Pinning* for Middle Grade

“Are you on Pinterest?” When teacher after teacher asked me this last school year, I figured it was time for me to finally see what it was all about. After all, I’m supposed to be the tech person in my school building! I was more than a little reluctant, though, because I already am a neglectful blogger, sporadic tweeter, and half-hearted Facebooker. I really didn’t need the guilt of another social media account I couldn’t keep up with.

In Pinterest, if there are any of you not “on it” yet, you create pinboards of topics that interest you, then you “pin” pictures and links that you come across on the Internet. It’s social because people can follow you and you can follow others—whole accounts or just the “boards” of theirs that interest you. If you see something of theirs that interests you, you can repin it to your boards.

So…I joined. Back then you had to get an invitation to join. Now you can request an account. As I signed up, I read Pinterest’s tag line: “Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love.” 
Hmm, organize. I liked that. Sharing’s good. And visual is always a plus in my book.

Then I started creating boards--and I realized that Pinterest was really quite different than Twitter or Facebook or blogging. Rather than yet another stream that I felt obligated to contribute to and check, my Pinterest account had the capability of being something useful to me all by itself. As the months have gone by, as expected, I haven’t done a lot with the social aspect of Pinterest, but I have come to love it for the organizing and inspiring my reading and writing life.

I’m still definitely a fledgling pinner. But, if you’re a reluctant pinner like I was, here are some board ideas that might get you started pinning.

• This one is less for me than for my readers, but I created a board for each of my books. For example, my upcoming middle grade mystery, MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT’s board has pins of photos of old schools, sketches I drew as I wrote, articles about the amazingness of rats, my book trailer, interviews I’ve done, reviews, anything for anyone who’s looking for more about the book…it’s all there. Pinning a link or photo to Pinterest is SO much easier than uploading a photo or a link to my website. It looks better, too. And I can link from my website directly to this board.
• A board of writing ideas. I’m constantly coming across things on the internet that fascinate me. I used to keep a private blog where I jotted down these story “seeds,” as I call them. Now, I pin them. It’s so fun to see an article on Ghengis Khan pinned next to one on the discovery of a new planet that might have water. It’s my favorite board to browse because the ideas can't help but percolate.
• A board of writing tips. I’ve gotten a whole writing education off of the generosity of blogging writers. Many of these invaluable posts I’ve bookmarked through the years, but I didn’t often go back to them, because sometimes the titles are a little obscure and I’d forget what they were about. Now that I’ve pinned them, not only do I have the visual, but I can write a line or two about what I found valuable in that article.
• A board of my favorite blog/articles I’ve written. I’ve blogged on and off for…eight years (?! ). While most of my posts are pretty forgettable, there are a few I’m kind of proud of. Pinterest allows me to highlight these, instead of having them lost in a jungle of posts complaining about my children and how they won’t allow me to write.
• Boards of favorite books. I also blog at Sleuth, Spies, and Alibis, and recently, I used Pinterest to create a board of new young adult and middle grade mysteries coming out this fall. So much easier than typing them all out! And there’s nothing prettier than a page full of great book covers!
• A board of research links for my work-in-progress. As I work on my new manuscript, I’ll be creating a board for that book even before it gets published. Kind of like my own scrapbook of inspiration—pictures of settings, characters, and links to research that I might need to refer back to.

And finally, if you want to really stretch yourself and tap into the social parts of Pinterest, you just might find some readers there. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, teachers and librarian are BIG users of Pinterest (check out the Education subject boards). By following their boards you can peek through the window of their worlds…and the worlds of your middle grade readers. And some of them just might follow you back.

Want to know more about Pinterest for writers? I found these articles and posts especially helpful:

• Writers, Why It's Time to Renew Your Love Affair with Pinterest (Kirsten Lamb's Blog)
• Pinterest for Readers and Writers
• Pinterest Things Writers Should Know (Rachelle Gardner)
• Very Pinteresting!: The Hot Social Network is Taking Educators by Storm (Kate Messner, School Library Journal)

____________
*Not to be confused with PINING for middle grade (of which I am also guilty).
____________

W.H. Beck (www.whbeck.com) is an elementary school librarian and the author of MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT, a middle grade mystery starring classroom pets at midnight. It comes out on the first day of school (Sept. 4--next week)! Her Pinterest boards can be found at http://www.pinterest.com/whbeck.

MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT Trailer and Giveaway!

In two months (just in time for the start of school!) my middle grade novel, MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT, will be in bookstores. Needless to say, I'm a little excited. Anyway, to help send Malcolm on his way, I’ve been tinkering on a book trailer. It's been done for a little while, but the end of the school year has been so crazy, I haven't done much about it. Until now! Project Mayhem seemed the perfect place to post it (try saying that ten times fast!). Anyway, to help celebrate, I'm also giving away an ARC. Please enter below.

So, without further ado . . . here it is: MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT, a funny middle grade mystery starring classroom pets at midnight, complete with ghostly shrieks, school hijinks, instances of valor, the occasional cheese puff, and . . . footnotes.

More info:

• About the book, including what some very nice authors said.
• Malcolm on Goodreads.
• Malcolm was recently featured at the BEA Middle Grade Editors' Buzz panel! Here are some links to that.
• And finally, I learned a lot in making the trailer. In fact, I posted about 13 things I learned over on my own blog.

Thanks for watching!

~W.H. Beck

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Summer Reading

The June bugs are banging on windows. The cicadas are revving up. There's the occasional whiff of charcoal, fresh-cut grass, and sunscreen. Lemonade suddenly tastes so much better. Have you noticed? It’s almost here!

Ah, summer. Sure, the calendar says it’ll be June 20th before summer’s officially arrived, but any middle grader worth his kickball knows that summer begins the moment that school gets out. For some out there, summer’s already begun; others have another week or two left. That's where my school falls. Two weeks left. That means this is my last week to see students. It also means my big push for summer reading.

I won’t see my students over summer (well, except for the random encounter at the pool or at the Summer Snow slushie stand), so I do all I can to get them set up to read this summer. After all, I sincerely believe that it’s the number one thing they can do to get ready for the next school year. I talk about the school district’s reading program and the public library’s reading program, and I share with them some of my favorite bookish websites. Since most of you aren’t eligible for our local summer school or public library reading program, I thought I’d share the websites here. Here are my favorite book lists, incentives, reading challenges for middle graders in summer.

The Top 100 Children's Novels

I’ve been sharing this video for the last three years with students. It’s a survey that Betsy Bird over at Fuse #8 did, put together by Maggi Idzikowski. Betsy’s doing new surveys this year (Top 100 Novels), but they won’t be done in time for me to share, so it’s this one again. And, as I say to my kids, these aren't all the good books in the world, but you certainly can't go wrong picking one off of this list. I’m also not too proud to admit that it always gets me a little teary-eyed. I don't know if it's the music, the cramming together of so many old "friends", or hearing my students gasp as their favorites appear. But....every time!

Read Kiddo Read 

This is James Patterson’s website. He does a great job of making it kid-friendly and I love how he’s divides up his suggested reading lists.

NoveList K-8

NoveList K-8 is a paid subscription we get through the state of Wisconsin, so I can’t guarantee you have access to it. But it’s definitely worth asking at your public library about it. You can type in your favorite book and find read-alikes, you can pick a genre you love and browse, you can even plug in your reading level in the advanced search and find books that way. I’ve often found that sometimes it’s not that kids don’t want to read, they just don’t know WHAT to read. So my fifth graders, who are heading off to middle school in the fall, are creating and printing personal reading lists from the site using the folders this week. (Writers, it’s also a great resource for finding what other books are comparable to yours.)

Mrs. Wojahn Reads

What!? You haven’t heard about this site? Ha! This is my own little summer reading challenge I do with my students each year. In the summers, I post what I'm reading on this blog. Then I challenge my students to keep track of their summer reading. Anyone who brings me their reading list on the first day of school gets a free book. And anyone who reads more pages than me in the summer also gets a GOLDEN LIBRARY CARD, which is really just their regular card with a gold sticker on it, but it comes with unlimited book checkout for the school year. You would not believe how motivating that is for kids. And it's a lot of fun for me, too.


So what are your favorite reading sites? Not just for kids, but for us grown-ups, too? After all, summer is our reading season, too. Share them in the comments here, or, if you're on Twitter, shout out your summer reading plans to the world. Katherine Schulten over on the Learning Network at the New York Times invites you to take to Twitter and share your thoughts, book recommendations, and ideas about #summerreading on June 7.

I can't wait to tune in. Preferably with the grass mowed, lemonade in hand, and the grill fired up. (The June bugs I can do without.)

Keeping the Gate: How One School Librarian Buys Books

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons by Scalespeeder

So…if you are a middle grade author (or any kind of author, probably, but I mostly know the middle grade variety), I’ll bet that you’ve had at least one sleepless night worrying about how to get your book “noticed.” Maybe you are trying to get your book noticed by an agent. Or an editor. Or maybe you’ve made that sale (congratulations!) and have moved on to fretting about getting your book noticed by readers themselves. It never ends!

If you look online to figure out what works, it’s an overwhelming mess of responsibilities. Blog tours! Twitter! Events! Giveaways! Swag! Interviews! Contests! Where to begin?

In a recent discussion with my agent, I can’t tell you how relieved I was when she said that she’s not all that convinced that any of that stuff—blogs, Facebook, events, swag—actually makes a difference in numbers of books sold. Maybe it does for YA—teens are online more and have their own money—but not for middle grade. My agent, bless her heart, thinks it comes down to word of mouth. And word of mouth for middle grade generally starts with…The Gatekeepers.

(You know the gatekeepers. The parents, teachers, and librarians who tell the kids about the books, who buy them for them, who place them in the kids’ hands?)

Well, as a middle grade author with a book coming out in 4(!) months, this conversation was both terribly relieving and terribly terrifying.

YAY! It’s okay if I can’t get off of work to handcraft one-of-a-kind bookmarks that I’ll hand-deliver in my own independent tour of bookstores!

YIKES! What if no one talks about my book!?

My agent, being the great agent (and kind person) she is, assured me that they WILL hear about my book. She also said that I already know what those gatekeepers are looking for—after all, I am one.

Hmmm, she’s right. (She's a smart agent, too.) I AM an elementary school librarian. I choose books and put them in kids’ hands every single day. So…what makes a gatekeeper “notice” a book?

Well, in my little corner of the world, there are generally three different ways a book finds its way into my library:

1) It is part of my school’s curriculum. This is the main mission of my library, so if I come across a new book on insects—and I know second grade does a huge insect unit, or I read about a novel with themes on individuality—and that is something that the fifth graders work on, I will buy it for my library.

2) It is a book I know my students will elbow each other out of the way to get it. To me this is really an addendum on #1 because part of my school’s curriculum is teaching kids to read. Well, you only become a reader if you actually spend time reading. So if there’s a Lego Ninjago book or a Taylor Swift biography or a cheesy movie tie-in novel, I will buy it for my students. Because it’s not true that if you only have great literature in front of kids, then they will read it. The truth is, kids are very willing to sit there and NOT read. So sometimes you need the junk to get them started.

3) Professional reviews. This is a tricky one because it’s really overarching. If a book meets the criteria for #1 or #2 but has terrible reviews, I won’t buy it. But there are books that find their way into my library through reviews only. These are books that don’t feature Star Wars characters or fit perfectly with the third grade unit on simple machine. They’re books that simply tell really good stories. I buy those, too. A lot of them.

So how does this help you, the author who is freaking out about how their little book will be noticed? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t. So much of it is out of our control. But I’m looking back at my list now with my author hat on and it’s got me thinking. Not so much about how I can shout louder about my book, but how I can make it more appealing to the gatekeepers. Some things I can’t change. At this point, my premise is set. My book’s about a talking rat, not Selena Gomez or farting dogs. But maybe I can make it more curriculum-friendly with a book discussion guide that pulls in some of the topics that fourth and fifth graders cover...hmmm.

As for the reviews? Well, I suspect there still may be sleepless nights ahead of me.

Please Pass the Poetry: 6 New Poetry Books for Middle Graders

April is National Poetry Month, but, unfortunately, tell that to a bunch of middle graders, and you just might get a groan or two (or is this only the students at the school where I work as a school librarian?). Anyway, I've found the key to poetry and middle graders is to jump right in. Don't talk about it--start reading! After all, poetry is meant to be heard, not just seen.

Here are some new poetry collections that I am looking forward to ambushing my middle graders with this month.



by Lee Bennett Hopkins, Will Terry (Illustrations). Dial, 2012.
ISBN 0803737165 (ISBN13: 9780803737167)

Bugs and poems! From ticks to bed bugs to lice, the creepy and the crawly are sure to drawn in the middle graders who love the yuck factor. By a slew of illustrious poets such as Marilyn Singer and Lee Bennett Hopkins.


by Douglas Florian, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
ISBN 0547688385 (ISBN13: 9780547688381)

Baseball--the other big April event, right? This book of baseball-themed poems, complete with Douglas Florian's great illustrations will appeal to anyone who's ever spent any time at all at the ball field.

by Susan Katz, Robert Neubecker (Illustrator),  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
ISBN 054718221X (ISBN13: 9780547182216)

Who doesn't love quirky facts about famous people? Especially people as important (and, let's face it . . . stuffy) as the presidents. 43 poems highlight little known facts about all those leaders of the free world. With historical notes, too.

by J. Patrick Lewis, Michael Slack, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
ISBN 0547513380 (ISBN13: 9780547513386)

This is the perfect example of "read it, don't talk about it!" Because these are math riddles wrapped in parodies of classic poems. Yeah, don't say "huh?," just go read them. And you might want to have the originals on hand when you share them with kids because they'll be asking for them for sure. By Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis.


by Rick Lieder, Helen Frost, Candlewick Press, 2012.
ISBN 0763656011 (ISBN13: 9780763656010)

This one slows it down a little--instead of rowdy, funny poems, it's one poem, about stopping to really see what's around you in nature. Paired with stunning photographs that get even the most antsy middle grader looking closer.


by Ntozake Shange, Rod Brown, Amistad Press, 2012.
ISBN 0061337412 (ISBN13: 9780061337413)

An example of a picture book made for older kids. This one's free verse poems about the Underground Railroad. Their emotion puts readers (and listeners) right there in that world. Perfect for an immediate taste of history.

And finally,


by Laura Purdie Salas, Capstone Press, 2012.
ISBN 1429672099 (ISBN13: 9781429672092)

Okay, so this isn't a book of poems. But who doesn't share poems with kids without wanting to try some of their own? Laura Purdy Salas covers the basics while using pictures as inspiration.

Happy poetry reading! Do you have more ideas? Be sure to add your favorite middle grade poetry books in the comments.

Are Your (Book) Roots Showing?

This is not me.

Hi, everyone! Another new Mayhemer here. Long time middle grade book lover, though. In fact, in a way, that’s what my post is about today. I was all set to write on a different topic for my inaugural Project Mayhem entry, then I went to the bookstore last Saturday. And I came across THIS:

This is the cover on the copy I bought, but I find it puzzling--the mice look like cats, don't they? And the original art was by Garth Williams. (See above ^.) Replacing Garth Williams!?

THE RESCUERS by Margery Sharp! Have you read this book? (Not to be confused with the also fun, but so-different-you-can-hardly-recognize-it movie.) Oh, so good.

THE RESCUERS was one of those books for me when I was a kid. A book I came back to visit, time after time, in my tiny school library. So much so, that when I saw this in the bookstore last weekend, it reminded me of how much my upcoming novel, MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT, is rooted in the humor and heart of THE RESCUERS.

Which got me thinking. And that made me change my post topic. And now--ta-dum!--you're going to be treated to an extended metaphor. (I know! I hope I don’t get kicked out of the group after my first post.)

I started wondering . . . what other books were my roots? Ones that influenced who I grew up to be? That became a part of me? That changed my world and caused me to sprout in a different direction?

What books are my own stories grounded in?

In the branch of me that wrote MALCOLM, I can see roots that go way down deep, like THE RESCUERS'. There's also a little bit of RAMONA (I named the teacher Mr. Binney). Some RATS OF NIMH--those rats were so clever! More heart from THE SUMMER OF THE MONKEYS. Goofiness from BUNNICULA. Maybe even the re-purposing of household items from THE BORROWERS. But there are newer roots for MALCOLM, too. Like THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX. The mysteries in HARRY POTTER. And Andrew Clements’ classroom banter.

I love digging around and seeing how these book roots of mine grew together into something new. But it's also a scary thought as author who has a first book coming out this year. Will my book cause ideas and feelings to germinate in someone else . . . years later? Author Sid Fleischman said, "The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever--they have a special impact." Eep. That's a big responsibility!

Now, granted, I probably have more or deeper book roots than the average person. I grew up to be both a children’s librarian and a children’s author, after all. My book roots probably look like those plants you get from the garden center that have been in their pots too long—all twisted and tangled and wrapped around and around themselves. I sometimes have a hard time talking about non-book-related things.

But I’ll bet you have book roots, too. If you’re a writer, what stories did your books grow from? And if you don’t write, well, I’ll bet if you dig down deep enough, your book roots are there, too.

I’d love to hear about them. After all, I’m still leafing out new branches.

*~W.H. Beck~*