SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS Book Birthday: Reflecting on Medicine and Writing

By Rajani LaRocca

I’m so excited that my debut picture book, SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS: A TALE OF MUSIC AND MATH, is releasing today! It is gorgeously illustrated by Archana Sreenivasan and is published by Lee & Low Books.

The story is set in ancient India and follows a boy named Bhagat who wants to bring his family out of poverty by winning a place in the rajah’s court as a singer.

Interior spread from SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS, written by Rajani LaRocca, illustrated by Archana Sreenivasan.

As he prepares to leave on his long journey to the rajah’s city, Bhagat brings with him all that his family has left in the world: a single rupee coin and a chain of seven tiny golden rings. Bhagat’s mother blesses him and reminds him, “Bhagat, you are a fine singer. But you are an even finer thinker.”

 As it turns out, when it’s time for Bhagat to find a place to stay in the city, he is faced with a mathematical puzzle. He must pay the innkeeper one ring per night in advance, and it costs one coin to break one link in his chain of seven. But Bhagat only has a single coin, and he doesn’t know how many nights he will need to stay. How can Bhagat find a way to divide the chain of seven rings in order to pay one ring per night and avoid overpaying? As he walks through the city contemplating this conundrum, his mother’s words come back to him.

Interior spread from SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS, written by Rajani LaRocca, illustrated by Archana Sreenivasan.

In the end, Bhagat succeeds in an unexpected way—and it is his thinking as well as his singing that saves the day.

This story was one of the first picture book texts I ever wrote—one of the stories that taught me how to write a picture book. I first drafted it in 2013, and it took me almost seventy drafts before I felt it was “ready” in 2017. We sold it to my wonderful editor, Cheryl Klein, in 2018, and here we are in 2020 with its release. It was well worth the wait!

But my journey to becoming a writer has been even longer.

I was a kid who was obsessed with books.

Rajani at age 8

I also loved writing, but I knew I didn’t want to pursue it as a career. I was in a creative writing class in high school—a class I loved—when I told my teacher, “I really enjoy writing, but I know I want to become a doctor.”

That teacher, Mr. Herzfeld, told me, “Who says you have to choose?” And he introduced me to the works of several authors also happened to be doctors, including Richard Seltzer, William Carlos Williams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

And although I already knew what I was going to do with my professional life, that planted a seed in my mind.

Years later, after college and medical school and residency, I did indeed become a practicing physician. I made some of the best friends of my life, friends who share the same values of helping people stay healthy and easing their suffering when they are ill. And I loved my career in medicine. I still do.

Dr. LaRocca

But eventually, when I’d become established in my practice and my kids were older, I felt a yearning to return to something creative. And that seed planted by my teacher years earlier began to grow and bear fruit. I started taking writing classes again—first online, and then in person, and I met fellow writers who would become my critique partners and some of my closest friends, who share my love of creating beautiful stories for children. And I kept writing, and learning, and writing.

And then, after a few years, I signed with my marvelous agent, Brent Taylor of TriadaUS. He loved my work, and we started submitting manuscripts to editors. And after the rollercoaster ride that is publishing, we sold a book. And then another. And then another. And on and on, until today, when we have eleven books under contract!

I could have closed the door on writing all those years ago. I could have told myself it was enough to have a career I loved. But I’m so grateful I didn’t talk myself out of the possibility of having two careers I love, two careers that challenge me and nourish me and bring me joy in unexpected ways. And like Bhagat, I’m grateful that early on, I had someone in my life who believed in me and told me I didn’t have to choose, that maybe I could do both.

So today, on the book birthday of my debut picture book, I’m also celebrating the idea of not letting anyone limit what you can be . . . including yourself.

Book Details

SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS:
A Tale of Music and Math

by Rajani LaRocca, Illustrated by Archana Sreenivasan

Pub Date: October 27
ISBN: 978-1885008978
Publisher: Lee & Low

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Rajani LaRocca was born in India, raised in Kentucky, and now lives in the Boston area with her wonderful family and impossibly cute dog. She spends her time writing novels and picture books when she’s not practicing medicine. Her middle grade debut, MIDSUMMER’S MAYHEM (Yellow Jacket/Little Bee Books), was a Kirkus Best Middle Grade Book of 2019 and a 2020 Massachusetts Book Award Honor title. Her debut picture book, SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS: A Tale of Music and Math (Lee & Low Books) involves a math puzzle and an explanation of binary numbers and earned starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly. Her forthcoming middle grade novel-in-verse, Red, White, and Whole (Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins) will publish in February 2021 and involves heritage and fitting in, science and poetry, Hindu mythology and ’80s pop music. You can learn about her other forthcoming books at RajaniLaRocca.com and find her on Twitter and Instagram @rajanilarocca.

Launch Countdown: Reflections and Results

By Vicky Fang

A Scholastic early chapter book, out now.

So I just ran a launch countdown for my debut book, LAYLA AND THE BOTS: Happy Paws. If you’re curious about how I set it up, how much anxiety was involved, and what the results were, this is for you!

THE IDEA

One countdown post per day, posted to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, for eight days leading to the launch of my book.

DAY BY DAY

Let’s look at each day and how it went.

8 Days to Launch: Book Giveaway

I wanted to kick off with something fun and splashy, so I ran my first book giveaway. Learning from the experiences in my Soaring ‘20’s debut launch group, I kept it simple. Just a Follow/RT with an extra entry for tagging a friend. This last part is key! It promotes your tweet to your desired audience and keeps the visibility of your tweet high all day. I did retweet once in the afternoon, and posted a thank you reply in the evening. As you can see, I got 142 retweets on this post. It’s hard to say how many followers, because they continued to come in over the next few days, but I’d estimate 50 followers on the first day. Facebook likes were low—I would guess because it didn’t have any new information for my friends and family and because the call to action pushed them to Twitter, which most of them don’t use.

Worth noting, too: I spent way too much time debating whether I should make the countdown a thread, or a nested retweet, or independent posts. I ended up going with independent posts for simplicity (even though it means a given day could be retweeted three days later with no context and therefore showing the wrong number of days until launch - I figured nobody would get too upset about the number of days and decided to just let it be.)

7 Days to Launch: Podcast Interview

I was scheduled to appear on Jedlie’s Reading With Your Kids podcast so I chose to promote this. One awkward thing I realized was that my graphic countdown approach made it difficult to retweet with comment or highlight the content link itself. I ended up using my graphic for visibility and including the link, but also retweeting (without comment) Jedlie’s post. I’m not sure what the best answer is, but if I had to guess, I would say the graphic helps promote awareness, while possibly dampening link action. It’s a tradeoff to consider on posts in general. Engagement on this was also much higher on Facebook, which makes sense as those are my friends and family who would be most interested in listening to me, as an unknown debut author.

6 Days to Launch: Free Stickers w/ Pre-order

On this day, I chose to promote free stickers on orders from my local indie, Linden Tree Books. I didn’t expect a lot of action on this, but I wanted to give my local indie some love and encourage others to as well. It probably only resulted in a handful of new orders to be honest, but it raised awareness for the book, for the shop, and felt like a nice thing to do.

5 Days to Launch: Online Activities

I wanted to post my online activities, especially since I had grown some new teacher and librarian followers from my first day giveaway! I expected this post to get more traffic than it did, but I didn’t want to retweet because at this point I was starting to feel some anxiety from shouting about myself publicly all day.

4 Days to Launch: KidLit411 interview

On this day, I was scheduled to appear on KitLit411. I was pretty relieved to not have to talk about myself and to let somebody else talk about me. I didn’t feel too bad about the lower engagement on my end because it was being promoted in a separate tweet (thanks to the KidLit411 folks!) You can see I chose to retweet with comment and add my graphic, because the KidLit411 content looked okay and clickable when I set it up that way.

3 Days to Launch: Bookshop.org List

If you haven’t guessed, at this point I was feeling quite, quite anxious about posting about myself all the time. I had another post planned to point to some past interviews, but I couldn’t bear it and spent the night setting up a Bookshop.org site featuring my favorite #STEAM books for kids so that I could talk about other people for a day! I also tagged all the authors I included. I enjoyed this one because it did allow me to interact with some of my favorite authors, some of whom I’m already connected with and others who maybe had never heard of me until I posted. I also feel good about having this Bookshop running list for books that align with my goals as a writer, in empowering kids in STEAM.

2 Days to Launch: Critique Giveaway

On Day 2, I stuck to my plan and posted a critique giveaway. This time, I decided to try out a Rafflecopter, with entries tied to Twitter follows and newsletter sign-ups. To be honest, I knew that at this point I had saturated my feed with my countdown and that I couldn’t expect huge engagement, so with Rafflecopter entries being invisible (vs Twitter RTs/Follows) I figured that as long as I got one entry, it would be all good! (I got more than one entry, forty-five to be exact.) I retweeted once in the evening with a thank you. From this retweet, I got a lot of likes in the morning, which made me realize that tweeting at 7am PST missed a lot of the EST morning Twitter traffic.

1 Day to Launch: Thank You Blog Post

My last day was saved to thank my editors, illustrator, book designer, agent, launch groups, and critique partners. I considered posting this on a blog with larger influence, but it felt most relevant to writers and I didn’t have a good outlet in mind on such short notice, so I kept it on my personal blog.

That night, I picked the winners and optimized the images on my website. Why I didn’t do that BEFORE the launch countdown, I don’t know.

Launch Day!

I posted a launch graphic and announced the winners. This was fun! 

THE POSITIVE TAKEAWAYS

Overall, I was happy with the results of the countdown. Here are the upsides:

I grew my audience:

By the end of the week, I had gained about 110 new Twitter followers. To be transparent, there were also many factors and activities outside of the countdown happening. I snuck in book reviews and retweets of other authors to ease the anxiety of self-promotion. I also posted cute pics of my kids to my smaller networks. My publicists and launch groups continued to post articles and interviews that I continued to retweet.

I partnered with my publisher:

I do think the countdown was appreciated by my publisher, including my editors, my publicist, and my marketing partner. It gave me a way to share with them my own enthusiasm and willingness to pitch in. The countdown was one piece of the puzzle. I also generated original content for them (STEAM activity blog post, activity sheets, and video).

I generated awareness for my book:

Even when engagement felt low, I do think awareness grew just through the visibility of the countdown, which really was the point. There were many instances when something surprising would come out of the woodwork—a friend that I didn’t know was an influencer in another sphere tweeting about my stuff, a friend choosing to order from my local indie, close friends suddenly asking where to buy my book or telling me they finally ordered it, friends ordering from bookshop.org who hadn’t heard of it before. Even though I felt like I was shouting about myself, each post had tangible results and brought my book back to the forefront of people’s crowded minds.

LESSONS LEARNED

This was a decent amount of work. Every night, I found myself finalizing content and every morning, I was manually blasting my social networks. I had fun doing it, but it was also anxiety-inducing. In the end, I think it was worth it and I would do it again. But here are my notes-to-self for my next countdown:

• Keep the simple giveaway kickoff.

• For mental sanity, consider running it for 3-5 days instead of 8.

• Find ways to ease the self-promotion anxiety, for example:

  • Have scheduled content from a blogger/influencer.

  • Find ways to promote other people’s books.

  • Continue to tweet about other books/things/people.

• Be flexible and adjust to what feels comfortable on the go.

• Tweet early and retweet later in the day if you want more visibility.

And one more note—I’m not sure if the graphics helped or became tedious for my audience. I think because not many people are running countdown graphics, it was okay, but if everybody starts doing it, then it might lose its appeal. So I plan to keep this fluid in future countdowns, depending how I feel.

Okay, that’s what I learned from running this countdown! I hope this is helpful for you as you think about promotion for your own books and that you figure out a strategy that works for you. Onward! 

(And keep an eye out for my next launch countdown for INVENT-A-PET, starting very soon!)

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Vicky Fang is a product designer who spent five years designing kids’ technology experiences for both Google and Intel, often to inspire and empower kids in coding and technology. Through that work, she came to recognize the gap in education and inspiration, particularly for girls and minorities. She began writing books to provide kids with accessible STEAM-inspired stories that they can read again and again, learning from characters they love. Her goal for her books is to inspire computer literacy for a wide range of kids—while letting their imaginations run wild with the possibilities of technology! Her debut books, LAYLA & THE BOTS (Scholastic early chapter book series) and INVENT-A-PET (Sterling picture book), are launching in Spring/Summer 2020 and feature courageous and innovative girls in STEAM. You can find Vicky on Twitter @fangmous or at her website  www.vickyfang.com.