Last Saturday, thousands of readers from all over Texas celebrated the 10^th annual Texas Teen Book Festival at St. Edwards University in Austin. As I wrote last week, the months leading up to the event are filled with planning meetings, emails, and spreadsheets, as BookPeople, the Texas Book Festival, and our dedicated team of librarian volunteers put everything in place. Once the day arrives, though, there’s nothing left to do but let it all happen and enjoy the show. We did have a few uncertain moments when we decided to enact our rain plan for the first time, but the show must go on, and it was great!

We kicked off the morning with an exclusive roundtable discussion for our We Need Diverse Books Essay™ Contest winners, all of whom wrote thoughtful essays about “The hero I want to see…” These lucky young writers got to sit down with authors Julissa Arce, David Levithan, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Cynthia Leitich Smith along with Brenda Conway from Random House to ask questions and share thoughts about writing and publishing and the power of representation. One of my personal favorite moments of the day came when Julissa Arce realized that a number of the winners were from her old high school in San Antonio. They couldn’t have been more delighted. Continue reading →

Most bookstore’s have little traditions built around recurring elements in our world. One of our traditions at DDG is the Rainbow Fairy Theme Guess. First of all, for the uninitiated, here is a little background information.
Little is known about how Rainbow Fairies come into the world, whether they are hatched or not, but we do know that when they come into their maturity many Rainbow Fairies join a thematically related group. Past themes have been Dance, Color, Earth, Sports, Baby Farm Animals, Jewels, and so forth. Each fairy represents an element of her theme. For example, the Party Fairies include Jasmine the Presents Fairy, and Polly the Party Fun Fairy. Or again the Candyland Fairies, whose members include Monica the Marshmallow Fairy and Gabby the Bubblegum Fairy.
Some themes are rich enough to have two related incarnations. For example, the Candyland Fairies came after the Sweets Fairies, or again the Baby Farm Animal Fairies were followed by the Baby Farm Animal Rescue Fairies. It should be noted that there are occasionally special Rainbow Fairies who stand alone, such as Kate the Royal Wedding Fairy, but by and large themed groups of Fairies, in sets of either four or seven, are revealed twice a year on the Scholastic frontlist. This brings us to the DDG Rainbow Fairy Theme Guess.
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We are a year-round children’s store here in Central Indiana, with sales seasons punctuated by holidays but driven mostly by the school calendar of our young readers. Our local community disappears for Spring Break and the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, but otherwise, our sales are spread pretty evenly over the entire year — unlike some of my colleagues in beach and lake communities, who are now slowing down after a busy summer. Here, we march steadily through the months of the year,  celebrating birthdays and lost teeth and first days of school and travel soccer and new siblings… all with wrapped gifts of books and toys and “little somethings” for siblings purchased by doting grandparents and busy, over-scheduled parents en route to parties at the local trampoline center or gymnastics studio.
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My hat goes off to editors. Their work is amazing; a great editor understands an author’s vision and works to help him or her realize that vision by asking the right questions at the right time and making suggestions that spark a creative response. Great editors have enough distance from a project to consider it, if not objectively, then with a particular kind of outside perspective that can be enormously helpful. They are not only the stand-ins for future readers, noting where a passage is muddy or out of place and likely to confound an audience, but they attend to both minute details—suspect grammar, awkward word choice—as well as overarching concerns of theme, structure, arc, etc. They navigate tricky waters, rowing away from what might be personal preference to shape a manuscript in a certain direction, and toward professional support of an author’s intention. Editors are also a project’s most resilient cheerleader. And they do all of this with very little external acknowledgment; the public rarely knows whose skilled and thoughtful analysis has guided a manuscript to its best form.
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As I write this, we are about 34 hours away from the 10^th annual Texas Teen Book Festival. Planned in partnership between BookPeople, the Texas Book Festival, and several amazing librarians who do this in their free time, TTBF has grown from an experiment launched in a high school theater to an event that takes over St. Edwards University campus with 35+ authors and 4,000 readers every year.
At this point, the truck has been packed with books, giveaways, banners, props, and all kinds of miscellany. Final emails have been sent out to authors, publishers, and moderators; announcements are getting a final polish; and signage has been printed.
Festivals are whirlwinds of energy and activity. Every year is different, so there’s always a new wrinkle to adapt to and learn from. But here are a few things I’ve learned over the last decade in the trenches as TTBF Programming Director.
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With the Nobel Prizes in science being handed out this week one might be forgiven for seeing the bookstore floor as a laboratory for assessing the interaction between a book’s cover as art and its intrinsic purpose to help induce suitable readers to purchase it.
Suppose we have read, enjoyed and are primed to handsell a particular book. Further suppose that we have framed a hypothesis that its cover will impede sales because many suitable readers will find the cover off-putting. With the book’s on-sale date at hand the scientific method now comes fully into play out on the bookstore floor, which has been prepped for our experiment with a prominent display of its test subject.
We will take a book released on Tuesday, Kill The Queen, as a case study. I want to say up front that I have been wrong about the effect of covers many times over the years. We are interested in science here, proving or disproving a hypothesis. The role of opinion is strictly limited to establishing the hypothesis.
My opinion of Kill The Queen is that it is an excellent book with a cover that will seriously hamstring its sales to an audience broader than the author’s existing fan base, Let’s look at the matter in a little more detail.
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Booksellers across the country are tucking their stores in for a few days in order to attend regional fall forums and meetings. I’m going to borrow the images of Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle’s classic read aloud* this week, so that you can join in to the storytelling (and the flurry of tasks to be done ) with me.
Brown box, brown box, what do you see?
I see a bunch of new product receiving looking at me…. which needs to be done before I leave for Heartland Fall Forum in Minneapolis. I could leave it all for the staff to do, as long as I identify somewhere for them to put the damages. There will be damages, of course, which increase exponentially with the following criteria: if you order only one copy of a book, it is twice as likely to be damaged. If the book is a BIG RELEASE with lots of pre-orders, count on damages to equal the number of books over the preorder amount plus one.  If the book is has a silver cover, a clever cutout on the paperback cover,  or some kind of strange texture…. well, you knew better when you ordered it, and you got what you deserved.
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When I’m in need of heartening, I turn to books. I’ve been so happy this fall to bring to the store several beautiful new books that feel like open arms welcoming and celebrating all of our citizens. Here are a few of my favorites. I hope you’ll share some of yours in the comments.

First Laugh—Welcome Baby! by Rose Ann Tahe and Nancy Bo Flood, illustrated by Jonathan Nelson (Charlesbridge). in this bright picture book, Navajo author and artist Tahe and Nelson, together with Flood, share a joyful tradition from the Navajo Nation: the first person to make a baby laugh gets to host the First Laugh Ceremony, a big party welcoming the baby to the community. (Bonus: The book also mentions similar celebrations from other cultures.) What a wonderful tradition!

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At bookstores we always talk about the holiday rush, and that’s a real thing. Come December, it’s an all hands on deck situation on the floor, putting books in hands, giving recommendations, and keeping the shelves impossibly full. But, in a way, the September-October-November whirlwind is harder to manage. There are just a lot more different balls to keep up in the air. The store gets busier, as families get back from vacations and camps, kids need books for school, book fairs start going out, and all the new releases start hitting the shelves. But it’s also when frontlist orders need to be placed for Winter-Spring, holiday planning gets underway, and event season really kicks in. Keeping it all on track takes a bit of strategic juggling.
As the towers of book boxes stack ever higher and inboxes (virtually) groan with the weight of their contents, it’s sometimes hard to see past each day’s urgent tasks. Yesterday, as our marketing team spent the day setting up offsite sales for the Texas Tribune Festival; our school event team helped facilitate six school events around town with Max Brallier, Jonathan Auxier, and Alexandra Penfold; and we capped it all off with two packed evening events for families, it started to feel like the balls in the air might just start to blur.

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This has been a quieter, more reflective observation of Banned Books Week in our store, and I think it might have been so in other places, too. We look forward to this week on the calendar as one of those absolutes of independent bookselling, like the annual observance of Indies First and the weekly Tuesday launch of new titles. It’s part of what makes us “indie” – we pause to make a fuss, along with our colleagues in the public and school library system, about the challenges of access to books that have been confronted in the last year. We marvel at the repeat titles (“Really? Someone still objects to that?”), we shake our heads ruefully at the lack of understanding demonstrated by groups who choose to protest books (that they haven’t even READ in their entirety!), and we admire our stalwart champions in schools, libraries and universities who battle these onslaughts.
Surely, we think, in a time when information and unrestricted physical access are as easy as the click of a cursor or a finger on the screen of a tablet…. surely, now, we don’t need to waste time or energy trying to ban old-fashioned print books? When the nightly news contains more horror and violence than can be invented in any dystopian YA fantasy series, when sexual content is presented without filter as advertising for consumer products, and when hatred against people for differences as insignificant as hair color are commonplace front page news…. surely, now, there is no need to remove books from curriculums or library collections? But challenges to content continue, and brave colleagues saddle up yet again to defend, to explain, to invite others into a world where we read broadly to understand deeply.
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