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More Publishing News: Chronicle...

From today's Publisher's Lunch:

"At Chronicle's children's division, Julie Romeis has been hired as editor, managing a list of titles including middle grade and young adult fiction. She was an editor at Bloomsbury, and is relocating to San Francisco to start next month. Peter Bohan will join the unit as children's marketing manager. He was marketing and promotions manager at Workman."

Here's the CWIM listing for Chronicle (since I'm in a listing posting mood today):


CHRONICLE BOOKS
680 Second St. San Francisco CA 94107. (415)537-4400. Fax: (415)537-4415. Web site: www.chroniclekids.com. Book publisher. Acquisitions: Victoria Rock, associate publisher, children's books. Publishes 50-60 (both fiction and nonfiction) books/year; 5-10% middle readers/year; young adult nonfiction titles/year. 10-25% of books by first-time authors; 20-40% of books from agented writers.
Fiction Picture books, young readers, middle readers: "We are open to a very wide range of topics." Young adults: "We are interested in young adult projects, and do not have specific limitations on subject matter." Recently published Emily's Balloon, by Komako Sakai (ages 2-6, picture book); Ivy and Bean, by Annie Barrows, illustrated by Sophie Blackall (ages 6-10, chapter book).
Nonfiction Picture books, young readers, middle readers, young adults: "We are open to a very wide range of topics." Recently published An Egg Is Quiet, by Dianna Hutts Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long (ages 4-10, picture book); Tour America, by Diane Siebert, illustrated by Stephen Johnson (ages 7-12, picture book).
How to Contact/Writers Fiction/nonfiction: Submit complete ms (picture books); submit outline/synopsis and 3 sample chapters (for older readers). Responds to queries in 1 month; will not respond to submissions unless interested. Publishes a book 1-3 years after acceptance. Will consider simultaneous submissions, as long as they are marked "multiple submissions." Will not consider submissions by fax, e-mail or disk. Do not include SASE; do not send original materials. No submissions will be returned; to confirm receipt, include a SASP.
Illustration Works with 40-50 illustrators/year. Wants "unusual art, graphically strong, something that will stand out on the shelves. Fine art, not mass market." Reviews ms/illustration packages from artists. "Indicate if project must be considered jointly, or if editor may consider text and art separately." Illustrations only: Submit samples of artist's work (not necessarily from book, but in the envisioned style). Slides, tearsheets and color photocopies OK. (No original art.) Dummies helpful. Resume helpful. Samples suited to our needs are filed for future reference. Samples not suited to our needs will be recycled. Queries and project proposals responded to in same time frame as author query/proposals."
Photography Purchases photos from freelancers. Works on assignment only.
Terms Generally pays authors in royalties based on retail price, "though we do occasionally work on a flat fee basis." Advance varies. Illustrators paid royalty based on retail price or flat fee. Sends proofs to authors and illustrators. Book catalog for 9 x 12 SAE and 8 first-class stamps; ms guidelines for #10 SASE.
Tips "Chronicle Books publishes an eclectic mixture of traditional and innovative children's books. We are interested in taking on projects that have a unique bent to them-be it subject matter, writing style, or illustrative technique. As a small list, we are looking for books that will lend us a distinctive flavor. Primarily we are interested in fiction and nonfiction picture books for children ages infant-8 years, and nonfiction books for children ages 8-12 years. We are also interested in developing a middle grade/YA fiction program, and are looking for literary fiction that deals with relevant issues. Our sales reps are witnessing a resistance to alphabet books. And the market has become increasingly competitive. The '80s boom in children's publishing has passed, and the market is demanding high-quality books that work on many different levels."

I knew something was up when I got an email from the President of the Vermont Library Association this morning saying “Wow nice podcast!”

I was pretty sure she wasn’t referring to the MetaFilter Podcast — though those are quite nice — so I emailed her back asking wtf as politely as I could. That’s how I learned that the interview I did with the Chronicle of Higher Education from a hotel room in Halifax (setting the alarm so I could be alert at 9:30, do I sound like I just woke up?) was part of the CHE podcast and was excerpted, along with the succinct commentary from many other “young librarians” (oh gosh, I laugh and laugh) including my pal Casey and other names you’ll recognize. I’m not entirely sure how to link to CHE articles for non-subscribers, but you can maybe see the article and the amusing iphone photo here. Apologies, as always, for swearing.

by Laurie Rosenwald Blue Apple / Chronicle Books 2007 This is one of those books that reviews best visually. Here's the front and back cover spread. This genius of a mess of a color concept book revels in the playfulness of its rhythm and the perfect child-like roughness of its collage work. I'll grant, this book won't be for everyone, especially those who might

New Chapter in the Chronicle/Blurb Story...

You may have seen it reported recently that Chronicle Books was forming a partnership with print-on-demand publisher Blurb.com in which Chronicle would refer writers to the service and in turn receive a fee from Blurb.

Now Publishers Lunch quotes Sarah Williams at Chronicle saying that information cited in Newsweek was not correct: "Chronicle Books will not receive a referral fee for recommending Blurb.com to aspiring authors or artists," she said.

She goes on to say: "Chronicle will provide a landing page from our website to which our editors may refer authors or artists whose works they feel are a good match for Blurb.com. For their
part, Blurb.com will offer us discoveries they might make in terms of online trends, notably how consumers are finding books online. There are many self-publishing options in the marketplace, though far fewer for illustrated book authors and artists. As an independent illustrated book publisher in San Francisco, Chronicle Books felt an affinity for the locally-based
Blurb.com and the quality of the product it is offering the public."

We can't help but wonder here at the Writer's Digest Books office whether Newsweek got it wrong or if Chronicle changed the terms of their partnership after the fact due to reactions of the writing/publishing world. It makes me uneasy to think that a reputable publisher like Chronicle would enter into such a deal, referring rejected writers to a self-publishing outlet for a fee. Even without the fee it still feels a icky.

I'm both feeling ill AND extraordinarily busy today, dear readers, so no time for the thougtful review I was hoping for. Instead, here's some of what I've got coming up -- maybe I'll see you around...

I'm headed to the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA) trade show in Providence on Friday, where I've been invited to speak on an ABA panel titled "Doing Digital Right." Robert Gray of Fresh Eyes and Shelf Awareness and Heather Gain of Harvard Bookstore will be my illustrious co-panelists, and the inimitable Len Vlahos is moderating; it's at 3:00 PM.

Next, of course, is the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association trade show (or NAIBA-Con) in Baltimore -- hooray! On Sunday, October 14, I'll be joining Robert Gray (again) and Felicia Sullivan on a panel tentatively titled "Getting the Most out of the Internet" at 3:45 PM. Hope to see you there!

Then, closer to home, I'm honored to participate in the Literary Writers Conference of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses here in New York. On Saturday, November 10, at 2:30 pm, I'll be one of speakers on a panel titled "The Power of Blogging". Stop by if you're in the neighborhood. (Incidentally, the program is the first time I've ever seen my name alphabetized under the ALP's last name...it comes right before Ishmael Beah. Kind of exciting!)

Let me know if I can hope to see you at any of these events!

by Amy Krause Rosenthal illustrated by Jen Corace Chronicle 2005 Little Pea must eat his candy if he wants to grow up to be big and strong. More importantly, he must eat his candy if he wants his dessert: spinach. This wisp of a twist on the trials of dinnertime, while cute, feels empty. In order to flesh out the punchline we are shown the daily life of Little Pea and his family, and then

Despite the purported summer doldrums, July was a busy month as booksellers came together for pooling our collective brains and planning for the future. My own brain is a bit fuzzy today as I seem to have contracted an icky summer cold, but I'll do my best to give you the scoop on the two meetings I attended this month.

Wednesday, July 11: American Booksellers Association Digital Task Force (ABA-DTF)
Participants:
* Beck Anderson (Anderson’s Bookshops – Naperville, IL)
* Tom Campbell (Regulator Bookshop – Durham, NC)
* Dan Cullen (Director Information Department – American Booksellers Assoc.)
* Avin Domnitz (CEO – American Booksellers Assoc.)
* Kelly Justice (Fountain Bookstore – Richmond, VA)
* Russ Lawrence (Chapter One Books – Hamilton, MT)
* Ricky Leung (Technical Lead – BookSense.com)
* Madeline MacIntosh (Senior VP and Publisher, Random House Audio Group)
* Jessica Stockon (McNally Robinson – New York, NY)
* Neil Strandberg (Tattered Cover – Denver, CO)
* Oren Teicher (COO – American Booksellers Assoc.)
* Len Vlahos (Director BookSense.com & Education – American Booksellers Assoc.)
* Dave Weich (Powells.com – Portland, OR)
* Jeff Wexler (IT Director – American Booksellers Assoc.)
* Eric Wilska (The Book Loft – Great Barrington, MA)

Thank goodness for emailed agendas -- while all of these booksellers and ABA staffers were insightful and fascinating, there's no way I would have remembered their names and associations without Len's helpful briefing. The Digital Task Force is a rotating group of booksellers and publishing folks convened occasionally by the ABA to address issues of emerging technology and how they relate to our industry -- and perhaps most importantly, to make sure independent booksellers have a seat at the table as the nature of the book changes in the internet age.

The meeting took place in the ABA offices in Tarrytown, New York, around a conference table littered with laptops, a Sony e-reader, and a projector to look at web pages on a large movie screen. Ideas were shared, theories were floated, experiences were analyzed, and jokes were made (the most memorable was one bookseller's suggestion that perhaps we needed to form a "Wake The F*** Up Task Force" for our still occasionally tech-phobic industry). I was especially fascinated by Eric Wilska's experience with an InstaBook machine, much like the Espresso Book Machine, which has added to his bottom line by printing books as a service and creating copies of out of print, public domain books that have a market in his region but are beneath the notice of any publishing company. It's just one of many opportunities indie bookstores have to take advantage of the redistribution of resources that the digital age portends, though of course these changes mean many challenges as well. The ABA, in my opinion and based on this meeting, is doing an excellent job of both keeping on top of developments in the tech world, and listening to its membership as they express how they think resources should be allocated in response.

We came up with a list of priorities, including bookseller education, BookSense developments, working with social networking sites (like Shelfari), monitoring trends in e-books, and more. I'm sure I'll be writing more about all these issues in future, and I'm looking forward to how they play out in the world of bookselling. Len Vlahos, who ran the meeting, is freshly married as of yesterday (CONGRATULATIONS!!), but he managed to contribute to a great rundown of the meeting for this article about the DTF in Bookselling This Week -- check it out for more details.

Monday, July 30: New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Board of Directors Meeting
Participants:
Joe Drabyak, President (Chester County Book Company, West Chest, PA)
Lucy Kogler, Vice President (Talking Leaves Inc., Buffalo, NY)
Pat Kutz, Secretary/Treasurer (Lift Bridge Book Shop, Brockport, NY)
Lynn Gonchar, Past President (Tudor Bookshop & Cafe, Kingston, PA)
Betty Bennett (Bennett Books, Wyckoff, NJ)
Carla Cohen (Politics & Prose, Washington, DC)
Paul Emberley (Walck Sales & Marketing, Wayne, PA)
Harvey Finkel (Clinton Bookshop, Clinton, NJ)
Tim Hepp (Simon & Schuster, Ardmore, PA)
Rob Stahl (Colgate University Bookstore)
Jessica Stockton Bagnulo (McNally Robinson Booksellers, New York, NY)
Eileen Dengler, Executive Director (NAIBA, Westbury, NY)

The board of our regional booksellers association met in the offices of Random House in New York (thanks again to RH for the use of the Dr. Seuss meeting room, and a few moments of wistful thinking about what it might have been like to end up on the publishing side of things in this posh, beautiful office, until I came to my senses.) There were some goodbyes (Carla Cohen and Jack Buckley of 9th Street Books in Wilmington, DE are leaving the board after much faithful service) and some hellos (we discussed nominations [secret, of course] for the next slate of board members, and it was my first meeting with my new last name, so there was some good natured teasing from my seniors on the board, as well as a David Mitchell-themed wedding gift).

Mostly, we talked about (what I like to call) NAIBA-Con: the NAIBA Fall Conference being held in Baltimore October 14 and 15. We still have a bit of evangelizing to do in bringing everyone in the industry around to the new format for the show: streamlined and scaled down, with an increased focus on publishers pitching the best of their list to help booksellers sell, and practical education for booksellers to improve their stores. But as the model is spreading to other regions across the country, excitement is running high about the potential for the new conference. Loads of fabulous regional authors are lined up for the Moveable Feast and other aspects of the show, the educational panels are looking stellar, awards for authors and others are in the works, and Eileen is (as always) working out the finest details for our weekend at the Baltimore Sheraton. Keep your eyes on the mailbox for the conference registration materials, which will be showing up soon.

I'm off to gargle with salt water again -- back with the first of the Brooklyn Lit Life interviews on Friday!

Did I mention we are suffering under summer's mandate to slow down and enjoy the view, here at IAG? I have spent the past three weeks in hectic report-writing and budget-reconciling land, but have emerged relatively unscathed now that both have been submitted to higher powers.

I have been attending to civic matters, and busy catching up on correspondence. One of which was a message from (gulp) more than two weeks ago about an interesting blog topic. I flagged it at the time and now am finally returning to it.

Andy suggested it from a Chronicle article about Web 2.0/3.0 methods of establishing relevance and authority. Here the draft list the author, Michael Jensen, presented that Andy circulated as brain food with commentary:

• Prestige of the publisher (if any).
• Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
• Prestige of commenters and other participants.
• Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
• Raw links to the document.
• Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
• Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
• Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
• Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status?
• Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
• Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s).
• Significance of author's other work.
• Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
• Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
• Length of time a document has existed.
• Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
• Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

both by Susan Goldman Rubin
Chronicle 2007

Board books are funny things. On the one hand they make perfect sense if you are trying to get kids used to the idea of books and reading at a very early age. They have sturdy coated cardboard pages that withstand throwing, food spills and the gnawing and chewing that comes from young pups.

But board books didn't always exist. They were invented, much like the term teenager was invented to suggest a difference between child and adult, probably more like the way the tween demographic was identified by markers and advertisers in order to better capture income from a growing consumer demographic. Somewhere in between the social science of presenting kids books at the earliest possible age and the capitalist goal to build a loyalty and brand recognition from the cradle, that is soupy mire from which board books arise.

Board books are not evil but there is a whole lot of cute mixed in with the good. It saddens me, for example, that publishers make board book versions of classic picture books, often abridging texts or images to fit the format. And there are those books that have "cute" spred all over their intents, proving that their true market is parents and grandparents for whom the book is going to have a greater appeal; they aren't buying for the child so much as they're hoping to impress their opinion of what is cute onto soft minds.

But sometimes people get that a board book can be more, and here we have two examples. Author Goldman presents classic Andy Warhol illustrations from the 1950's and 60's with short bits of rhyming text that are linked to their predominant colors. For those who only know Warhol's iconic factory-produced screenprints these fresh ink and watercolor illustrations may prove that, when he wanted to be, Andy was a talented artist. Featuring a typical assortment of animals -- cat, butterfly, lion, monkey, &c. -- Rubin fuses the color concept board book with a mini primer on a modern art master.

In the Thiebaud book Rubin offers us some of the artist's food paintings with a counting rhyme. That Thiebaud's paintings are done in a very thick application that makes them look as if they'd been composed with cake frosting is an added benefit. Consisting mostly of deserts -- pie, ice cream cones, cupcakes, candied apples -- the fact that they are well-known paintings from a still-living master is almost completely overshadowed by their tempting yumminess. Yes, I said that. The counting aspect of this book is practically lost but not in a bad way. It feels more a casual counting book, among a collection of food illustrations that, oh, just happen to be famous paintings hanging in museums.

Yes, okay, so these books are intended to appeal to adults on some level (did I not say yumminess?) but for those, parent and child alike, who might not be as familiar with these artists or their works, what a delightful little introduction. I noticed that there's no modern art master alphabet book from Chronicle but I hope they're considering it. In fact, I think this sort of art history could make for a very good series of board books.

After all, if Major League Baseball can produce board books (building that brand/team loyalty in the cradle again) then why not do more of the same for the arts and sciences? Just a thought.

A great box of new nonfiction books arrived from Chronicle the other day. Every one is great and I have been dying to share them with you. I'll try to share one a day this week.

PENGUINS, PENGUINS, EVERYWHERE by Bob Barner is a fun nonfiction picture book for young readers. The book is small--perfect for tiny hands. The text is rhyming and is written in a way that almost dances across each page. The illustrations are bright colored and very inviting. Each page tells the reader something interesting about penguins. There are two great spreads at the end of the book that add to the reasons why I love it. There is a "Penguin Puzzler" with illustrated questions and answers about penguin. The last page is the "Penguin Parade" which shows illustrations of 17 different penguins along with their names, place where they live and size. Good nonfiction books for young readers are sometimes hard to find. Because of the last 2 spreads, this book can grow with young children.