Soaring '20s Creators Celebrate Indie Bookstores!

The Soaring ‘20’s Celebrate Independent Bookstores!

August 29th is Independent Bookstore Day! We are so thankful for the support that independent bookstores have given us in our debut year, from running launch parties, to handling orders, to offering book signings — indies are the best! 

In these pandemic times, our local stores need our support now more than ever. Here’s where you can find signed copies (and in some cases, order personalized ones) of our 2020 releases. Or, you can always order books from YOUR local store via their store website or by using IndieBound or Bookshop.

Happy Independent Bookstore Day!

DOZENS OF DOUGHNUTS

Written by Carrie Finison

Illustrated by Brianne Farley

Get it at: Belmont Books, Belmont Massachusetts

Click here to order a personalized copy, along with some fun doughnut stickers and a recipe. Indicate any special message or personalization in the Order Comments field.

---

NO VOICE TOO SMALL: Fourteen Young Americans Making History

Edited by Lindsay H. Metcalf, Keila V. Dawson, and Jeanette Bradley

Illustrated by Jeanette Bradley

Get it at: An Unlikely Story, Plainville, Mass.

Click here to order a copy and receive a bookplate signed by all three editors.

BEATRIX POTTER, SCIENTIST

By Lindsay H. Metcalf

Illustrated by Junyi Wu

Get it at: Mainstreet Books, St. Charles, Mo.

Click here to order a copy with a bookplate signed by both Lindsay and Junyi. Indicate your request for a signed bookplate in the “order comments“ field at checkout.

---

THE VOICE THAT WON THE VOTE: How One Woman’s Words Made History

Written by Elisa Boxer

Illustrated by Vivien Mildenberger

Get it at: Print: A Bookstore, Portland, Maine

Click here to order a signed, personalized copy. Indicate your request for a special message or personalization in the “Order Comments” field at checkout.

They also have other cool merch you can order. Like this tote bag and mug.

---

THE ELEPHANTS’ GUIDE TO HIDE-AND-SEEK

Written by Kjersten Hayes

Illustrated by Gladys Jose

Get it at: Village Books

Order a signed copy here.

---

SOAKED!

By Abi Cushman

Get it at: Bank Square Books, Mystic, CT

Order a signed copy (with free media mail shipping anywhere in the U.S.) here.

---

LOUIS

Written by Tom Lichtenheld

Illustrated by Julie Rowan-Zoch

Get it at: Old Firehouse Books, Ft. Collins, CO

Order a signed copy here. Indicate a request to have it signed in the comment section - online order.

---

MIDSUMMER’S MAYHEM

By Rajani LaRocca

Get it at: Silver Unicorn Books, Acton, MA

Order a signed copy here.

SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS

Written by Rajani LaRocca

Illustrated by Archana Sreenivasan

Preorder a signed copy at Silver Unicorn Books, Acton MA.

---

SATURDAYS ARE FOR STELLA

Written by Candy Wellins

Illustrated by Charlie Eve Ryan

Get it at: BookPeople, Austin, TX

Order a signed copy here.

---

INVENT-A-PET

Written by Vicky Fang

Illustrated by Tidawan Thaipinnarong

Get it at: Linden Tree Books, Los Altos, CA

Order a signed copy here.

---

Thank you to all of our local indies for supporting us as debut creators. You’ve helped make a challenging year so much brighter.

And thank you to all of our readers for supporting our local indies right back!

Do you have a favorite local indie? Let us know about it in the comments!

Happy Book Birthday, Invent-a-Pet!

By Vicky Fang

View fullsize

INVENT-A-PET (Sterling Children’s Books), written by Vicky Fang and illustrated by Tidawan Thaipinnarong

My debut picture book, INVENT-A-PET, illustrated by Tidawan Thaipinnarong, launches on June 2 from Sterling Children’s Books!

INVENT-A-PET tells the story of Katie, an ordinary girl who longs for an extraordinary pet—something more spectacular than a simple goldfish. One day, Katie comes home to find a gift from her mother: a mysterious machine designed to help her create that one-of-a-kind creature. Each time she feeds different items into the machine, out comes a marvelously colorful new animal—like a purple monkey, rainbow-spotted horse, and green bunny! But none of them is just right. Through trial and error, Katie figures out the formula for her absolutely perfect SURPRISE pet.

Why I Wrote It

I started writing children’s books to inspire and empower kids in STEAM (science, tech, engineering, art, and math), particularly girls and minorities. I’m a former product designer, and I’ve had so much fun creating things like DIY robots, buildings that play music, and interactive storybooks. For me, technology is magical, and I want kids to be able to see that too!

Vicky Fang and team at Google have a dance party with their DIY cardboard robots.

The Idea

If you asked me where the idea for INVENT-A-PET came from, I would have a hard time telling you.

The most direct answer is this: I keep a long list of random story ideas on my phone. At some point, I jotted down “mixed up animals” and at another point, I jotted down “Louisa’s Magnificent Mixing Machine.” One day, on an airplane flight (my favorite place to write), I thought to combine these two disconnected ideas, and the first draft of INVENT-A-PET was born!

View fullsize

INVENT-A-PET spread, ©2020 Sterling Children’s Books

But the thing is … if I look back through my life, some idea of pet mixing machines has been there for a long, long time. As a designer of kids’ experiences, often combining technology and education, mixed-up pets have dipped in and out of my consciousness many times before.

The first time that I have a record of it is in 2002, when I was in graduate school studying for my MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in NYC. I was working with fellow students on a children’s educational software project. We created a game called PetSet that allowed you to create mixed-up pets by dragging and dropping different icons into a simple animated machine.

The next memory that I have is from 2003 or 2004, when I was working as a game designer at a small independent game design studio called Large Animal Games. We built an online game that created funny, mixed up dogs through a wacky machine.

And most recently, in 2017, I was working as a designer on kids’ experiences at Google, many of which were geared toward inspiring and empowering kids in STEAM. When I told a co-worker about my story, she said, “Oh, like Sound Pet.” I hadn’t made the connection, but at that very moment, I was the creative lead on a kids’ game that let you take care of a virtual mixed-up pet.

I’m sure there are probably more examples. Somehow, this idea was always close to me. That may sound like a strange thing to say about a wacky pet-mixing machine that teaches you STEAM concepts … and yet, it’s true. When they say, “Write what you know,” you may be surprised at what that might be!

The Takeaway

As I get deeper into my writing career, I’m finding that the ingredients that went into INVENT-A-PET hold true for my other books as well. Let’s take a look at those ingredients—or, rather “inputs,” as Katie would have us say!

1. Usually, I find that a single idea isn’t rich enough to make a strong story. I often need to combine two or more ideas to add depth.

2. I also need to be able to pull from a bench of rich experiences—which for me, so far, has been related to STEAM inspiration for kids.

3. And then, after all that, it’s about writing a great story. Impossibly simple, right? (Or is that simply impossible?)

That, my friends, is my perfect formula for an extraordinary story. I hope this is somehow helpful to you on your quest for yours!

View fullsize

INVENT-A-PET spread, ©2020 Sterling Children’s Books

I am so excited to share INVENT-A-PET with the world, and looking forward to many more books to come.

View fullsize

Vicky Fang’s 2020 book titles

Book Details

INVENT-A-PET

by Vicky Fang, Illustrated by Tidawan Thaipinnarong

Pub Date: June 2
ISBN: 978-1-4549-3381-6
Publisher: Sterling Children's Books

---

View fullsize

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.

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!)

---

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.