ARE YOU READY?!?!? How many illustrators can you fit on a podium?

FRIENDS! We are so thrilled that the Book Maker's Dozen will be here tomorrow. Some of them spoke to us on Friday at the Marketing Intensive for Illustrators. We didn't want to give too much of it away on the blog, but we do want you to see Dan Yaccarino's fantastic trailers for one of his impeccable-as-always books, ALL THE WAY TO AMERICA!

Catch Dan Yaccarino, John Rocco, Sophie Blackall, Selina Alko, Sean Qualls, Peter Brown, John Bemelmans Marciano, Sergio Ruzzier, Brian Floca, David Gordon, Aileen Leijten and Brett Helquist on Sunday at 9:15 in the AM!

Ooo, and more of Yaccarino's awesome trailers:

Marketing Intensive for Illustrators - Reaching the Picture Book Audience

Jed Bennett of Penguin, Deb Shapiro, principal of the new Deb Shapiro & Co., a PR, marketing and consulting firm, and Michelle Fadlalla of Simon & Schuster spoke to the attending illustrators about how to help sync their personal marketing efforts with the efforts of their book's publishers.

Great tip from Michelle:  SimonandSchuster.net is a site targeting librarians and teachers, so the marketing elements and lead books on that site may be different from what you might see on bookseller or retail driven SimonandSchuster.com. I think developing separate marketing materials for the same book where appropriate is a wonderfully clever idea all authors or illustrators could take to heart for their grassroots marketing efforts, AND THIS IS JUST THE FIRST OF MANY GREAT IDEAS!

I'm so thrilled with the way the Marketing Intensive for Illustrators turned out. Here are two more tips, and then we'll go on radio silence until the conference officially starts tomorrow morning!!

Super tip from Deb: Any awesome marketing ideas you have are great, great! But the real question is how are you going to effectively disseminate all that information? Know this before you go nuts on, say, a blimp advertising scheme and you remember, as you are boarding that big GOODYEAR, that you are allergic to helium. And heights.

Final helper from Jed: Look first to the communities you are already involved with and use your connections, you never know where you could have a fantastic book event. If you sell 200 books to your Zumba Support Group in the basement of your local Y, and not to unknown kids at a children's book store, it doesn't matter! You've still sold 200 books, and for Jed, that's the goal.

Illustrators Intensive - Sophie Blackall - Crossing Over to New Audiences

Sophie Blackall is teasing us with a photo of her home country, a sunny beach on the blue waters of Australia.

Sophie has always been a bit of a multi-jobber, she describes herself as ILLUSTRATOR, ETC. She’s done fine art painting while moonlighting in scientific medical illustration. Taking design courses while playing with oil paints. Making editorial illustrations for business papers while also doing zodiac drawings for horoscopes.

And Sophie’s lack of job focus has made her the phenom we know and love. I had NO IDEA: that because of an illustration of Sophie’s that Meg Rosoff saw in an airline magazine, Meg eventually hired her for 9 animated detergent commercials in England, which resulted in a relationship with Meg and some of my favorite books were born—MEET WILD BOARS series!

With Sophie’s first picture book job, RUBY'S WISH, things started to get rolling in the book department, but Sophie still wanted to make and paint things that don't fit literally or figuratively in picture books.

It won the Ezra Jack Keats Award! Buy! Buy! Buy! http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780811834902

Besides making picture books, Sophie also loves to do all sorts of wild art and sculpture, painting on walls, on photographs, plates, making skeleton families, collaborating with mega-pop stars, holding collage-ish workshops in Spain, making art for the subway:

“Being an illustrator is a mostly wonderful thing... you get to choose to draw anything... set your own hours... atrophy in your basement while compulsively blogging.”

“To combat this, I leave Brooklyn once a week to go into Manhattan to see the world and meet with people.”

It was on one of these trips that Sophie learned about Missed Connections. If you don’t know about these, STOP reading this trifling blog and go see her site right now!

Sophie posted Missed Connections for free online, and when she wanted to try and get them published in a book together, many said no one would want to pay for something that was already available for free, but TWELVE PUBLISHERS wanted that book.

I love Sophie’s Golden Rule: IF YOU LIKE DOING SOMETHING, FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT YOUR WORK.

There's an opera singer singing in the conference room next to ours, which is kind of a fittingly unrelated way to end Sophie's session, just one more beautiful, unexpected note.

 

Illustrators Intensive -Dan Santat -

Here's Dan eating a baked good and drawing in his sketchbook yesterday morning after signing a load of books at Books of Wonder. If you know Dan, you know he's always nanoseconds away from either completing final art for a project, doing a promotional something or other for one of his published books, or eating a baked good. Here he's doing two out of three (THAT WE CAN SEE.)

This morning, Dan's telling us how to market ourselves early on in our careers and on a limited budget.

#1 Utilize free image sites like Tumblr, or Flickr to get your work out there, including final art spreads that are sneak peeks at your soon-to-be-published picture books. Dan likens it to seeing a Cinnabon sign at the mall. The more you see the sign, the more you think you want to stuff your face with undercooked dough smothered in cream cheese icing... or a picture book. Also, art directors and editors like to look on Tumblr/Flickr, you're not only promoting your books, you're potentially reaching people who want to hire you.


#2 Build a network of peers Dan really enjoyed doing Illustration Friday and thinks commenting on other sites, and commenting on your own site's comments is a courteous and important thing to do every week.

#6 If you build it they will come, but you constantly have to show them the door Dan credits John Tesh as the website genius that makes Dan's website genius. Dan repeats themes on his website (like his clone photo series, he says each photo only takes about 20 minutes and is a good way to practice Photoshop.) Dan also has a special sketchbook that he sells original pages from on his Tumblr site

Dan's the king of viral marketing (which maybe most of us need approval for, but if you are as good as Dan, you can probably go for it!)

#10 You can do as much social networking that you want, but if your work isn't up to par, you aren't going to make it.

#11 is maybe the essence of Dan: Take what you have and do more with it, Dan says he's really not a good and helpful person that gives 150% in every flipping avenue, but he does. He practices what he preaches in dealing with family, friends, students, kids, librarians, booksellers, the media, cats.

#12-#15 Are some really juicy tips about how illustrators can use Facebook to get work!

Illustrators Intensive - John Rocco - New Methods for Promoting Your Book

David Diaz introduces the still-high-on-Caldecott-fumes John Rocco as our first speaker for the morning!

He's got some great tips for illustrators. The first few might be tough to do, though:

John Rocco's Self Marketing & Promoting Your Book in Three Easy Steps

1. Win a Caldecott
2. While waiting for step 1, add the word "licious" to the end of your title
3. Change your name to Mo*

BUY! BUY! BUY! http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781423121909/john-rocco/blackout

And while you wait for the legal name change papers required for Step 3 to be approved, why not spend your time making promotional materials that shine instead of researching the yacht you will buy with your Caldecott royalties? If you have a new book coming out, here're a few things John does right off the bat:


Step 4. Make a website! Put your new book on it!

Step 5. Create a book trailer. John has an entertainment background, so he thought he could "make the hell out of a trailer!" But bells and whistles aren't always what make for a good trailer. He shares two with us. John says the trailer for BLACKOUT is the simplest trailer he's ever made, and it's really stunning:

John says to make a trailer all you need are Photoshop and iMovie, or a flip camera, or your iPhone—simple(ish) tools that most illustrators have access to. (The FLINTHEART trailer was made using AfterEffects.) Licensing the music in FLINTHEART cost John $35 and Candlewick did reimburse him for it.

Put your trailer on your web page, but not just a Quicktime movie, make sure it's the Youtube version so it can be shared. iMovie exports directly to Youtube.**

Be sure you put your web address in the trailer itself as well as its release date, people will want to know where to see more.

He talks about Step 6. Branding, Step 7. Making your own promotional materials, and Step 8. Doing themed events or group events.

Step 12. My favorite takeaway from John's talk: is the free takeaway. He prints out really lovely one-sheets with a short bio as well as images of his book covers and info about each of them, plus his web address. John knows there is a lot of pressure at book events for people to feel like they have to buy a book to get to talk to the author/illustrator. John provides these one-sheets for people to have something to come up and get from his signing table, and who knows, maybe someday they'll buy a book because of something they saw on that one-sheet. And there are rare instances when your books AREN'T at your scheduled book event, so it's a great thing to have something to give the audience.***

Thanks, John!

*But not if your last name is Lest.
** And space.
*** Other than your spleen.

Marketing Intensive for Illustrators - Opening Remarks

Cecilia Yung says howdydo and shares with us all a new way to think about the work we do and how we might benefit from thinking of ourselves as a corporation*. She likes Dan Santat's self-proclaimed CEO status.

Cecilia says—

The reality is: published books jostle one another for space on a children's bookstore bookshelf.

Being a brilliant illustrator is just the beginning,
Being visible is another important step,
Being smart is the most important step to success in children's book illustration.

Since most of you have one pair of hands, 24 hours in your day, and let's face it, limited funds, being smart is making sure that you are the CEO of your company, and that every single one of your books will contribute to your success by thinking of each of your books as an employee. And marketing is what you do as a CEO to make sure your books work around the clock to bring you success.

*I would like to talk to my corporation about how some people always forget to clean the coffee pot thoroughly.