running this contest, and why you should share it far and wide with all your writer friends!

As you know, I focus on diversity in fantasy, science fiction, and mystery. We don’t require that our writers be people of color. Writing cross-culturally is perfectly valid—we’ve talked a lot here about how important it is to get a culture right if you’re writing cross-culturally, and to me, that’s what matters most when it comes to diversity in our books: that the books themselves reach beyond the status quo, and get it right while doing so.

But a vital part of getting it right is also welcoming voices from those communities we’re talking about, discovering new voices and adding them to the choral symphony. Look at CCBC’s 2011 numbers—the number of writers of color have mostly stagnated at roughly 6% of all books published, with roughly 8% of all books published featuring significant content about people of color (including formulaic non-fiction). Compare that with the population at large, which is roughly 25% PoC—or to the percentage of kids of color, our audience, which is fast approaching 50%—and you can see how stark those numbers really are, how bad we’ve been as an industry at offering “mirror” content to our readers and at sharing voices from their communities. If we were able to break it down into genres (does anyone have access to that kind of information? I’d love to see it), I have a feeling that YA SF and fantasy would have numbers that would look much worse.

So with that in mind, we started the New Visions Award, modeled after Lee & Low’s New Voices Award, to seek out new voices in genre fiction for young people. All the details can be found at our site (plus some awesome words about the contest from awesome people like Mitali Perkins and Nikki Grimes), but I’ll post a bit of it here so you can get an idea of what we’re looking for:

TU BOOKS, the fantasy, science fiction, and mystery imprint of LEE AND LOW BOOKS, award-winning publisher of children’s books, is pleased to announce the first annual New Visions Award. The award will be given for a middle grade or young adult fantasy, science fiction, or mystery novel by a writer of color. The Award winner receives a cash grant of $1000 and our standard publication contract, including our basic advance and royalties for a first time author. An Honor Award winner will receive a cash grant of $500.

TU BOOKS was launched in 2010, dedicated to diversity in the beloved genre fiction market for young people. Titles include Wolf Mark, Tankborn, and Cat Girl’s Day Off. This fall will bring the publication of Morris Award nominee and Pura Belpré Award winner Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s Summer of the Mariposas. For more information about TU BOOKS, visit leeandlow.com/p/tu.mhtml.

Eligibility:

  1. The contest is open to writers of color who are residents of the United States and who have not previously had a middle grade or young adult novel published.
  2. Writers who have published work in other venues such as children’s magazines or picture books, or adult fiction or nonfiction, are eligible. Only unagented submissions will be accepted.
  3. Work that has been published in its entirety in any format (including online and self publishing) is not eligible. Manuscripts previously submitted to TU BOOKS will not be considered.

Dates for Submission:

Submissions will be accepted from June 1, 2012, through October 31, 2012, and must be postmarked within that period.

Notice that the deadline is coming up at the end of this month!! So please share on Facebook and Twitter, share with your writing groups, share with your listservs—post it wherever it might be appropriate to share it around. Let your writer friends know! And if you, reading this right now, have a book that would be right for me, send it along!

I’d also add for those who aren’t new writers of color who want to submit a book to me, we’re always open to submissions from all writers, both agented and unagented, in our general submissions.

Las Comadres conference in October

- Stacy 1 Comment

I’ll be at this conference, and hope you can make it as well! Info below is from the press release:

Las Comadres to Host October Conference for Latino Writers

Day-Long Event to Offer Experts, Insight into Publishing Industry Opportunities

New York, NY; July 26, 2012 – Las Comadres Para Las Americas, the national Latina organization, will present a day-long conference on October 6 for Latino writers seeking more access into the publishing industry.

Comadres and Compadres Writers Conference will be held at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, Brooklyn. Joining La Comadres as collaborators are the National Black Writers Conference, the Center for Black Literature, the Foreign Language Department and the Latino American Association, Full Circle Literary, Marcela Landres, and Scholastic, with support from the Association of American Publishers.

Through the workshops, panels and other sessions, writers will gain an insider’s perspective into how to best navigate the challenges and opportunities of the industry.
A highlight of the day will be a full schedule of one-on-one meetings for writers with agents and editors. Participants currently include Johanna Castillo, Vice President & Senior Editor/Atria, Simon & Schuster: Jaime de Pablos, Director/Vintage Español, Knopf Doubleday Group; Adriana Dominguez, Agent/Full Circle Literary; Mercedes Fernandez, Assistant Editor/Dafina Books, Kensington Publishing; Sulay Hernandez, Editor/Other Press; Cheryl Klein, Executive Editor/Arthur A. Levine Books; Selina L. McLemore, Senior Editor/Grand Central Publishing; Christina Morgan, Editor/Harcourt Houghton Mifflin; Lukas Ortiz, Managing Director/Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency, Inc.; Diane Stockwell, Founder/Globo Libros Literary Management; and Stacy Whitman, Founder and Editorial Director/Tu Books.
Scheduled panels will examine magazines and literary journals, genres, poetry, children’s/young adult writing, fiction, non-fiction, publicity and self-publishing. There will also be a session for authors to pitch their work and get instant feedback as well as an agents/editors panel.

Keynote speaker is author and television personality Sonia Manzano. Having originated the role of “Maria” on Sesame Street, Manzano wrote two children’s books, No Dogs Allowed (Simon and Schuster, 2004) and A Box Full of Kittens (Simon and Schuster, 2007), and will have her first YA novel, The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, published by Scholastic in Fall 2012.

Registration for writers and vendors is now open for the conference.

Las Comadres is a nationwide grassroots-based group of Latinas launched informally in 2000 in Austin, TX. The national networks, created in 2003, have grown to over 100 US cities. Its 15,000 strong membership keeps Latinas connected via email networks, teleconferences, and monthly potluck events in individual cities. In conjunction with the Association of American Publishers, it sponsors a national book club promoting the work of Latino authors and encouraging literacy. The National Latino Book Club is currently celebrating its fourth year