picture book and middle-grade author
I’ve always thought owning picture books is like having my own collection of inexpensive art. So I wanted to alert you that Amazon is currently selling my dear Over in the Wetlands for only $7.00 — that’s a savings of $10.99 or 61% (Really inexpensive art).
If you’ve enjoyed this book, I hope you might share this with a fellow reader. If you haven’t yet read it, now’s the time to consider getting your own copy.
Enjoy!
The Classroom Bookshelf has just published an incredible post about Over in the Wetlands that I wanted to pass on. You can click through to read an overview of the book and ten Teaching Ideas and Invitations for readers K-8.
So much to love.
First, as a former upper elementary and middle school teacher, I am so pleased to see others actively using picture books with older children. Second, these lesson ideas cover a number of disciplines, from art to science to literature to geography. There are a couple of other picture book suggestions that parallel nicely with Wetlands as well as a number of website resources.
And don’t forget the Over in the Wetlands Discussion Guide and Activity Sheets Random House Children’s Books produced for the book.
Click through to read The Classroom Bookshelf’s post.
Part of my month-long writing-free vacation was spent with these lovelies.* Like I did with May B., I collected addresses in dribs and drabs over the last year, waiting until I had a stretch of time to devote to stamping, labeling, and writing.
On 699 postcards. For real.
While it isn’t the 1,662 I sent out for May B., it was still a pretty big commitment, one that I found surprisingly satisfying.
You’ve probably heard the rate of return on direct mailings falls somewhere between 1/2 and 2 percent. Pretty dismal and probably not worth the effort, right? For me, the process has become a ritual where I can exert the tiniest bit of control over the unwieldy and unpredictable experience of releasing a book into the world.
Because the books I write are largely sold to the school and library market, that’s where I focus. I had graphic designer Sierra Fong create two postcards for my mailings this time around, one meant to introduce Over in the Wetlands to the schools and libraries of the Gulf Coast, and another to share both Wetlands and Blue Birds with New Mexico schools and libraries.
Here’s what’s happened since the postcards went out: I have had a handful of teachers email me after receiving the card. My sales for both of these books have increased slightly in the last few weeks.** I’ve gotten more website hits from the areas I’ve targeted. And I’ve been invited to speak at Mosquero Elementary School, a K-6 school of 22 students in Mosquero, NM (population 93). Seeing young readers in corners of my state I’ve never visited is pretty much the best thing out there.
While I’ll never know the actual results of the mailing, every postcard was a chance to directly tell a teacher or librarian about something I believe in, and in this age of quick and impersonal blasts of information, it felt significant, important even. However small the return, my efforts to match books with readers has left a mark, perhaps in ways I’ll never know.
Which is exactly how this publication thing works, anyway.
*Points to the person who catches the typo. My son spotted it immediately!
**Penguin Random House has a website called Author Portal where sales can be tracked, using numbers from Nieslen BookScan. Many, many bookstores don’t report sales, and few, if any, schools or libraries do. Until statements come in months from now, it’s really impossible to know true numbers, but the BookScan stats are a start.