Tumblehome Learning Announces its Presence

Tumblehome Learning has announced its presence to the publishing world. This week, Publishers Weekly online and Children's Bookshelf (scroll down) presented articles about publisher Ian Leask leaving his beloved Scarletta Press to devote more time to our startup, Tumblehome Learning. The announcement made us scramble to get our new website up several weeks ahead of schedule.

In the bold words of our president, Barnas Monteith,

Make no mistake -- Tumblehome Learning is not a publisher. It is a science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) education revolution. THL's product suite offers a continuous learning program from elementary through high school grades. Our reading materials feature exciting adventures and leading-edge "real world" science & engineering content along with self-paced hands-on activity lessons. A wide variety of different subject materials assure that there's something of interest for everyone.

Our goal is not just to make kids more successful in school, but to offer them an alternative pathway to opportunity and fulfillment throughout life--a pathway of genuine interest in subjects they learn to love and subsequently love to learn about. THL's innovative books, kits and other products inspire kids of all backgrounds and ages to become fascinated by the pursuit of scientific truth. At Tumblehome Learning, we believe that as fun proceeds, knowledge exceeds!

Tumblehome Learning began nine months ago with four friends talking about kids, science, books and experiments, and the idea of science playdates. Almost six months ago we incorporated. Since then we've been writing, searching for books, designing activities, editing, finding partners, working with suppliers and distributors, and generally having the time of our lives. We are operating out of Boston, Minneapolis, and Taipei, and our team has grown to ten. We plan to make a big splash in 2012 with the release of our first seven books.

Tumblehome Learning will showcase our products-in-process at our Asian launch at the Taipei International Book Exhibition in February and again at the USA Science and Engineering Festival Book Fair in Washington, DC, April 28-29. We will have our first books, including a graphic novel, plus plenty of activities for families to try. Not only that, I'm a featured author, speaking Sunday at 10 am. Come join us!

And for all you authors out there, in mid-January we will begin looking at book proposals and queries. Check under Submissions on our website.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. VII. Marketing with Social Media

Marketing Lost in Lexicon began with the website but went much further. Rebecca and I took the book's release as an opportunity to learn about the world of online and traditional marketing. We talked to publicists, read whatever we could, and consulted a small design and marketing firm called Nectar Creative Group, whose principals, Patrick and Sarah, patiently educated us. Basically, we decided to try a little of everything. Here's some of what we learned.

First, of course, came blogging. I really didn't see why I should have to blog, and I was very reluctant to give up the author's cloak of mystery and anonymity to do it. But everyone says authors have to blog. I tried to weasel out of it by offering to blog in my characters' voices. Daphne blogs about cool words, and Ivan blogs about interesting math problems. I thought the topics would draw in potential readers and teachers, but the truth is, those blogs have only a couple of visitors a day. (Come on, someone, follow them! They're lonely, and it's not a big commitment: they only post about once a week.) Finally I agreed to try blogging in my own name, with the following guidelines:
-- Blog several times a week: write some blogs in advance before you start so you'll have a backlog.
-- Tag your blog posts with possible search words, so people can find them.
-- Most posts should be about 500-700 words, substantial but easy to gulp down in one sitting.
-- Once you have a number of meaty posts up, you can afford to put in a fluffy one once in a while (I don't really do this).
-- Don't constantly be asking for something in your blog; offer something at least four times as often as you ask, advertise, or push.
-- Visuals help (I really fall down here).

Other advice, which I haven't taken, is to specialize enough that your blog will stand out. I tend to mix all my areas of interest and expertise in one blog.

To my surprise, I've really come to enjoy blogging. I like coming up with topics. I try to be careful and respectful when I review books or comment on current events. One way I've learned to increase page views is to send a link to particular organizations that might be interested in the topic of a particular post -- say, 4H or the Association of Science and Technology Centers.

Sarah and Patrick also insisted I join Facebook and Linked In. Linked In is not just good when you're looking for a job: you can find colleagues in your field. They advised me to join lots of Linke In groups, so I belong to groups on writing (there are lots), publishing, math and science education, gifted education, graduates of the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, etc. Here again, the idea is to start conversations and offer insights to other group members, with a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio of helpfulness to self-promotion. (Not everyone on the forums follows those guidelines.) The point is not so much to sell books directly as to increase the number of references to your website or blog and to establish standing among your peers. Besides, you'll hear good ideas and often learn something. Just don't spend too much time there.

Everyone knows Facebook. It's useful to have a fan site where you can post pictures and events and sometimes look to reassure yourself that you do have fans. I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook. For one thing, I don't want to spook my children and their friends by lurking in the shadows of their world. Still, Facebook has led to some renewed friendships and opportunities.

Finally, there's Twitter. A year ago authors were being told they had to be on Twitter. I created an account and have never opened it. I'm sure Twitter is a great thing: after a talk I gave in South Carolina, one audience member told me she had madly tweeted little pearls from it to friends as I spoke. That sounds like a nice way to increase the reach of whatever you have to say. But I fight with distraction enough as it is. I don't think I could absorb any more small snippets of input from people everywhere. Interestingly, this year at the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference, there was much less of a push toward Twitter. It's as if editors, agents, and publishers all recognize that every social media outlet drains time from somewhere, and probably from writing time. Now the advice seems to be to choose judiciously and reach out from your areas of strength.

Right now, social media probably requires about four hours a week from me. That's a lot, and it grows if I spend too much time browsing. Is the time worthwhile? That's hard to say. There's no direct line between blog posts written and books sold, that's for sure. But I do find I speak and write with increasing confidence. I've found another way to have a voice in the world.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. VI. Distribution

Now we come to the independent publisher's nemesis: distribution. Is there any way to get the book into bookstores? Bookstores cannot possibly deal one by one with every individual publisher: they work through distributors, who represent large companies or large conglomerations of small ones. Getting a distributor can be almost as difficult as getting an agent or publisher. As with everyone else in the publishing world, traditional distributors make money on any given book only if it generates a large volume of sales.

One way around this problem is not to worry about bookstores. An independent publisher can sell through Amazon or through the author's own website. If the book is an e-book only, the question of physical distribution never arises. For adult books, the e-book only route may make the most sense. After all, close to half of all adult books sold are now sold as e-books, and it's relatively cheap and easy to format a manuscript (or have someone else do it) for the Kindle and competing e-readers. After that, it's all profit (though the e-book companies take a good share).

For the children's market, however, e-books comprise only 4% of all books sold. This may change, and is certainly already changing for YA books (books written for teens). My experience may be informative here. Of the roughly 2000 books I sold in ten months, I sold around 900 myself, through my website and various events, including 120 to one school and 160 to be given to attendees at a math and science education conference where I was keynote speaker. Of the 1090 ultimately sold through Greenleaf (the distributor), 74 were e-books, 306 sold through Amazon, and 182 sold to libraries. Something over 500 sold through a mix of chain and independent bookstores.

So how does one get a distributor? One option is to publish through an entity like Lightning Source, which has a direct connection with Ingram, one of the largest distributors. This is a rapidly changing landscape, with Google, Amazon, and some literary agencies developing their own imprints, so rather than try to summarize the field I'd just recommend that any author think hard about distribution and investigate the options with a lot of internet research before making any deals.

I chose to approach Greenleaf, which works with independent publishers of all sizes. Greenleaf is selective, and it also prints under a couple of imprints of its own, like Emerald Book Group. An author can submit either a manuscript or a book that is much further along the production path. Either way, Greenleaf will charge for its services; even if you are seeking only distribution, you will be asked to submit a marketing plan and commit upfront to significant spending on marketing and promotion.

The truth is that like most self-publishing operations, Greenleaf makes its money from charging authors for services, not from its share of sales revenue. That's why it can afford to open its doors to a wide range of books and authors. Still, I have found them honest, responsive, professional, and pleasant to work with. Greenleaf designed and placed great banner ads for online sites like Publisher's Weekly; they fulfilled orders promptly; they kept me informed about sales and always answered within a day when I had a question.

So the final message here is Think about distribution. Sometimes we authors are so fixated on seeing our books in print that we forget to wonder how anyone other than our own friends and family will ever see them. There are lots of great options now, but all of them need deliberate thought.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. IV. Editing

One question my current publisher asked when I asked him to look at Lost in Lexicon was whether it had been properly edited. He meant had it been line edited, looked over closely by an experienced editor to make it tighter, cleaner, more effective, and to watch out for any inconsistencies, dropped details, or glitches of plot.

The truth is, I didn't hire anyone to do that job specifically. By the time I turned to self-publishing, I had run the whole book, chapter by chapter, through the online groups at Critique Circle, and a couple of experienced writer friends had combed through the entire manuscript. In addition, both my agent and Karen Klockner, the art director I was working with, had been editors of children's books at Little, Brown. I asked them what they thought needed work, and with two exceptions, they thought the book was ready to go.

When I first submitted the book to her, my agent asked for some extension to the ending, a little more emotional and intellectual wrap-up to bring the themes of the book to closure. I let that suggestion sit for a few days until it really seemed right to me, and then I wrote the additional couple of pages.

Karen's concern was harder for me. She wanted me to cut down the opening pages and start more quickly. She thought the first few pages didn't represent the rest of the book well. By this time, I had already reworked those opening pages for my critique group about twenty times. I had compressed the start as much as I thought I could, but I still wanted to establish Daphne and Ivan as characters and establish their everyday reactions to the world before I set them out on their adventure.

Karen suggested I cut the first two or three pages. Instead, I kept replacing them with ever tighter writing. "No," she said, "I think you can just cut them." She told me where to start, and finally, I understood. Those labored over, sweated over, first few pages finally hit the wastebasket.

Beyond that, Karen read very carefully through the book multiple times and made line edits. Then came the fierce copy editor, Joan Giurdanella. I thought copy editors fixed grammar and semicolons; I never realized the extent to which they insist on internal consistency, on proper pronoun antecedents, and on paragraphs that don't repeat the same word multiple times. Joan wanted to know whether each stop in Lexicon was a town or a village, and she wanted me to be consistent. She didn't like paragraphs beginning with pronouns. Her use of commas was much more traditional than mine. I learned a lot by responding to her corrections and suggestions one by one.

Neither Joan nor Karen, though, offered to check or edit the math sections, so I compulsively checked the numbers and explanations. I asked a couple of math teachers and curriculum developers to read it, too, to make sure I hadn't said anything incorrect or stupid. I checked and refined all the figures.

We had another round of copy editing after the manuscript was fully formatted, and even then, Karen and I continued to find errors that had somehow crept back into the text. One thing I learned from this experience is that you can never have too much copy editing. Nothing screams "amateur" more than a book riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors. In the end, Lost in Lexicon's first edition had one glaring typo: a missing word. That was one word out of 68,000. Not bad.

Lost in Lexicon's Publishing Path. III. Illustrations

Working with an illustrator was one of the most absorbing parts of publishing my own book. Karen and I agreed that Lexicon's rather challenging academic content would be lightened and leavened by illustrations to help carry the emotional thread of the story. We decided to create a short list of potential artists.

While I spent hours poring over collections of online portfolios, Karen approached her contacts in the industry. I looked for an artist that could portray both playfulness and menace in a black-and-white style with a distinctive personality. Karen sought in addition someone with professional experience, a reputation for on-time delivery, and an open enough calendar to accommodate us.

My list was lengthy, and my family and friends all had different opinions, but eventually I whittled the list down to five. Karen suggested a few more, and then she investigated availability and reputation. Finally we narrowed our list to three. We commissioned each author to do three sample drawings for the book. Each had its own flair, but the characters I fell in love with were those drawn by Joan Charles. She had included a witty picture of Mr. Garrulity holding forth at the Ivan and Daphne's welcome dinner in Lexicon and an inviting color picture of the Mistress of Metaphor ringing her bell to clear away the fog as Ivan and Daphne climb her hill.

Working with an illustrator is a multi-stage process. Karen, Joan, and I all made our own lists of scenes that might be illustrated. We included a mix of full-page, half-page, and spot illustrations. Karen and Joan discussed the ideas and setup in detail. Then Joan produced sketches, and we went back and forth trying to perfect the look of the main characters. Most challenging was finding the right look for Emily the Thesaurus, with her alpaca-like face, her tufted ankles, and her horse tail. I loved having input into the "look," though I know some of the back and forth drove Joan crazy.

For me, working with a talented artist helped me see my book and my characters more clearly. In truth, I'm not a terribly visual person. For example, I seldom what people wear. Sometimes in the past I've thought in despair my lack of instinctive attention to how things look meant I wasn't qualified to be an author. Now I work hard in second drafts to pay attention to visual detail that will bring the story alive. But what I found with Joan's illustrations was that she helped the vision spring more fully into my head. "So that's what I meant," I found myself thinking. "So that's how it looks." And on those few occasions when I felt the opposite, we worked it through.

After the sketches came detailed drawings and eventually final drawings. Here I did pay attention to detail. As a child, I always hated it when an illustration hinted that the artist hadn't actually read the book -- when a character's hair was drawn as blond and straight when it was supposed to be dark and curly, for example. Joan had read carefully and more than once, but illustrations still need proofreading. We were careful.

There remained a few technical illustrations that Joan didn't feel comfortable doing. I sketched an algebraic compass for her, and I also sketched the layout of Aunt Adelaide's farm and the frontispiece map. For the map, I used a technique suggested by author Tamora Pierce at an SCBWI conference a few years ago. I chose a random piece of the world from an atlas and traced its boundaries, skipping to other countries and coastlines whenever I pleased. That gave a natural-seeming but completely unrecognizable shape to the land of Lexicon.

For the more mathematical drawings found in chapter 12, I got in touch with a designer who works at COMAP, a company producing math textbooks. George Ward was able to draw the little diagrams with elegant clarity.

One of my concerns when Scarletta picked up Lost in Lexicon was whether I would be able to keep the same artist for the next three books in the series. Scarletta was willing, bless them. Joan Charles, on the other hand, wasn't sure she could survive another such intense, huge, illustration job. In the end, we decided on a much more reasonable number of illustrations for The Ice Castle: twenty-five full-page illustrations instead of 160 of all sizes. To my relief, Joan has promised to stay the course through all the four-book series, and she's already finished the Ice Castle sketches, even though the book won't appear for another year.