{"id":31387,"date":"2019-10-29T08:31:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T12:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=31387"},"modified":"2019-10-29T08:31:50","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T12:31:50","slug":"the-store-was-in-a-mood-a-good-mood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=31387","title":{"rendered":"The Store Was in a Mood. A Good Mood."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Megan McDonald shares a photo of her three-year-old self flat-out on the pavement, having a tantrum.\u00a0We’ve all been there.<\/p><\/div>
\nWhen\u00a0the funny, powerhouse author of the Judy Moody and Stink series, Megan McDonald, came to town to celebrate her new book, Judy Moody and the Book Quiz Whiz<\/em><\/a>, she\u00a0was on the road, she had a fever, and she still enthralled\u00a0hundreds of children \u2014 as well as one of our toughest adult customers (more on that later). It takes a true professional, a natural entertainer, and a gracious human to pull that off.
\nIt helped that\u00a0Megan’s traveling companion,\u00a0her calm and tour-seasoned husband Richard, was on hand. Their easy, fun rapport with each other and those around them made even the more workmanlike aspects of a tour, like\u00a0the\u00a0lengthy school order book-signing process, enjoyable. (Note to publicists: I think all major tour planning should include in the budget an author’s most trusted and favorite person to come along for the trip\u2014perhaps instead of media escorts, who\u00a0are occasionally a little\u00a0chatty for introverted authors needing downtime. If those traveling companions are as nice and as helpful as Richard, they are well worth the investment! I’m not surprised that Candlewick Press, our host publisher for the event, was on the ball.)
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\nMegan’s school visit had been arranged for months, and\u00a0those moving parts were well in hand: order forms made up and sent home to families weeks in advance, orders processed (with the usual array of missing sales tax, missing teacher names, confusing autographing instructions, questionable\u00a0math, and misunderstandings of how rounding up works), books tagged and set aside, classrooms prepped for the visit by our wonderful local school librarian, Kari Ahern, and\u00a0our Shelburne grades 1-4 teachers.
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Richard Haynes, Megan McDonald, and librarian Kari Ahern in the unbelievably cool space travel portal in the SCS elementary school library. Beam us up!<\/p><\/div>
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Body language says it all in a school visit – no restless squirming, no picking at their neighbors. Megan had the kids’ total rapt attention throughout her talk. (And later, wildly enthusiastic participation during the book quiz questions.)<\/p><\/div>
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The kids loved Megan’s stories of growing up\u00a0as the youngest of FOUR older sisters.<\/p><\/div>
\nEven though Megan’s fever was ramping up, she was a consummate professional. The kids\u00a0loved hearing about her childhood adventures that led to the Judy Moody and Stink stories, and the book quiz was fantastic.
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\nIf you haven’t read the\u00a0newest Judy Moody\u00a0yet, it’s a book lover’s dream! In it, the kids in Judy’s class are preparing for a major book quiz contest against a rival school. Megan McDonald seeds in references to and titles of dozens and dozens of amazing books, both\u00a0contemporary and longtime favorites. When I was reading it, I started keeping a list of all of the fabulous books mentioned,\u00a0and then quickly realized that surely some savvy Candlewick editor had already thought of that. Sure enough, in the back of the book is not only a handy\u00a0alphabetical\u00a0index of every\u00a0title mentioned \u2014 what a springboard to\u00a0those books for young readers! \u2014 but a chapter-by-chapter list of\u00a0every book mentioned, so kids can go to the chapter they’re reading to see which books were just referenced in case they missed a clue.
\nAfter a little\u00a0post-school-visit rest at\u00a0the hotel, Megan came back to the\u00a0Flying Pig to sign all of the school orders before our afternoon event. Speaking of which, we’d had some finessing to perform with the store event promo. Our usual venue for a major author with a huge fan base like Megan McDonald is Shelburne Town Hall, which can seat about 250, but back when we were planning the event,\u00a0Town Hall was under construction and renovation (and had been for over a year), and though they planned to re-open sometime in the fall, they weren’t taking reservations\u00a0until at least October. That was too close for comfort; if the renovation wasn’t complete in time and we’d taken reservations for 100+ people, we would be sorely out of luck (which is what SOL means, right?). So we needed to host Megan inside the bookstore, which\u00a0fits about 45 max if we squish in and crowd the aisles. With that limited a space, we had to\u00a0promote enough but not TOO much, which was a comical juggling act. Fortunately, it worked. We had a full house without cranky claustrophobia.
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Megan amuses the audience with a rubber hand she pranked her sister with as a little kid.<\/p><\/div>
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\nOne of our regular customers brought his two children to the event. They are eager readers, and while he’s a caring and involved Dad, he’s not\u00a0really into kid stuff, so I was surprised to see him standing at the back of the event area through the whole presentation instead of off in the adult books. Later, Megan McD told me that a man had come up to her and said, “I didn’t expect to enjoy this AT ALL, but I\u00a0LOVED it! You were TERRIFIC!” I’m not 100% sure he needed to say the first part, but knowing who\u00a0the speaker\u00a0was, it was high praise indeed.
\nWe also had a woman come up to thank us after the event. “We’ve never been here before,” she said, “but this is now our new bookstore.” It turned out she is from a neighborhood a couple of towns away. She went on, “This was such a lovely event, and\u00a0this is such a lovely store. Everything was just lovely!” She couldn’t have known how taking the time to share her appreciation warms the very souls of booksellers, especially after a busy event day.
\nMegan’s visit\u00a0was a total delight, and I hope\u00a0her readers’ enthusiasm offset her being a little under the weather.\u00a0As for us, our shelves are stocked with an array of autographed copies (which are already starting to run low\u00a0after the post-event run on titles) of most of the 65+ (!) books Megan has written to make kids laugh.
\nWe loved that her warm and generous and funny nature matches the warm and generous and funny spirit of her books (which also boast warm and generous and funny\u00a0drawings by the, yes, warm and generous and funny\u00a0Peter Reynolds). There’s a lot of heart and laughter in\u00a0these books. It’s such a joy when books\u00a0are hugely kid-appealing and manage to avoid snarky sarcasm and mean-spiritedness, while still feeling very real and true to kid life. That’s a brilliant balance to strike. I think\u00a0Ramona Quimby would be impressed.\u00a0I also think that she and Judy and Stink and Henry and Beezus and Dory Fantasmagory and Fudge would be friends. That’s a neighborhood I want to live in!
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\nNext week, Johnny Boo creator James Kochalka!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When authors knows their young audiences, magic happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}