Category: publishing

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.

Diverse Energies

- Stacy

Now that it’s been circulating around for a while, I thought I’d show off the gorgeous Diverse Energies cover right here, in case you missed it in the hundred other places people are talking about it. In other news, I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but I am working hard on Awakening by Karen Sandler (Tankborn 2) and New Worlds by Shana Mlawski (spring books) as well as books for next fall that include Joseph Bruchac’s next book. Here’s the description we sent to Publisher’s Marketplace:

Stacy Whitman at Lee & Low Books has bought world rights for Wolf Mark author Joseph Bruchac’s newest YA Killer of Enemies, a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel with a steampunk twist, for publication in fall 2013 under the Tu Books imprint. Described as “space cowboys in the new Old West,” it retells the story of Lozen, the monster slayer of Apache legend, in a world where space dust has rendered digital technology obsolete.  Barbara S. Kouts of the Barbara S. Kouts Agency did the deal.

Awesome, right? I’m SO EXCITED for it, you guys. And, without further ado, check out this gorgeousness from designer Ben Mautner. And the lineup? If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out after the cover.

 

No one can doubt that the wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. No one can doubt that cooperation in the pursuit of knowledge must lead to freedom of the mind and freedom of the soul.

—President John F. Kennedy, from a speech at University of California, March 23, 1962

In a world gone wrong, heroes and villains are not always easy to distinguish and every individual has the ability to contribute something powerful.

In this stunning collection of original and rediscovered stories of tragedy and hope, the stars are a diverse group of students, street kids, good girls, kidnappers, and child laborers pitted against their environments, their governments, differing cultures, and sometimes one another as they seek answers in their dystopian worlds. Take a journey through time from a nuclear nightmare of the past to society’s far future beyond Earth with these eleven stories by masters of speculative fiction. Includes stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, K. Tempest Bradford, Rahul Kanakia, Rajan Khanna, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, Malinda Lo, Ellen Oh, Cindy Pon, Greg Van Eekhout, and Daniel H. Wilson. Edited by Tobias Buckell and Joe Monti.

 

ALA–Summer of the Mariposas and Diverse Energies!

- Stacy

Will you be at ALA in Anaheim? So will Guadalupe Garcia McCall, author of Summer of the Mariposas! Guadalupe will be there to celebrate her first book, Under the Mesquite, and its win of the Pura Belpre Author Award, but she’ll also be signing ARCs of Mariposas, so be sure to come by the booth. You can find the schedule on the Lee & Low blog.

Several of the contributors to Diverse Energies will also be at ALA, and though they don’t have a specific signing time, they will be dropping in to sign select copies of the book. Perhaps you might be the lucky one to win a copy in a drawing. And if you just want to read some awesome stories, signed or not, from Ursula K. Le Guin, Paolo Bacigalupi, Daniel H. Wilson, Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, Greg van Eekhout, and more, make sure to stop by and take a look.

And whether or not you’re off to California this weekend, if you’re a reviewer or a librarian and on NetGalley (and if you’re one of those and NOT on NetGalley, check it out) our fall books are now available for you to request for review. Take a look!

Blogger whose cat reviewed Cat Girl says it should be a movie

- Stacy

And I so totally agree. (Here’s the cat’s review.)

Hollywood, are you listening? Dani Alexis also has some pithy thoughts on Cat Girl‘s subtle commentary on celebrity culture:

Behind the on-screen action of Cat Girl’s Day Off is a well-played critique of celebrity movie teen squee culture. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that this book manages to look twice at things like celebrity bloggers, paparazzi mobs, celebrity privacy and lack thereof, our habits of overlooking bad behavior in celebrities we’d never overlook in ordinary folks, and more, without ever once becoming preachy, heavy-handed, or tiresome. It does a particularly good job of exploring teen celebrity movie squee culture. Which would be the lifeblood of a movie version, of course, but which would also ask some good questions about it. And unlike The Hunger Games, it doesn’t require 22 teenagers to die horribly in order to bring the subject up.

I also just realized I haven’t yet posted a real post saying “GO BUY MY BOOKS” for this spring, though in all my linkage of reviews and contests on Twitter and Facebook might imply otherwise. For any of you who are not following me at either of those locations (and for those of you who are, who are meaning to but haven’t quite gotten around to it), now’s your chance!

For you e-book aficionados, we’ve got convenience aplenty for you! CAT GIRL’S DAY OFF and VODNIK are both available on Kindle, nook, and Google Books! (We’re still working on iBooks, which takes much longer than the others.) Links below (also note that Google Books has Vodnik and Cat Girl on sale for $7.99, a $2 discount!):

Barnes & Noble nook e-book
Amazon Kindle e-book
Google Play e-book
Google Play e-book

 

Amazon Kindle e-book
Barnes & Noble nook e-book

 

(Sorry for the formatting issues—Wordpress seems to be auto-deleting any returns I put in, and won’t put the pictures where I want them on the page. It’s never done this before. Maybe the captions are interfering with the coding?)

And for you fans of traditional hardcover, what we’d really love is if you were to go to your local bookseller and ask them to order it. Barnes & Noble will gladly order it in for you, and the more people who ask for it ordered in, the more they’ll pay attention. You know who especially pays attention? Independent booksellers. Let’s show them that we as readers value diversity on their shelves! Want reviews to show how great these books are? Share the long list of great reviews at the bottom of the book’s info page on our website (Vodnik) (Cat Girl’s Day Off).

If you’d prefer to order online, you can order directly from Lee & Low, or through a wide variety of your favorite online booksellers. Links below to a wide variety, but if you have a favorite bookseller who’s not linked here I’m sure you’ll be able to find it. Note that BookDepository.com has free shipping for international readers.

Direct from us, the publisher
Direct from us, the publisher
Amazon hardcover
Indiebound hardcover
Indiebound hardcover
Book Depository hardcover
Book Depository hardcover
Barnes & Noble hardcover
Barnes & Noble hardcover
Books a Million hardcover
Books a Million hardcover
Amazon hardcover

Blogging at CBC Diversity this week and last

- Stacy 1 Comment

Though I am frenetically working to get some fall ARCs out to the printer, making me absent here despite having a computer at home again (and friends coming into town last week and this weekend has made me busier than normal at home, too), I was able to write a couple posts over at the CBC Diversity Committee blog this week and last. If you’re interested in getting into publishing but unsure how, check out our series of posts by the committee members on How I Got into Publishing. Looking for a good book? Take a look at Books that Changed My Life and our Book Spotlight. And don’t forget that at the end of the month, the Highlights Foundation workshop Creating an Authentic Cultural Voice is coming up quickly!

How a book gets a cover, the prequel

- Stacy 5 Comments

Over on the Lee & Low blog this week and next, the designer of Vodnik—Isaac Stewart*—and I are discussing the design process of the book. What you see over there is very similar to the process I have with most designers. The designer reads the book and provides some concepts based on the things I’ve said I’d like to see, and what I tell him or her takes into account the author’s suggestions as well.

What I didn’t get into over there is what I do before that process begins, to think about what *I* want. Sometimes I have a very clear idea of what I’d like to see on a cover, or the author has such good suggestions that I just tell the designer, “Let’s try something like that!” And when the designer comes back with concepts (which we’re going to cover next week), often what they come up with is so much better than I could have thought up on my own that it sparks ideas that meld into something entirely new (again, see what we’ll be talking about next week for more on that part of the process).

But when I don’t have a clear idea of what I want, I tend to do something similar to what I hear writers do as they brainstorm: stare into space and appear as if I’m not working. I also take trips to the bookstore and collect covers I find intriguing for one reason or another in a Pinterest board (which isn’t very big yet, as I’ve just started doing this). The books on the board may or may not end up being used as inspiration when I talk to a designer eventually, but just thinking about type, images, and what stands out to me on a shelf and how these covers interact with each other helps me to think about what I’d like to see when we apply those ideas to the particular book I’m working on.

Then I come back to the office and I start rifling through my own bookshelves.

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I pull out a bunch of books whose covers are interesting (some interesting in better ways than others, but this is all part of my process, thinking about what’s popular, what stands out, what is overdone, what I still love after several years, etc.). Then I sit and stare at them some more.

And eventually I come up with a few covers that I think will help the designer if I say, “Here are some key concepts I’m looking for, and here are some covers that I think stand out.” Then the designer will usually come back with something that takes those thoughts into consideration yet still completely blows me away. And that’s the most interesting part of the process, so stay tuned for next week’s post on the Lee & Low blog.

 

*Fun fact: Isaac is also Aprilynne Pike’s brother-in-law.

Update: handouts

- Stacy

Just wanted to let everyone know: if you’re waiting on me to email you a handout, can you remind me in about a week or two? My home laptop has finally given up the ghost, so I’m without a computer at home for at least the next week or two, and that’s where the last version of the handout lives (backed up on the external hard drive, thankfully). I’m also moving this weekend, so in general it’s kind of nuts right now, but once the computer is back I’ll be glad to share it with you. In the meantime, feel free to browse the “diversity” tag on this site, which will give you many of the same resources, or check out the SCBWI roundup link from a few posts back, in which I linked to the book I discussed on Deep Culture.

LTUE through a cold-fogged lens

- Stacy 10 Comments

As those who went to LTUE can attest, it seems that I caught a bad cold either on the plane or on the moment my foot touched Utah soil, and I was a little bit out of it during the con. But even so, I had a great time, and got to catch up with a lot of old friends, meet new people, and even sit down with some writers I might work with someday. Hopefully I didn’t give them a cold while I was at it.

Normally I’d give a more complete run-down, but others might remember it more clearly than I could due to the fog of this cold, which I’m still getting over. I had the worst time remembering people’s names—I even blanked on the names of long-time friends. 🙁 Sorry, guys! You know I really love you, but names aren’t my forte even when I’m thinking straight, and this week it was very hard to think straight.

I was able to think straight on my panels at least (though with moments of “you go ahead, I forgot what I was going to say”), and my Writing Cross-Culturally presentation was both well-attended (wow, standing room only!) and included attendees who had some great questions. For those who have come to this blog looking for the questions we discussed at the end of class, go to my SCBWI wrap-up, where I summarized those same questions. Also, if you didn’t get the handout and were looking for the links and resources I gave out in class, comment or email me with a request for it, and I can get you the Word document. Or perhaps I can just post it here, but later, once I’ve caught up on all I missed when I was out of the office.