A Dose of Vitamin E (for Emma)

What a great weekend! The Route 19 Writers invited Emma Dryden of DrydenBks to come work with us and critique our work. And boy, did she! In this and future blogs, we’ll share some of what we learned from Emma. But first we want to share some pictures and give you an idea of how much info, fun and food 11 writers and one editor can cram into a weekend.

 

This is Emma. In every single picture taken of Emma, she’s talking with her hands. Cynthia does that, too. Wonder what that means  . . .

 

We gathered on Friday night at Judy’s house for a salmon dinner, conversation and the first critiques. Emma reviewed the synopsis and first 10 pages for two novels, both YA contemporaries. While we are a darn good writers group that provides supportive, constructive but kind criticism for each other, it was so helpful to have a seasoned pro arrive and nudge us to work harder and smarter.

Emma has edited nearly five-hundred books for children and young readers. She understands the challenges of writers who want to create great, compelling books for children and young adults. But before a writer can reach an audience, she/he has to get published. Emma helped us step back and ask ourselves some basic questions – who is your audience for this book? Do toddlers want to see a book with a little baby main character or do they prefer to see toddlers like themselves? Or if your characters are graduating from high school you'll be losing some of the YA high school audience and venturing into NA (new adult). Is that who you want to reach? 

Basic writer/craft topics were also addressed. Even though our group boasts published authors and fairly advanced writing, Emma informed us that we were missing the mark on synopsis writing. Oops!

E Tip #1: A synopsis is not a pitch, a tease or an outline – it’s meant to communicate your main character’s emotional journey – their want – and major plot points. Don’t just jam in a bunch of details about time and place. And you can’t forget to put the category (picture book, YA fantasy) and word count in the upper right hand corner.

 

On Saturday, Miss Kitty hosted all of us at her house. She read us a book to get us in the right mood. We had a fab lunch after a morning of reviews. We finished up crits in the late afternoon despite bombarding Emma with questions all day. One of our poets is considering getting into self-publishing so Emma pointed out pros and cons about that route vs. traditional publishing.

 

Coriander kept Emma’s seat toasty whenever Emma got out of her seat. That’s western Pennsylvania hospitality.

 

This is Miss Kitty capturing the ever present Stinkbugs that plague western Pennsylvania. They're an odd little bug – harmless, stinky if squashed. Maybe they're writing little stinkbug novels and wanted some tips from Emma, too. Emma assured us that New York has bugs, too. They have cockroaches. Which makes stinkbugs seem sort of okay.

We ended the day over glasses of wine and hanging out at the kitchen table. Having Emma there chatting about the market and social networking do’s and don’ts felt totally comfortable. It felt like all of us had made a great new friend.

E Tip #2: Quit stalling. Get a website. Get a Facebook. Follow Tweets from your favorite agents. It’s called social networking for a reason - be social and network!

Thanks for a great weekend, Emma.

 

If your writers group is ready to get nudged to the next level and would like to talk to Emma for a dose of Vitamin E, she can be reached through her website .

 by Jenny Ramaley

 

Textbook Evolution?

Have you ever leafed through your child’s textbook and sympathized with them? I’m sure the experience varies from student to student, but for those of us to who don’t find it easy to stay focused, textbooks can represent a black hole of frustration. In short, they message something contrary to excitement in learning.

They’ve improved since my days in school. And I’m not really faulting the textbook industry. After all, they’ve been limited by a one dimensional format, didactic and inert. I’ve always been endlessly distracted by sound and movement. Put me in a quiet room with no other living thing and I might have a chance at success in comprehending. But that isn’t the nature of the classroom, or even home. We live with other people who move around, talk on the phone, watch television. To many, that movement and those noises are invariably more interesting than the static black print before them that is supposed to teach.

My interest was pricked when the announcement was made last month introducing Apples iBook Author application, a program for designing multimedia, interactive textbooks. You can drag and drop almost anything you have access to. One of the major limitations--you need a MAC (OS X), and only iPad users have access to the textbooks. But I happen to own a MAC, and allegedly 25 million or so iPads have sold, so my curiosity has potential. They’ve partnered with the three biggies in the industry, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin and McGraw Hill. This is no small potatoes. I can imagine the process of building a textbook to be quite exciting and creative with the ability to utilize videos, photos, and 3 D diagrams. The user can highlight, take notes and generate flashcards. After building it, you simply upload to the iBookstore. Somehow, it goes through a review process. (hmmmm, I’m curious as to how this works and who performs them) And then, like mainstream publishing, the company gets a cut of sales and has exclusivity to the product.

Audrey Watters, in a Mind/Shift article regarding the Apple announcement, stated “Considering the involvement of the three largest education publishers — a group that currently controls 90% of the textbook market — I don’t think we can pronounce the textbook industry “digitally disrupted.” Maybe not, for the time being. But it’s just the beginning. We will keep moving toward a major shift in teaching techniques. We have to. We can’t go backwards with technology.

I submitted to McGraw Hill in 2006. They replied that my approach had merit and would maybe fit into their line in “the future” Well, this is that future, and I don’t need to wait for their acceptance any longer. That’s pretty exciting. And if we just imagine that of the 25 million iPads sold, 20% is for use by children (I think I'm being conservative), and of those 5,000,000 children, a mere 1% would purchase my iBook, that’s 50,000 books sold. I would say that’s a better chance than waiting for “the future”.

Submitted by Fran McDowell