Why We Do School Visits

Posted by on Jan 11, 2024 in Children's Literature, Educators & Librarians | 0 comments

And this, my friends, is why you want to invite an author to your kid’s school.

In case you have any difficulty with the handwriting, it reads:

“Dear Ms. Sarah, Thank you for showing us poetry. Sometimes I practice at home. Now I’m in love with poetry. Thank you for everything.”

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Last Post of 2023

Posted by on Dec 21, 2023 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

And to all a good night!

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Audiobooks and Spotify

Posted by on Dec 14, 2023 in Children's Literature | 0 comments

photo by justin evans

Well this is…horrifying? I think this is horrifying.

Spotify is going to offer audiobooks? This is nice.

Spotify is only going to pay authors the full royalty if someone listens to the entire book? This is…alarming.

Royalties are small enough already. Not everyone knows that an author typically gets 10% of the price of a hardcover book and 6% of a paperback. (If we’re talking about a picture book, those royalties are split between author and illustrator.) But at least you get that entire amount even if somebody only reads a chapter or two.

Maybe this will be a delightful way to open up a huge new market and get lots and lots of new listeners…but I don’t feel I can be blamed for being skittish. It just seems like a way to whittle down the already small share of profit that goes to people who build up the creative work that allows platforms like Spotify to profit. (Except apparently they’ve yet to turn a profit? This also alarms me.)

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Illustrator for The Griffin’s Boy!

Posted by on Dec 7, 2023 in BOOK: Griffin's Boy, Illustration | 0 comments

I’m so excited to announce that Anna Aparicio Català is going to be doing cover and interior art for The Griffin’s Boy! I just love her lively, fluid, energetic line work and her utterly sweet animals. It will be a gorgeous book!

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Joys of December

Posted by on Dec 4, 2023 in BOOK: Griffin's Boy, Editing, Uncategorized | 0 comments

photo by karishea

The satisfaction of hitting SEND and whooshing off a second draft to your editor is just about equaled by the satisfaction of having a stack of Christmas presents wrapped, packed, addressed, and ready for the post office.

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Grateful

Posted by on Nov 22, 2023 in Inspiration, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Today I’m grateful for the way books develop empathy. They are the best tool that I know of for learning to live inside other people’s minds, hearts, and stories.

Every step we take outside of our own experience is valuable, worthwhile, and hopeful.

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What We Are Doing to Libraries

Posted by on Nov 16, 2023 in Educators & Librarians, Politics, Uncategorized | 0 comments

If you want your heart broken–or if your heart is made of stronger stuff than mine–read this piece from the Washington Post, “The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore.”

Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.


A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.


Now the library, or at least this library, was a place where a librarian was about to leave.

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