Want to win a signed copy of The Day-Glo Brothers or Shark Vs. Train or an advance, uncorrected proof of my next book, Can I See Your I.D.? Soon — very soon — I’ll be sending out the new edition of my occasional Bartography Express newsletter, and as always, one subscriber will get a free book. How do you subscribe? See the box on my home page — but hurry…

The big literary event here in Austin every fall is the Texas Book Festival. This year’s lineup of authors was announced this past week, and I could not be more excited about being included. Seriously — take a look at who all’s coming to town, and then make sure you join them October 16 and 17.

Also speaking of big events — and of big events in which I’m delighted to play a part — registration is now open for the 2011 Regional Conference put on by the Austin Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Is this conference for you? Only if there’s some appeal in spending a weekend learning from a Caldecott medalist, a National Book Award winner, editors who have worked with Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling, the agent who sold Newbery honoree The Underneath, etc.

Of course, an event doesn’t have to be big in order for it to be meaningful — especially when the audience is a group of young readers with the opportunity to connect with the author or illustrator of one of their favorite books. To help schools and libraries find Texas-based creators of books for children and young adults, SCBWI chapters from all over the state collaborate each year on a guide to available speakers. Here’s the PDF version of this year’s guide, and here’s a little information about getting included in next year’s guide.

Finally, if you’re interested in what Marilyn Carter, Lisa Lawrence, and I had to say during our recent Writers’ League of Texas panel on publicity, video from the event is available on YouTube. Bethany Hegedus (author of the upcoming Truth, With a Capital T) offered a recap on her blog, one of the many reasons to spend time getting to know Bethany and her writing.

Yesterday’s mail brought an envelope with a return address of “Executive Residence, State of Wisconsin.” I last visited the state for the wedding of a cousin who had both Metallica and Lou Reed played at his reception. A great time was had by all, but that was five years ago this weekend, so I was reasonably sure that the statute of limitations had expired.

Sure enough, the mail was entirely unrelated. It was a letter from First Lady of Wisconsin Jessica Doyle informing me that Shark Vs. Train has been picked as September’s featured Primary book for the Read On Wisconsin! online book club. (See this post from Rebecca Hogue Wojahn for more on this year’s selections.)

On its own, that would have been terrific enough, but it’s coupled with news that The Day-Glo Brothers is a nominee for the Land Of Enchantment Book Award (sponsored by the New Mexico Library Association and the New Mexico Council of the International Reading Association) and has also made the 2010-2011 Reading List for the Maine Student Book Award (sponsored by the Maine Library Association, the Maine Association of School Libraries, and the Maine Reading Association).

Many thanks to the folks in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Maine for their recognition of Bob and Joe and Shark and Train!

On August 19, the Writers’ League of Texas’ monthly panel on marketing topics will address the theme, “Building Your PR Team.” (The discussion starts at 7 p.m. at Austin’s BookPeople; pregame will be down the street at Shoal Creek Saloon.)

At least as much as the various PR tools available to us, we writers (illustrators, too) need to know what our objective is as professionals. Even before I joined Facebook and Twitter, I’d reminded myself occasionally that this blog is a secondary medium that serves to support my primary medium of books. For me, that’s still just as true, and the need for a reminder is still just as great — maybe even more so.

I have no interest in becoming known primarily as a blogger, or Tweeter, or especially prodigious Facebooker. I like researching and writing books, and I want to do more of that. I also understand the need to support my book-writing habit through school visits and conference appearances. (Luckily, I absolutely love doing those visits and appearances.) So, my virtual “PR team” is geared toward enabling those things.

There are also the (occasionally hazy, but nonetheless real) limits on how much of my time I can spend on anything related to my writing. Producing more words to go into those books has to come first, but figuring out which of those PR activities comes second, third, and so forth — and which just don’t get done at all — is a continuing struggle.

I’m eager to hear folks’ thoughts — both this Thursday evening and in comments and conversations in the meantime — about how they prioritize the marching orders for their PR team.

P.S. This doesn’t qualify as “usual stuff” by any means, but last weekend I did visit the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature (a.k.a. “The Nickel”) in Abilene, Texas. The SCBWI Golden Kite, Golden Dreams exhibit is there through September. Go see it.

“Uh, Chris — do you even have a PR team?”

Sure I do. For years, I’ve employed the firm of Mee, Mishelf, and Aye to help me get the word out about me and my books. I figure that’s the same team that most writers use, and so I expect that I’ll spend some time discussing which tools and approaches have worked out the best for us.

Thinking out loud here, those tools and approaches have included:

Networking through groups such as the Writers’ League of Texas (obviously) and the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators

Posts and comments on this here blog and others

My website

My Bartography Express email newsletter, which I produce via Constant Contact

In-person appearances at conferences, in both official and unofficial capacities

Collaboration with my publishers’ marketing and publicity staffs

Business cards, post cards, and bookmarks

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Old-fashioned hard-copy correspondence with folks I think would be interested in knowing about me and my books

My books themselves, which it wouldn’t do me any good to publicize if I hadn’t put sufficient time and care into creating in the first place

I’ll be giving all of these a good ponder over the next week and a half. Which have had the biggest impact — and how do you even measure that? Which have not been a good use of time, effort, or money? Which might not be as effective as they seem, and which may have done more for me than I’ve realized?

If you, dear Bartography reader, have any questions or insights into these PR tools and approaches or others I’ve failed to mention, I’d love to hear them. I’d be most grateful, in fact. And I bet attendees of this month’s panel will be especially glad that I got some help from beyond the good people at Mee, Mishelf, and Aye.

You know what’s even more so? Having that same someone (a librarian named Christopher Busta-Peck, to be precise) so inspired by your book that they set off on their own related research project.

Galleys — “advance, uncorrected proof[s], not for resale” — for my next book arrived this week! The real deal has a publication date of next April, but I’ve already begun sending these early versions out into the world. Paul Hoppe’s illustrations are too good to keep to myself…

I responded the same way to that idea when it returned to my thoughts early this past spring. A great project, I thought — for somebody. Just not for me. Not right now.

Well, it came back to me again this week. In so many ways, it’s still not the right time. But today I sent my agent a proposal for it — a proposal that I loved writing more than anything else I’ve done lately. We’ll see if editors are any more successful at avoiding this idea than I’ve been.

The First Person I Ran Into at the Convention Center
My Austin friend Liz Scanlon. If you want to be easily spotted on a crowded show floor, it helps to have great hair. Liz has great hair.

The Complete Current, Recent, Long-Ago, or We’ll-Them-Anyway Austinite Wrap-Up
I saw Liz again at the banquet where Marla Frazee picked up the Caldecott Honor for illustrating Liz’s All the World. Jacqueline Kelly was there, too, to receive her Newbery Honor for The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. In the post-banquet receiving line, I met Thom Barthelmess, president of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), which sponsors the awards — I hadn’t known that he used to be the youth services manager at the Austin Public Library. Austin librarian extraordinaire Jeanette Larson was also there, and earlier in the day, I got to meet Vicky Smith, the children’s book review editor at Kirkus, which is now owned by an Austin company. On Monday, I was delighted to see Austin authors P.J. Hoover and Jessica Lee Anderson when they dropped by while I was signing Shark Vs. Train. And it would not be a legitimate publishing event if I hadn’t gotten to see former Austin bookseller Heather Scott.

Holy Moly, I Got to Go to the Caldecott/Newbery Banquet!
Eerdmans, the publisher of one of my forthcoming books, invited me to sit at their table and, in the process, made me want to never, ever, ever not be at one of these banquets. At the Eerdmans table alone, I got to meet Melissa Sweet, who received a Caldecott Honor last year for A River of Words, and also visit briefly with and/or holler across the tablecloth at Carole Boston Weatherford and Jen Bryant. Before, during, and after the dinner, the elbow-rubbing opportunities were off the charts — old friends, editors I’d been wanting to meet, freshly behobbled and temporarily tattooed Betsy Bird, John Green (whom I quickly gushed at over Will Grayson, Will Grayson as we were commanded to take our seats), Françoise Mouly (whom I gushed at in a more leisurely fashion over her Little Lit books adored by my sons), and many more folks, including my marvelous agent, Erin Murphy.

Plus, Those Speeches!
I’ve been reading the Newbery and Caldecott acceptance speeches in The Horn Book for years now, so to hear them as they were delivered — exceptionally well, I should add — by Rebecca Stead and Jerry Pinkney — was a thrill. It was a little disconcerting, though, to find a souvenir CD containing those very speeches at my place at the table before the banquet even started. So much for being able to procrastinate on those suckers.

Breakfast #1
Don’t be surprised, if you go to a restaurant called “Teaism,” to find that they don’t serve coffee. It’s kind of a thing with them.

Breakfast #2
The main reason I was at ALA this year was to attend the ALSC breakfast where the Sibert awards (along with the Batchelder and Geisel book awards, plus the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children’s Video) were handed out. The breakfast included coffee (which had become kind of a thing with me by that time), nifty speeches (including one by Mo Willems, for his Carnegie, that really ought to receive an award of its own next year), and the opportunity to say hello again to Sibert medalist Tanya Lee Stone and honoree Brian Floca, and to introduce myself to my other fellow honoree, Phillip Hoose.

Just to My Left…
At the Sibert ceremony, I got to sit next to Claudette Colvin, the subject of Phillip’s deservingly lauded book Twice Toward Justice. During one of the speeches, I surreptitiously (I thought) snuck a package of gum from my coat pocket and began to extract a piece. That’s when I felt an elbow in my side and from the corner of my eye saw Ms. Colvin smile. I gave her a piece of gum. I figured it was the very least I could do.

Books for the Trip Home
I managed to bring home only two new books from ALA, but I sure chose well (and exclusively from Charlesbridge, the publisher of The Day-Glo Brothers): Mitali Perkins‘ Bamboo People and Karen C. Fox and Nancy Davis’ Older Than the Stars.

About That Trip Home…
Around 4 p.m. Monday, after a late lunch with Shark Vs. Train’s editor, Alvina Ling, I took a cab to Union Station. From there, I took Amtrak to the Baltimore airport, then a shuttle bus from the train station to the terminal. At pretty much the same moment I arrived to check in for my flight, it was canceled (for reasons presumed to be weather-related but which were never actually explained by American Airlines). So, I hopped a bus back to D.C., and took the Metro to back to the hotel I’d checked out of that morning, arriving five hours after I’d begun trying to leave town. I decided to view the whole thing as an unplanned adventure, and in fact I did get to see some mighty pretty Maryland countryside from my seat on the bus. Andrea Spooner’s profile of Jerry Pinkney in the current Horn Book really helped me keep things in perspective:

Jerry would be the first to say that he’s been blessed in many ways, but luck is not always in his favor when it comes to traveling. Every time I speak to him after a trip, there is a story of wretched flight delays or other mishaps. And yet he always relays these tales with a bemused chuckle, in the spirit of “Such is life! Why complain?”

Breakfast #3
This one wasn’t supposed to happen, and I’m not entirely convinced that it did. Surely I didn’t have my most important meal of the day at a Fuddrucker’s in the Ronald Reagan airport at 5:30 a.m. when I was supposed to be asleep in my bed back home…

One Last Reminder from ALA
Thursday afternoon, back at the office, I was starving. I had only a $5 bill, so couldn’t use the snack machine. Then I remembered the Luna bar that Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich gave me on Monday between my back-to-back book signings. It was still in my messenger bag, and it was delicious.

For details on the event, info on my other upcoming appearances, and other news about me and my books, check out the latest edition of Bartography Express (available online through mid-July).

Some other big news this weekend: Shark Vs. Train will appear on the New York Times’ list of best-selling picture books for the second week in a row!

What else is new? Real quickly-like:

Last Saturday, I got to share the bill with a tank containing live sharks at a party hosted by the Starlight Foundation at this downtown Austin bar.

I received PDFs this week for the galleys of Can I See Your I.D.?, the cover of which is beyond captivating — I can’t wait to share it here.

I’m happily submerged in the research for a new picture book biography. “Happily,” as in “I got my kicks during my lunch hour this Tuesday by rooting around in the microfilm section of a university library.”

My friend Audrey Vernick has a brand-new book out this week, but you’ll probably like it only if you have a thing for really funny books by really funny people.