(from the National Library of Ireland on The Commons. We recommend a similar treatment for your own target audience as this target is receiving; skill with a bow and arrow is actually sometime required of all our authors. We do not provide lessons.) What is a ‘target audience’? What that term refers to is to Read the Rest…
(This is my cat Persephone. She knows all about luxury problems, despite not being a cartoonist.) Congratulations! You’ve finished your first published book. It’s been edited, copyedited, proofread, corrected, designed, approved, proofed, printed, bound, shipped, warehoused, marketed, sold into stores, and finally… YOUR BOOK IS OUT! Now is the time for you to be busting Read the Rest…
. . . and then we didn’t write you back. (photo from the US National Archives. This bird is just as alone as you are, in your e-mail-writing solitude. Perhaps you can keep each other company.) WHY??!! (a list of ten possible reasons) 1. Your e-mail is requiring some thought. After we have had time Read the Rest…
(photo from the LSE Library. These are not advance books, just the regular kind.) We get a lot of questions about advance books, so here’s some information about how they work! When we’re done with a book, the files go off to the printer, where they are made into books. But — of course those Read the Rest…
(photo from The Smithsonian. This is a general rather than a specifically problematic example of rudeness.) One of our favorite questions that we got at NYCC this past week was: When you’re considering acquiring a project, do you care whether the author of the project is rude to you? Let’s think about this in terms Read the Rest…
(a post in which we compare apples and . . . other apples that don’t have a matte finish. There’s a difference, we swear) Sometimes the Scholastic Book Clubs pick up copies of our books for their book clubs and publish their own editions for them (after we sign some kind of licensing contract with Read the Rest…
(photo from NASA. This is a rocket launch, not a book launch. Obviously. You could still have a party for it if you wanted, though.) Sometimes when books come out, people are so excited that they have parties! (Okay — typically the ‘people’ I mention so elliptically in the previous sentence are us, because we’re Read the Rest…
(from the London School of Economics. I know who neither of these people are, but they are clearly the people who make the decisions about publication dates everywhere in the world. You can tell by their serious expressions.) “Dear Author, your book has a publication date! It officially comes out on October 2nd!” What does Read the Rest…
(photo from the Library of Congress. Our meetings have a much higher ratio of women to men. Also no one ever wears bow ties, to our great dismay.) How do books get acquired at First Second? What will happen to a manuscript after you send it to us? STEP ONE: Our editor reads the manuscript. Read the Rest…
There’s this thing called Spot UV, or Spot Gloss, or sometimes Spot Varnish. This is the technical term for making part of a matte book cover shiny. Sometimes what people choose to make shiny is the title! Or maybe there’s a central character. Or something! Using Spot UV is a technique that designers apply to Read the Rest…
