NCTE, School Visits, and a Special Storytime Offer

Sharing an interview I really enjoyed doing, my NCTE schedule, an offer to read to your class, and random photos of my pets, just because.

Congratulations to the winners of my Back-to-School giveaway! Sets of my books have been mailed to: Barkley Elementary School in Pennsylvania, Centerville Elementary School in Texas, Eaglecrest Elementary School in Colorado, Lafayette Elementary School in California, and Parkside Elementary School in Indiana. Thank you to everyone who entered! I’ll do more giveaways in the future, so stay tuned.

Hi friends,

This Friday, November 17, I’ll be at NCTE and I’m looking forward to connecting with teachers, librarians, and other kid lit people. Will you be there? Here’s my schedule for the day:

I’m excited to be signing copies of Sisterhood of Sleuths at my publisher’s booth! I hope you’ll come get a copy if you’re there. I’m also looking forward to my panels— “Writing Connections” will be with authors Ann Braden, Tara Dairman, Sayantani DasGupta, Veera Hiranandani, Joy McCullough, Rajani LaRocca, Elaine Vickers, and educator Jen Vincent will be leading our session. “Girls Breaking Through the Limits” will be with authors Ann Braden, Sayantani DasGupta, Janae Marks, and Anne Nesbet, moderated by educator Aliza Werner.

I also thought it would be fun, while I’m at NCTE, to carry around a stack of A Good Deed Can Grow to give away randomly. (Assuming I don’t forget to pack them.) So if you spot me walking around and I’m holding my picture book, that means I have copies to give away and would be very happy to give you one! Just come up and say something like, “Hi! I’m a newsletter subscriber and read that you’re giving away copies of your picture book!” And then I will be excited to see you and hand you a book!¹ (I’ll be excited to see you regardless, so please say hi if you see me. Conventions can be really fun and inspiring, but they’re also often a bit nerve-wracking—at least for me—and it helps to know I’m among friends.)

Guinea Pig Break

In non-NCTE news, I did some awesome school visits this fall. I spent a week at a local school reading A Good Deed Can Grow to nine different K-3 classes! I loved it, and it was especially fascinating to me how every group responded to and noticed different things about the book. One group was very enthusiastic about the traveling hearts illustrator Holly Hatam carried throughout the story, another especially liked seeing the different appearances the turtle makes. The kindergartners were working on writing their letters, and so I received several questions wondering how I learned to write my letters so well. (Lots of practice!) That week, the school was focusing on community building and kindness, so the book was a great complement for the conversations they were having in class.

I also traveled to southern California to visit two schools because Sisterhood of Sleuths is on the Battle of the Books list in their district! I gave assembly talks to a variety of grades, and met with the BOB kids at each school for special lunches that were so much fun! And I got to see my book as a cookie for the first time! And there were lobster balloons and Nancy Drew decor (that will make sense if you’ve read Sisterhood of Sleuths)—but best of all was talking to students who had read and loved the book, and just talking with kids about reading and books in general.

I love making connections with kids over books, and it made me wish I could visit even more schools, but I’m limited with how much time I can dedicate to school visits and how often I can travel. And I know many schools are limited by budgets! So I came up with an idea that might be a great fit for both of us. I’m offering a 20-minute virtual storytime/picture-book chats along with TEN COPIES of A Good Deed Can Grow for $100. If you’d like more copies so each of your students can receive their own signed copy, I can connect you with a local bookseller who offers an educator discount, or we can figure out some other way to make that happen. I’m also happy to schedule the virtual storytime chats without any books for $50. Reach out to me via the contact form on my website if you’re interested in scheduling a virtual storytime visit!

If you have absolutely no budget, I will also be doing World Read Aloud Day again next year and should have 6 or 7 slots available. I’ll open up the sign-ups to newsletter subscribers first, probably in early January? Stay tuned for more info if you’re interested in that, but know that my schedule filled up quickly last year, so no guarantees. Also, if you’re reading one of my novels with your class or book group, I also do free 15-minute QA calls, as long as they work with my schedule.

Other than school visits and preparing for NCTE, I’ve been making progress on the draft of my next middle-grade novel. We decided to change the title—I can’t remember if I mentioned that here before. The original title was On the Bright Side, which I liked, but there are other factors that go into picking a title for your book besides liking it. Marketing, for example. Earlier this year the picture book The Bright Side by Chad Otis was published, and this fall the middle-grade graphic novel Look On the Bright Side by Lily Williams & Karen Schneemann was published. Sometimes similarities between books can be a good thing for marketing purposes. If my book was published this year, maybe me and the other author/illustrators could have done a “Bright Side” tour! That would have been fun. Our books are also quite different, other than the title similarity, so I wouldn’t worry too much about them being confused with one another, but it’s still something I think about. I always google my title ideas to see what comes up in the search, and how that might impact my book’s discoverability.

But the bigger reason why I decided to change the title is because it was based on the name of the town in the story, and the further I got into the story, the more strongly I felt that the town’s name wasn’t right. It was too thematically heavy-handed, for one. And the setting is heavily based on where I grew up in northern California in the 80s. “Bright Side” just doesn’t sound like a northern California town to me. San Jose, San Francisco, Mountain View, Los Altos, Oakland, San Mateo, Moraga, Palo Alto . . . Bright Side. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but the name doesn’t feel right. And when you’re the storyteller, believing in your own fictional town is important. So now the town is Mira Vista, which you could trick me into thinking is an actual city in northern California. The town name isn’t in my new working title, because the town isn’t really what the story is about. The story is about three kids who go missing from this town. I really like my new working title—I especially like that it has a nod to 1985, the year my story is set. I’m not going to share it yet because it still might change, and also, I think it will sound better when it’s paired with a fantastic cover, so I’ll save it for the cover reveal.

In addition to working on my next novel, I’ve also been brainstorming some ideas for Book Scavenger fans. I hope to have more to share about that soon, and I also hope you all know how much your support for the series and continued enthusiasm and sharing of the books has meant to me. In 2025 it will be Book Scavenger’s 10-year anniversary, if you can believe that! I really attribute the book’s staying power to you, and all the readers who have continued to recommend the series to others, select it for book clubs, nominate it for state lists and Battle of the Book lists, include it in lesson plans, plan birthday parties around it . . . Readers are what keep books alive, and I am so appreciative to know you’ve connected that way with something I’ve written.

I’ll leave you with this fun interview I did recently for the 2 Kids Interview YouTube channel. Abigail and James asked me some really great questions and I loved talking with them! If you agree that they did a good job, give them a like on their video, and subscribe to their channel to see more of the interviews they’re doing with some amazing authors!

Until next time,

Jenn

"You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing."

― E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

1. Note: I won’t be giving away copies of my picture books at my Sisterhood of Sleuths signing, because that’s being organized by my publisher and I don’t want to complicate things for them. My random picture book giveaway at NCTE is my own whim-based idea.