(photo from The State Library of New South Wales.  Probably if you have your author event here, we will not go, as it is very far away from New York City.  Also it appears that we might need a time-traveling machine, which we unfortunately do not possess.)

So, your book is coming out in the very near future and you are like, ‘clearly there should be celebration!’ and of course you are correct.  And your local bookstore and/or library seems to be on board as well; you schedule a date and a time.

Now that date’s coming up, and your bookstore/library seems to think that you’re totally on top of it and know what you should be doing for that hour-and-a-half of time that you’ll be — gulp — talking in front of a whole room of people.  What should you do?

Here are five basic options to think about when you’ve got an author event staring your calendar in the face.

1. Have a party.

This might actually be the most complicated of the options, though it sounds like the easiest.  There are just so many things to consider — and so much that you, personally, have to provide.  Should there be refreshments?  Music?  Games & activities?  What is the likely outcome of champagne + pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey?

However, on the plus side, you’ll only have to personally say a few words — thanks for coming, please check out and buy copies of my exciting new book.

2. Do a reading.

Worried about coming up with an hour long speech?  That’s so many words!  Luckily, your book is full of words, and you have already come up with them, so sometimes the easiest option is to just read them aloud, then take questions and sign books.

Graphic Novel Caveat: If you’re a graphic novelist and doing a reading, you may also have to put together a powerpoint presentation, recruit people from the audience to help do the voices, and make very very sure the store/library you’re reading at has a projector.

3. Organize a panel

If you don’t like to be the center of attention, maybe recruiting some other people for your author event would help!  You can all have a discussion about the general subject of how awesome you all are.  Or, you know, some other topic, like how much you all like Tolkien.

This one does take some work, because a typical panel tends to have four people plus a moderator, and you have to make sure that they can all come.  On the plus side, if you’re worried about attendance, more speakers tends to mean a larger audience!

4. Do a talk.

I’m always fascinated when people do book events and instead of talking about their book, they talk for an hour about ‘The Modern Novel’ or something similar.  On the plus side, this means exciting new information that I’m not likely to have heard before even if I’ve gone to another of this author’s events for a previous book.

On the minus side, what if some of the attending audience are not interested in the modern novel?  Also, hour-long educational/inspirational speeches seem like a lot of work.

5. Mix it up.

An hour and a half does seem like really long amount of time to just be doing one thing.  So why not have half an hour of reading, half an hour of a talk (you can discuss the reading! your inspiration! your childhood! your writing technique! etc.), followed by a Q&A with the audience and a signing.

And last: have fun!  Your event is not meant to be a torture-device.

We swear.

(image from The Library of Virginia.  Presumably, reader, this could actually be your local library that you’re trying to get books into!  Though I think by this point it would’ve made the transition from black and white to color.)

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) announced their awards this past week, and some of our books made their Great Graphic Novels for Teens list and their Popular Paperbacks list!  This was an occasion for great joy in the office (we had champagne, or perhaps that was for the other people in our parent company who won a Newbery Honor and a Caldecott Honor) and at the same time we got a question here on our blog about how libraries get books.

So!  Here is how our books get into libraries.

The first thing to say here is, if you’re a reader and go to your local library, your opinion matters!  Many libraries have a book buyer on staff who selects the titles that are bought for the library.  One of their first priorities is, what are the people who are actually using the library reading?  What’s being checked out?  What’s popular?

If you would like your library to carry specific books, sometimes this can be as easy as asking your librarian for them.  If that doesn’t work, ask your friends who have similar reading tastes to request those specific books from the librarians as well.  Your library may also have a Friends of the Library association that does volunteer work to support the library — organizing book sales of discarded or donated books, doing fundraising, doing outreach, etc.  Talk to them — frequently they have a voice in the purchasing decisions at the library — or at least in how the money they raise in fundraising and book sales gets used.  The power in libraries is often in the hands of The People, and the good thing about The People is that you, O Graphic Novel Reader, are one of them!

Here at First Second, we do a lot of specific outreach to librarians, because we know that sometimes you are too tired/hungry/aquamarine/upside-down to accurately request our books from the library.  As with everything, the main task here is getting information about what we’re publishing (and how awesome it is) to the librarians.  We do that in a variety of ways.

We go to librarian conventions.  With our parent companies MacKids and Macmillan, First Second has a presence at around five library conferences a year.  We exhibit, have breakfasts, show upcoming books, distribute catalogs, and make sure as many librarians as we can pin down know how wonderful our upcoming books are!

We talk to librarians and send them books.  We have an extensive mail and e-mail list of librarian contacts who buy books for their library system (and do other cool librarian-related things).  We keep in regular contact with them by sending them e-mails about what’s coming up from First Second and books that fit their age category interest.  That way, they know what to buy.

We work with professional publications that specifically reach librarians to review and promote our books.  We send review copies to publications like SLJ, LJ, The Horn Book, PW, VOYA, etc. that are read by librarians.  We also work with librarian bloggers and librarian websites to feature our books and our authors (and sometimes our company!).  That way, our books are vouched for in the librarian community by some of the finest librarians in the industry.  Bonus points for us!

We work with award committees for librarian awards to make sure our books are on their radar.  Award lists are another way that books are vouched for by the finest librarians in the industry, so we make sure that committee members receive copies of our books and that we tell them why they are super-awesome.

We have local librarians over to our offices to tell them about our upcoming books.  It’s like a party!  With lots of conversation about books!  (It’s actually more like a presentation than a party, but there are still cookies.)

The library market is a pretty important market for us — it’s where a lot of kids read their first books, and it’s where people who can’t necessarily afford to buy every book that crosses their path can find new books to read.  We’re very pleased to be recognized in this year’s YALSA awards and reach new libraries — and librarians — that way!

Fourteen hours in a jet plane will get you a sore butt all the way from First Second in NYC to New Delhi, India, where the third annual Comic Con India is about to take place.

Reader, I boarded that jet plane.

Comic Con India has a bunch of terrific publishers at their show this year, including several from English-speaking countries: First Second, Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics, Random House, SelfMadeHero, and Top Cow.

Every country has its own comics tradition, just as every country has its own literary or music tradition. I can’t wait to see what comics in India are all about. Stay tuned! I’ll report back soon.

Books have many parts.  Here are some of them.

Hardcover

(This is Baby’s in Black.)

Book Jacket

(This is the jacket for the hardcover Red Handed with the book taken out.)

Paperback

(This is Poseidon.)

Cloth Binding

(This is American Born Chinese.  You can tell it’s a cloth binding because you can see the texture of the cloth — this is one of the editions we did of this book.)

Paper Over Board Hardcover

(This is Anya’s Ghost.  POB hardcovers don’t have jackets — their covers are printed right on the hard cover boards.)

French Flaps

(This is Relish.  The french flaps parts of this picture are the part with the croissants in the front and the part with the author photo and bio in the back.  They’re like the flaps of the book jacket but part of the cover.)

Endpapers

(This is Primates.  The endpapers are the green parts — the paper pasted to the hard cover boards and to the first page of the book.)

Signatures

(This is Odd Duck.  You can see that this book has four signatures — they’re the pages grouped together at the spine of the book.  Those are sewn into the book’s spine.)

Spot Gloss

(This is Broxo.  The spot gloss is on the sword; see how it looks reflect-y?)

Foil Stamp

(This is Foiled.  The foil is on the title; it’s shinier in real life — unfortunately foil is moderately difficult to photograph.)

Gilt Edge

(This is Ball Peen Hammer.  This photo is the top view — the edges of each page are black and shiny.)

Blind Stamp

(This is Sailor Twain.  This is the cover, after you’ve taken off the jacket; there’s a mermaid stamped into the hard cover boards of the book.)

Deckled Edge

(This is Three Shadows.  The edges of the paper are all cut at different lengths.)

In Ye Old Olden Days, printers used to use many, many more cool effects on books (actual gilt on the edges! leather stamping! etc.) that we tend not to use a lot in the modern day or here at First Second.  Maybe someday. . . .

Maxwell Perkins: Author’s Champion, Author’s Challenge

Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947) is perhaps the most famous book editor of the 20th century. He edited for 37 years at Charles Scribner & Sons starting in 1910.

It was said Perkins was always kind and courteous, although he never shied from challenging authors, thoughtfully and thoroughly, and thinking long and hard over detail and structure.

There are tales of him struggling with Thomas Wolfe for instance, over nearly every sentence of his debut Look Homeward, Angel and arguing for massive cuts in it.

Perkins had an unparalleled instinct for spotting talent—apparently he signed up Hemingway over the strong objections of the editorial board, and ditto another author called F.Scott Fitzgerald.  With A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby, some would say he was midwife to the Great American Novel.

He also found Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling which won the Pulitzer, and became a perennial bestseller.

What inspires me about Maxwell Perkins is the two-way fight—the editor’s “No Man’s Land,” you might call it: pushing against The House if necessary to champion an author he believed in, but also pushing against the author’s ego, to push him or her to fulfill the promise of their own vision. Some writers who worked with him have said he believed in them more than they believed in themselves.

 ***

Ursula Nordstrom:  A Big Vision of  “Good Books for Bad Children” (her words)

Ursula Nordstrom (1910-1988) edited at Harper & Row from 1940 to 1973. She created the famous Little Golden Books collection and far more than that, she helped open up avenues for a new breed of children’s author.

At a time when much of what passed as children’s books was either vapid or morally didactic, Ursula Nordstrom’s battle cry was to speak to the real inner life of children, and connect with their feelings and imaginations.

She held a high standard, a vision of children’s literature as . . . literature. And into this space she envisioned, many brilliant and daring authors and artists rose up, and forever changed children’s publishing.

To name a few: E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends  and many more household names like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruth Krauss, Charlotte Zolotow, and Arnold Lobel…

For more, read Dear Genius: the Letters of Ursula Nordstrom.

 ***

René Goscinny: Creating a Space for Other Talents to Blossom In

Though he is best remembered as the author of the Asterix series, René Goscinny (1926-1977) was also a prodigious editor, and helped launch many of the luminaries of French bande-dessinée (comics) in the 50s, 60s and 70s in a now legendary comics magazine called Pilote.

Asterix isn’t just a worldwide commercial success…

It’s also an incredible body of work, hilarious, tender, and full of human insight and social commentary which stand the test of time.  This was only one of many series penned by Goscinny, others included Lucky Luke, Yakari, Rubrique-à-Brac with Marcel Gotlib…  The Asterix phenomenon became the financial engine for Pilote Magazine, and through it, helped propel many newcomers who would become greats.

Among the many, many talents Goscinny first showcased are some of the best: Jijé, Morris,  Mœbius/Giraud, Enki Bilal, Jean-Claude Mézières, Jacques Tardi, Philippe Druillet, Marcel Gotlib and more.

Interestingly enough, before all this, Goscinny was said to be hanging around in New York in the mid-fifties with the likes of Harvey Kurtzman, Don Martin, and Mort Drucker at the very inception of Mad Magazine. Something was in the air, he caught it, and brought the germ back to Paris!

A sad footnote: in 1968, as the spirit of counter-culture swept through France, most of the Pilote authors turned on their boss, resenting Goscinny’s own success and accusing him—he in his customary suit and tie—of being “The Man.” He was called to a meeting in the magazine’s office, which he thought was a friendly get-together. Instead he stood before most of the Pilote authors for an angry session of blaming and name-calling. Some of the authors splintered off and created new magazines of their own. Much later, a number of them would say that day was the greatest regret of their life. Goscinny never quite recovered from it, and broke off most of his relationships with comics authors except for René Uderzo.

A brighter footnote: their Asterix series has sold over 250 million copies worldwide—more than Enyd Blyton, Dr Seuss, and Beatrix Potter combined.

For more on him, read the excellent René Goscinny: profession, humoriste by the late Guy Vidal, longtime Pilote editor. (In French, though.)

(photo from the Nantucket Historical Association.  I shudder to think what ‘all the latest novels and magazines’ meant at the time this photo was taken.  It’s entirely possible that all this store carried was Gatsby.)

People occasionally e-mail and call us to tell us that they think we’re awesome (thanks, guys!) and that they want to support us financially by buying books in the way that is the most advantageous for us.  What should they do?  Where should you buy books if you’re just like, “:01, you’re so cool, I want to give you all the money possible from this $15.99 transaction!”

Here’s the thing: there’s not a good answer to this question.

A lot of companies that employ as many people as we do have a direct fulfillment service — a system where people e-mail them and are like, ‘here is money; please send me a book!’ and then they do.  Because we’re part of a giant multinational conglomerate, we don’t do that — if you called our warehouse and asked them to send you a book they wouldn’t laugh at you, because they are too nice for that sort of thing, but they wouldn’t be able to help unless you were a registered corporation looking at placing bulk orders with a minimum monthly quantity.

So we’re equally pleased with you if you buy our books at Barnes & Noble or at your local comics store or your local bookstore or anywhere else you can find them.  Really.  And we probably get about an equal amount of money in any place, once we figure in the shipping costs and other vendor costs.

If think that we’re awesome and want to support us, just buy our books — wherever is most convenient for you.

(Please note: saying ‘you can buy our books anywhere for optimal :01 advantage!’ is not actually the same as saying ‘anywhere you go, you will find books by :01.’  Obviously, we spend a lot of time working with bookstores and comics stores to make sure that our books are as well-represented as they can be as broadly as possible.  But sometimes, bookstores find that their customers are just buying graphic memoir . . . or comics stores have a customer base that’s just buying pamphlet comics and graphic novels for kids.  Etc.  So if you’re going to stores and are unable to find all the books by First Second you want on their shelves, remember that you can always ask the bookseller to order the books; if that doesn’t work, there’s always the internet, which has many sorts of book-buying options.)

When it comes to design, spines don’t often get much credit. People will rant or rave over covers, but it’s pretty rare to hear a “DID YOU SEE THAT BOOK SPINE?!” or “I was going to read that book, but I just couldn’t get over the ugly spine.” The spine is one of the trickiest design elements, such a small amount of space and such a big job. Often times spines are all you see of a book. You can have the greatest cover in the world, but if you have a weak spine, no one is going to notice it on a crowded shelf.

Over the years I’ve become more aware of spines, surrounded by them constantly. I’m pretty sure my office has walls, but there are too many books in the way to confirm it. When I glance quickly the same books pop out at me over and over again. Douglas Wolk’s READING COMICS, the MACHINE OF DEATH Vol. 1 edited by David Malki !, Matthew Bennardo, and Ryan North, the super sparkly UNLOVABLE by Esther Pearl Watson. I even started to buy books just for their spines. The red “creeping detective” spines you see above are gems found at Raconteur Books. Surprisingly, the stunning design comes from two mystery story collections that Reader’s Digest put out. Yup that’s right, Reader’s Digest. Take that all you literary snobs! I like my pretty design in all forms.

Speaking of books you’ve PROBABLY never heard of. There’s this one called WATCHMEN by…some guy…Alex….Adam…eh something like that. I know people always talk about the genius inside, but seriously that spine! So striking, so hard to miss. It’s simple, iconic, using every single millimeter the spine width allows (I can hear my production person, Alexa [no relation to Alan], get nervous just by me writing this.) A spine without much breathing room leaves a lot of room for slight printing mistakes, but the they left JUST the right amount to allow for subtle cover shifts in the binding process. Other spines of note! Matt Kindt’s SUPERSPY with it’s crooked handmade letters always jumps out at me. Those eye-catching stripes on Nicholas Gurewitch’s PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP collection. And HEY LOOK AT THAT! It’s FEYNMAN. FEYNMAN by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick was the first hardcover I ever designed, and when I saw the template for the spine width I practically started break-dancing on my desk. (NOTE: I can’t actually break-dance. DOUBLE NOTE: If my desk had not been so messy I think it would have happened.)  I went with a bold color scheme, teal and orange and red, with Feynman’s own equations working as a wallpaper pattern, floating up from him hard at work.

Since I kept lending my copy to friends who swear they “don’t like comics” (which I just translate to “they’ve never even TRIED to read comics”) I had to head over to Calista’s bookshelves to get a picture of what I consider the most iconic book spine in all of Comic Land.

BLANKETS by Craig Thompson. It’s impossible to miss on a shelf. It’s huge, beautiful, simple in colors but works both the vertical and horizontal planes. The handwritten text invites you into the trees and into the story inside. Also of note on her shelves, the new SCOTT PILGRIM editions compared to the original editions. CLASSIC FEYNMAN, a spine that gets a LOT of text in while still being as charming as Feynman himself. (Is there something about that man that inspires great spines?!) Aaron Renier’s SPIRAL-BOUND—made to look like the side of a spiral notebook, complete with a pencil shoved into the fake metal coils. LOVE. I also marked FUN HOME by Alison Bechdel, which has the most beautiful blue foil. This is an example of a spine that pictures do no justice. You have to walk by it in a room and watch it light up at just the right moment to see how stunning it is.

Every time we sign up a book that’s over 200 pages, yes I will admit I get crazy happy. Sure it’ll mean an extra few weeks of interior work, but it’s all worth it because I GET AN EXTRA .25″ or .5″ of a SPINE!!! WOOO! Larger spine means more possibilities, look at Blankets! If it had been a 124 page paperback it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact, but not all designs work at all widths and JUST having a big spine doesn’t mean you are going to have a great spine. Example: HARRY POTTER BOOK 5, HARRY POTTER AND THE DISAPPEARING SPINE TEXT. (Though I should note, I love you J.K. and that’s totally my favorite of the 7. Awkward puberty for the win!)

Small spines can be amazing as well. As an exercise let’s look at some of our publishing friends: The picture book spines! Picture books, usually 32 pages (occasionally 48-64), have a very limited space for spine art.

Looking at my shelves I squinted my eyes and picked out the first three that jumped out at me: CREEPY CARROTS by Aaron Reynolds and Peter Brown, OLIVIA by Ian Falconer, and Shel Silverstein’s THE GIVING TREE. CREEPY CARROTS just got a Caldecott Honor. The letters are slightly different shade of orange, with nervous sketchy writing for the author/illustrator names. Even they are afraid of the carrots in this book! OLIVIA succeeds not only because of the bold vertical lettering and stars, but the color of the spine is really unique, it’s not quite a red. It’s definitely not an orange. It’s playful and different, just like Olivia herself. THE GIVING TREE is iconic partially because most of you reading this post have seen it your entire lives, but it’s the green that makes it stand out so much. It’s not neon, but it’s certainly not a green you see every day. That combined with the hand-drawn text and the  slight bit of the tree’s branches that sneak onto the front of the spine make it so unforgettable.

So what makes a great spine? Is there a formula? A checklist you can follow? Like all things in design, it’s just one piece that holds together the rest of the package. I could say a spine needs to be READABLE, BOLD, and ICONIC, but really what a spine needs to do is to feel one with the book inside and to highlight its story or its art or its charm. I came from the land of mini-comics. Hand-sewing and stapling my own books for years. My first spine was created with a bone folder. 98 pages of comics printed on the cheap photocopy paper, hand-sewn in two signatures. The spine was so tiny I couldn’t even fit words so instead I made a pattern with the binding thread, three small braids, dipping in and out of the pages underneath. I don’t even have any pictures of it, because after a week of sewing I only was able to finish 12 copies and they all sold at my first convention.  It was preeeetty rough, though my warping brain likes to imagine it was somehow an intricate Japanese style binding worthy of a glowing place in my memory. What it did make me realize was all of the possibilities that are between the front cover and the back cover of a book. There’s a whole lot you can do with a spine. I’m thankful I get to design them every day now.

QUESTION: What are some of your favorite book spines?

This is a space suit:

It was designed by the Soviet space program to send the first live astronaut into space, during the Sputnik era. The astronaut’s name was Laika. She was a dog.

A picture of her before her historic space flight:

At the time, at the height of the space race with the U.S., the Soviets claimed to have brought her back from orbit—even filming spurious footage of a healthy dog leaping out of a returned space capsule. We now know it had always been a one-way trip for Laika. There never was any plan to bring her back.

Her story has been told over the years, most memorably by Nick Abadzis, in his exquisitely poignant graphic novel, which we published a few years ago. A perennial favorite, it continues to draw superlative praise, and for good reason.

A little glimpse behind the scenes, then… Nick’s research took him to Moscow, to the space museum there and deep into the archives of the Soviet space program.

The photos in this post are from him. From Russia, he returned with volumes and volumes of notes and raw materials.

He spent time exploring character designs, and fine tuning the visual handwriting he would put into the service of his story…

Eventually he zeroed-in on a distinct feeling, not overly cartoony, but not strictly realistic either—which would give him the ability to relate historical fact, but also the flexibility to take us inside a dog’s view of it all, and even into a dog’s dream state…

Alongside that, Laika‘s tale took the form of a kind of thumbnail/diagram/script, which few if any, other than Nick Abadzis, could actually read:

Then to a very rough thumbnail version of that, in which Nick played with pacing, staging, framing, but fast and loose and not bogging down on detail. He would work and rework this stage…

… until his finished ink pages…

And then on to color, and combining the text overlay—

… for a masterwork result, which I believe will be around for a long, long time.

(photo from the National Media Museum.  This man was surprised to realize that his job of fire-escape repair included regular breaks for reading.)

10. Recipe-testing.  Editors who edit cookbooks just psychically know that the manuscripts they’re editing will be delicious, right?

9. Choosing paper stock.  Don’t all books just get printed on the same paper stock?  It’s called ‘book paper stock’ and you can tell that it’s for books because it’s not brown like paper bags.  It’s standard!

8. Memorizing directions to all the halfway-decent places to eat in a five-block vicinity of every convention center in the United States.

7. Learning about the current political state of Iran so as to be able to talk intelligently about a book to media.

6. Shipping books by regular mail to California from New York City takes six – eight days.  Quiz me on shipping a book regular mail to any other place in the US, plus Canada, the UK, Australia, and Asia!  (Actually, don’t.)

5. Authors who draw amazing doodles on envelopes they send me things in.

4. Trips to the bookstore to look at other publishers’ book covers.  And taking notes.

3. Thinking about entertaining?  Tell me a little about the number of people, the kind of venue, and what you’re doing and I can work out some ballpark numbers for you.  Thanks, publishing!

2. You have to ask people for endorsement quotes to put on the fronts of books.  Those quotes don’t just appear; we go out and get them.  (Neither, by the way, does the ISBN.  You have to make it with special ISBN-generating software!)

1.  Math.

I loved Jim Ottaviani’s last book with us (Feynman, illustrated by Leland Myrick, who is also awesome), so I was super-excited to find that Jim was doing yet another non-fiction book for First Second, this time illustrated by Maris Wicks, whose art I love.

This new non-fiction book is called Primates, and it’s about (you guessed it) primates, which are drawn super-adorably by Maris Wicks (as clearly all primates should be; listen up — primates, if you’re getting portraits done by artists not Maris, you are missing out).

We just got finished books in — they look gorgeous!  I can’t wait for this book to be in stores in June.

Here’s the front cover.  Our designer, Colleen AF Venable, modeled it on the all-the-primates-line-up Origin of the Species cover.  (Except everyone is cuter here.)

Here’s the spine!  Including all the primatologists in the book — Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas — and all the primates!

This book is a jacketed hardcover; here’s the cover that’s under the jacket.  I would just like to say, if you gave me the opportunity to be in this tree, I would take it.

Here’s the front flap and the endpapers.  They’re a gorgeous green color!

I like the front flap / back flap image choice where the back flap is clearly Jane viewing the chimpanzees that are in the binocular-style front flap panel.  She can see through the book!

Here’s one of my favorite pages, with Dian Fossey seeing gorillas in the wild for the first time.

And here’s Birute studying orangutangs.  They are adorable!

Also an important part of this non-fiction book: end notes!  There’s an authors notes and a biography and everything, so that people can know where to go if they want to read more.

And the back cover!  Can you believe that one of the people at our parent company had never heard of the Barrel of Monkeys toys that our designer, Colleen AF Venable, was modeling these on?  We had to explain.

This book is going to be awesome!  We can’t wait until June when we can show it to you all.