Children’s Book Blog Tour

Whew! I’m back from an exhausting, but oh-so-fun, week in LA. The SCBWI conference was great. Agents and editors and talented writers galore.

What the conference will end up meaning to me as a writer remains to be seen. I met an agent I think I could work well with, and I met two dream editors to add to my list of editors who are smart, witty, and like the kinds of books I like. Editors I’d love to have edit me.

Someday.

When I’m smart and witty and writing the kinds of books I like. Sigh.

What the conference gave me, the person setting up tours on KidzBookBuzz.com, was a whole lot of great authors I want to nab for tours. Adam Rex…have you ever heard of him? Yes, you probably have. Smekday was making the blog rounds not long ago. Well, young Adam can draw and paint and write and he’s a hysterical speaker. (I mean he keeps the audience laughing, not that he has hysterics on stage.) I wouldn’t be surprised if he plays several instruments and is multi-lingual besides. It seems terribly unfair that one fellow should be so talented. And he’s just an all-around adorable guy. I plan to beg him to tour with us. If I can’t have that talent, at least I’d love to hang around with it for a few days.

And Adam is just one of many, many great children’s book authors out there.

I also learned that agents and editors love to promote the books they work on. I might invite some of them on to come on and talk about their books and authors. They love to discover new talent and they love to promote their authors.

Michael Stearns told us about how his agency, Firebrand Literary was working on marketing their authors. And Brenda Bowen held up one of her books, The Year the Swallows Came Early, by Kathryn Fitzmaurice, every chance she got. (I’d hold it up, too, but there are no cover images to be found on the Internet yet. And no author site for Ms. Fitzmaurice as far as I know, either.) What the agents and editors seemed to be saying was that the bestselling books have to be hand sold. It won’t do to have big advertising campaigns–what sells books is people talking to people about the books they love.

That’s what I see our blog tour doing, too. I see us talking to our readers about the books we love. Not only is that fun, it’s worth something. It will affect which books make it and which books won’t. It’s like voting. Shoot, I see blogging about children’s books as the responsibility of every good citizen. =0)