Editor Interview: Harold Underdown (Kane Press)

On December 27, 2021December 28, 2021 By Only Picture BooksIn Editor Interviews2 Comments

This month’s Industry Insider Interview is with Harold Underdown, a Brooklyn-based children’s book editor. His editorial experience includes being Vice President of ipicturebooks.com, editorial director of the Charlesbridge trade program, and an editor for Orchard Books and Macmillan. For a long while, he worked as a consulting/independent editor, a writing and revision teacher, a workshop/retreat leader, and an online writing teacher. As of October 2021, he started work as Executive Editor at Kane Press. That means he’s cutting back on independent editing work, though he’s still going to be teaching and leading workshops.

Most people in the kidlit world, however, likely know Harold best through his informative The Purple Crayon website, which was created in 1995 and remains a valuable resource for the picture book world.

To round things out introduction-wise, here are a few Harold Bio Nuggets.

HUGE Boston Red Sox fan.
Loves the work of Ursula Le Guin and N.K. Jemisin.
Thinks Monty Python is hilarious.
Wrote The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books.
Was obsessed with LEGOs as a kid.
Played cricket as a student at Haverford College.

Now that we know Harold a good bit better than we did 90 seconds ago, let’s get to that interview and see what he has to say about the world of picture books, discover the origin of The Purple Crayon, and find out about his cool new job!

OPB: When did you first realize you were going to be in the book industry?

HU: Unlike some people, I did not come out of college thinking, “Oh, I want to work in publishing!” In fact, for quite a long time, I thought I was going to be a teacher, which I think initially came from the fact that my dad was a university professor. But since he was a university professor, I saw the departmental politics and the requirement to publish. I didn’t want to go into that.

OPB: *laughing* Yeah. After working at seven colleges and universities, I know what you mean.

HU: After college, I went into a teaching job at a Friend’s school, and I kind of struggled with it, which led to my doing a master’s degree in education. Before that, I hadn’t had any actual training in teaching–I thought it was something you could just do.

OPB: It’s harder than most realize!

HU: I finally ended up in New York City, teaching in the public schools through an arrangement they had that was called a temporary per diem license for people who had not completed all the formal requirements, which, even though I had a master’s, I had not done. That was an interesting experience. I worked at an alternative elementary school on the Upper West Side. It was a great school. But really, I was kind of out of my depth because at that point, I still did not have enough experience or supervision. The part of it that I really liked, however, was working with the kids on reading. I read out loud to them. And they loved it.

This was a mixed group of third and fourth graders. I still remember reading James and the Giant Peach to this group of New York City kids. Since I had English family on my father’s side, I was able to do different British accents for the insects, and they loved that. That taught me something: here’s this book that’s mostly set in England and these kids from New York City were totally into it.

I taught a very diverse group of kids, yet I couldn’t find books in which they could see themselves and I was definitely looking for that. There were a few, but there weren’t nearly as many as there are now. And I thought, okay, so maybe if I’m not going to be teaching, maybe I can go into publishing and help create more books for kids like the ones I’m teaching. And that was actually what ended up happening.

OPB: How’d you go from that goal to landing that first publishing job?

HU: I did the typical pre-Internet job-hunting things. What ended up working was that my stepmother’s mother used to work at Greenwillow and still had some publishing connections. I sent my resume to someone she knew who was working at Macmillan–this being the old Macmillan–and she passed it along.

From that, I got started as an editorial assistant.

OPB: What was the first picture book that you worked on by yourself?

HU: Well, I wouldn’t say I worked on it completely by myself, but the first picture book that I regard as a book that I was deeply interested in and really wanted to acquire and bring on was The Foot Warmer and the Crow by Evelyn Coleman. It tells the story of an enslaved man who escapes from slavery with the help of a crow. It’s a folktale-like story–very, very powerful. And I wanted to find some appropriate art to go with it–a picture book illustrator who could really carry the story.

I looked through the art files and I talked to our art director. We eventually came up with someone who I thought was a good possibility. I told Evelyn about it and showed her samples. She wasn’t crazy about this guy. And she said, “Well, there’s this artist here in Atlanta. Can I send you some pictures of his art? I think he should be the illustrator.” Of course, I said the usual thing, “You know, we REALLY know what we’re doing here. It’s up to us to choose the artists…but if you want to, you can send the art to me.” And so she sent me a whole package of samples by Daniel Minter. At the time, he was a fine artist doing sculptures.

I looked at the samples and said, “Oh, yes. This is exactly what we need.” And fortunately, Daniel was open to the idea of illustrating a picture book.

OPB: I don’t know this book well, I’m afraid. It came out in the early 1990s–well after I stopped reading picture books as a kid, and not yet where I was reading them again as an adult. How was the book received when it came out?

HU: The book itself turned out really well. I think in some ways, it was a book that was ahead of its time. It didn’t stay on the market long. But it led to Daniel Minter becoming a children’s book illustrator, so that was a good thing.

OPB: Agreed. His art has received a Caldecott Honor, and with good reason. Now, let’s get back to you. In speaking with so many industry folks over the years, it seems to me that the picture book world does a very good job letting new agents and editors learn in an apprenticeship model. Was that how it worked for you?

HU: That’s an interesting question. And I actually would say that I didn’t have a full on apprenticeship kind of situation. Because I was working for Macmillan Children’s Books–a large, general purpose children’s book imprint–we did everything from picture books up to young adult. We even had the Macmillan Dictionary for Children along with a couple of other reference books.

There were three or four editors within the imprint–Judith Whipple, Beverly Reingold, and my boss Neal Porter, who was the publisher. I was officially working for Neal, but I also interacted with everybody else, so I was actually learning from all of them. One of the things they did within the department was make copies of all their important correspondence and put it in a file. That would get circulated weekly so we could all see what everybody was working on. That was always really interesting for me to read, because I could see how an editor wrote an editorial letter and how they corresponded with an artist. Another lesson I learned was the reality that publishing is a business.

OPB: That’s a tough realization, isn’t it?

HU: I thought of publishing as this noble calling where people are simply making wonderful books. And it is! But also, for every single book that we acquired, I had to do a P&L [profit and loss statement]. And it had to work out and make money for us, after I put in all the expenditures and an overhead percentage and so on. It had to hit a target number of profit.

OPB: You were a freelance editor for a long time. What were the benefits and challenges of moving away from working with publishing houses?

HU: I didn’t really get out of it. Because even when I was not working at a trade house, I was still very involved with the industry through my freelance work and the workshops that I did. All along, my intention was to get back there. What happened instead was that I ended up going off on a very long tangent.

OPB: Do tell!

HU: I had been working at Charlesbridge, which was a great place to work–a very good company. I was essentially commuting from New York City to Boston. My wife and I wanted to have a baby. We both agreed that we couldn’t do that if I was in Boston half the time. So, I looked for jobs back in New York. Unfortunately for me, the one that I got was working for a book packager. This was 2000 or so, and the owner was trying to set up a children’s focused ebook company. There were two problems with this. One of them was that it was way early to do a children’s ebook company. This was several years before the Kindle format came along. Nobody had figured out how to how to sell ebooks. Consumers didn’t want ebooks. There was probably some kind of market there–in the library market–but the owner wasn’t interested in that. So, we were going after a market that didn’t exist.

The second problem was the owner ran his own business badly, and treated his staff badly. Fortunately, this didn’t last long because he ran out of funds. He had some seed capital from Time Warner but he blew through it in a year and a half.

Honestly, it was a terrible experience in some ways. Yet I learned things from that, for sure, like the importance of finding out what the culture of the place is like before you take a new job. I’ll never do that again!

OPB: I hear you there! Culture matters. What happened next?

HU: I needed to find something quickly to support us. This was now the down slope of the .com years, so there wasn’t a lot of hiring going on. I consider myself lucky to have gotten a job at McGraw-Hill then. My teaching background was something they were looking for, along with my editorial background. I worked there on and off until fairly recently.

If you know anything about educational publishing, this fact will not surprise you–while I was at McGraw-Hill, they went through four rounds of layoffs. For someone who had worked in trade publishing, it was hard to understand what the problem was, but I think part of it was that they did textbook publishing, and that’s a business in which there’s enough money involved that they could afford to hire expensive consultants. And each time, the expensive consultants would tell them to do some something else to fix the company. Unfortunately, one of the things that was always involved was laying off people.

The last time this happened, I was one of the people who got laid off.

OPB: I’ve written textbooks, and I’ve seen the carousal of editors in educational publishing firsthand. You’re exactly correct.

HU: It wasn’t the end of the world. I had freelance work, which I’d been doing on the side, so I had connections to build up. But I also knew this was the time to get back into trade publishing. I had looked into doing that even while I was at McGraw-Hill, and I had talked to people about it, but I never found the right position for me, given my experiences and abilities. So I got very serious about hunting in a way I hadn’t before, and the Kane Press job came along.

OPB: When did that happen?

HU: Last summer. I’d had Kane on my radar because Bobbie Combs, who I know from working at the Highlights Foundation, had introduced me to Juliana Lauletta, who’s their publisher. So, I knew a little bit about them. Kane Press is interesting, because Joanne Kane, who founded Kane Press about 30 years ago, started the press very deliberately wanting to publish books that had an educational component. But the books weren’t textbooks. She was aiming at a very specific market, and that’s what she did as an independent publisher for quite a long time.

Kane was the first company that Thinkingdom Media Group acquired when they moved into the US market. As you probably heard, they also bought Boyds Mills, Calkins Creek, and Wordsong. And they made a deal to buy minedition, a picture book company started by Michael Neugebauer, who’s a very well-known Swiss publisher and a picture book specialist. He had worked at North South Books, and then he went out on his own and started minedition. And he decided to sell it to what became Astra. This year, they also brought Jill Davis in, who started Hippo Park as her personal imprint. So, they essentially assembled a publishing house, with an adult imprint and a literary magazine as well. And in 2020, they set up Astra Publishing House.

At that point, they wanted to bring somebody else in at Kane Press to help build it up and, hopefully, take it in a few new directions. Basically, that’s what I’m aiming to do.

OPB: Why was Kane Press the right fit for you?

HU: It was the right match for me because the things that I want to build out are very much things that they were already thinking about. For example, Kane Press has always done series publishing, like Math Matters and Science Solves It! More recently, there’s the Eureka! The Biography of an Idea series. All of these were developed in house and they would then hire authors and illustrators to create individual titles.

We’re going to continue to do that. But I made the point right at the beginning that while we may be brilliant, there are only so many ideas we can have. What if we open up the doors to proposals from the outside and see what people offer us?

That’s essentially been my main focus in the first two months–writing out how that would work, developing guidelines, and letting people know that we’re open. We’ve pretty narrowly defined it because we don’t just want to get lots of random submissions. We want to get series proposals with a sample manuscript and there are certain things we look for in them. We’re being cautious and we’re only looking at these if they’re from published authors, or from an agent.

OPB: Let’s help out some writers and agents here. In your capacity as Executive Editor at Kane Press, what ARE you looking for?

HU: One of the things people need to do before they do anything else is familiarize themselves with some of the books that Kane has published and try to get a feel for what distinguishes it from other companies. Because one of the things I’ve noticed already is people think, “Kane is educational, so they must be publishing those library series like Lerner and Capstone do.” And that’s what writers send us.

That’s not what we publish.

Also, almost all of our books are illustrated rather than photo illustrated. In fact, we did a photo series long before I arrived here. It was kind of a disaster.

The series that they’ve succeeded with have been ones that somehow walk a line between the school and library market, but they also speak to parents, maybe parents who are homeschooling or maybe parents who are just looking for something that’s going to supplement what kids are getting in school.

OPB: So they’re going to have a trade feel to them?

HU: Before I arrived, they’ve already been upgrading their illustration style and moving in a direction that makes the books look more like something you would see on the shelf in a bookstore. To me, the goal is that we’re going to publish books that are going to be every bit Kane Press books in the sense that there’s an educational component, either in the story, or, for nonfiction, in the facts. It’s got to have really great back matter, too, which is something Kane Press has a name for.

OPB: Let’s circle back to your website, The Purple Crayon. That’s how a lot of people know you, I think. Why did you start that? And what has it done for you over the years?

HU: The Purple Crayon goes back to 1995. Believe it or not, it was something that I started in between working at Orchard Books and Charlesbridge. When I moved to Orchard with Neal Porter, I got caught up in a kind of messy situation. Orchard Books–which at the time was owned by Grolier, which was primarily a reference publishing company–didn’t know how to deal with this sort of high-end trade children’s imprint that they somehow had. I’m still not entirely sure how they actually owned it. They didn’t know how to deal with it, and so people were unhappy there. And this was Neal Porter, Dick Jackson, and Melanie Kroupa. Three pretty amazing editing people.

We happened to be in the same office building on Madison Avenue with Dorling Kindersley and we would be going up and down in the elevator with Dorling Kindersley people. Neal in particular got talking to them, and it led to the three of them leaving and starting a new imprint at Dorling Kindersley that didn’t last long, but it got them out of the Grolier situation. I ended up getting laid off. So, while I was looking around for the next thing–which turned out to be Charlesbridge–my brother told me about this thing he discovered called the World Wide Web.

I had already been going to SCBWI conferences and the like, and giving presentations. I had one called Getting Out of the Slush Pile that was based on my experience as an editorial assistant and a young editor, being the person who read all the manuscripts that came in that nobody else wanted to read. This was back in the day when publishers hadn’t closed the doors to open submissions yet.

I thought I could put this presentation up on the web, and then people could find it from all over the world. And so I did that. The website initially was that and a couple other articles that I’d written. I think I pretty early on started the Who’s Moving Where page, which is a sort of chronological listing of editors who’ve moved around, or new imprints that have been started. And I just update that whenever I can, which isn’t very often these days.

OPB: The industry can move pretty fast sometimes. I feel your pain there.

HU: In terms of what’s on the website, some parts of it, honestly, I haven’t paid any attention to for years, but I try to keep up. The key informational articles and the Who’s Moving Where page, though, I try to keep up to date.

Having that website kind of increased my visibility. Definitely, it’s led to conference opportunities and things like that. And also interestingly enough, that led directly to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books.

OPB: How was it making that book?

HU: This is back in like 2000/2001. The Complete Idiots series had this model where they would publish one in a particular area, and in this case, it was just publishing in general. If it was successful, then they’d look for ways to kind of subdivide it. So they thought, we’ve got a successful The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published. Now, we should do children’s books and romance novels, and I don’t know what else they did, but I was not the only subdivided idea they had.

They would go out and look for experts and essentially commissioned those people to write them. And they found me through The Purple Crayon. Writing for them was an interesting experience. They had you write a very detailed outline, down to the subheads of the entire book. I think it ended up being about 10 pages long and and then you just kind of crank that out. One of the good things about that kind of structure is it’s very flexible. They let me say the things I wanted to say.

We were able to update it a couple of times since then. Unfortunately, they’ve sort of shifted their model, and they’ve stopped doing revised editions–they only do new titles. So the current edition that’s out in the market is about 10 years old.

Most of it’s still still pretty solid. I wish I could update it again.

OPB: I have to ask–what’s your editing superpower?

HU: That’s a great question. I think that this applies both to a freelance situation and to in-house work. I try to understand what an author is trying to do themselves, where are they going with this story or this piece of nonfiction. I try to get inside of it and see what’s working, what isn’t working. I try not to impose my ideas about what they should do but instead help them build it in the direction that they’re already trying to go. To me, that’s the best kind of editing.

Now, I don’t necessarily do that all the time. There are times when, for market reasons or practical reasons, I may say, “We need to do X, Y, and Z.” Or “This is too long.” That’s not editing from inside of the story, though.

What I always try to do is to get into the story to really take it in and understand where the writer’s going with it, and help them do it better.

OPB: One last question for this part of the interview. What are Harold Underdown’s feelings about art notes?

HU: I talk about this regularly because I teach the Crash Course in Children’s Publishing: Everything You Need to Know at the Highlights Foundation, which is probably the only course like that anywhere. In it, we focus on the practical and the business side of publishing and how that all works. So, it’s not a writing or illustrating craft course. We get a lot of people who are what I would call serious beginners. They’ve gotten into the field and are probably writing, but they just don’t understand how things work and they want to find out.

And art notes always come up.

I will say my thinking on art notes has evolved. Back in the day, I would always say–and this used to be the standard thing people said–“Don’t put in art notes. Don’t tell the illustrator what to do.”

I’m not as absolute now. The big thing I warn people about–I see people doing this a lot in manuscripts that I’ve been given a conferences, or the stuff that my students show in workshops–is using art notes as a substitute for the story that you want to tell. If you’re doing, that you’re not using art notes correctly. You should only be using art notes when it’s absolutely necessary to tell the illustrator something they won’t figure out simply by reading the entire manuscript.

OPB: Okay, Harold. It’s time for the Speed Round. Fast questions and faster answers, please. Are you ready?

HU: All set!

OPB: What’s the best place for REAL New York City pizza?

HU: There are a lot of options here, but I’m just going to mention one in my immediate neighborhood: Graziella’s Pizza on Vanderbilt Avenue.

OPB: “If I could be any picture book character for a day, it’d be ____________.”

HU: Harold from Harold and the Purple Crayon, of course. What’s great about him is that he never stops trying. He gets into trouble, and he draws his way out of it. He’s very creative.

OPB: What’s a secret vice?

HU: I picked up a fascination with cricket from my English father, and I still follow it. I like the international politics of the sport, which are fascinating. If you’re a soccer fan, for example, you know how corrupt FIFA is, right? There’s similar stuff in cricket, though, perhaps not as quite as pervasive.

OPB: Biggest time waster?

HU: Facebook and Twitter.

OPB: Your picture book philosophy in five words or less.

HU: Picture books are for children.

OPB: Thanks so much, Harold. This was truly informative! Best of luck at Kane Press.

Freelance Editor Interview: Brooke Vitale

On August 23, 2021August 23, 2021 By Only Picture BooksIn Editor Interviews

To understand why Brooke Vitale has been on the OPB Must-Interview list for some time, one need only look at three numbers.

100+ books written
750+ self-published books edited
1,500+ traditionally published books edited

If you want a bonus number, try this:

350+ of the books she’s been involved with have earned 5‑star ratings

Or look at a few of her own recent picture books!

So, yeah, she knows her stuff as both an editor and author. That’s why I let this interview run a bit longer than the norm–she has SO MUCH to offer. See for yourself!

RVC: When did you first realize you were a writer?

BV: Honestly, I didn’t realize I was a writer until my job threw me into having no choice but to write. One of the things that I think a lot of people don’t know about publishing companies is that lots of the books are written in-house by the editors because the publishing company can’t necessarily afford to hire an author to write something that’s going to sell for $7.99. So, it falls on the editors to go ahead and write it. And also to come up with the idea for the book, to look at the list, and say I don’t have anything for Valentine’s Day—I’d better write it and hire an illustrator quickly, then rush it out the door.

Actually, that’s how some of my favorite books came about. For example, when I was at Penguin, my designer happened to be a paper engineer. We did a book called Everyone Says I Love You, which was about the words “I love you” in different countries. I wrote it, and he did the pops, and it was gorgeous.

It was when I really started doing all of that that I learned I could write. And of course, the more you do, the better you get at it.

RVC: When you’re an editor who’s also authoring books for the publisher, do you get treated like an author?

BV: Not only do you not get treated like an author, chances are good that you don’t even get to put your name on the book. It’s just “We need to have books on our list. I will do better if I can keep the list going and keep sales up. I will get a promotion if I can bring in X amount of dollars. So, let me write this book and move it along.”

RVC: Let’s leap back to the beginning of your career. What was your pathway to becoming an editor?

BV: This probably wouldn’t surprise anybody given that I work in books, but I was that kid who was happiest being in my room. Reading. Even in college, I did a lot of reading.

RVC: You and me both!

BV: I went into school thinking I was going to be a physical therapist, and then I took chemistry and that idea went away. Then I went into psychology and really didn’t like it, so I ended up an English major with a focus in children’s books because I could graduate and figure it out later. I remember talking to a friend one night during my junior year of college, trying to figure out what am I going to do with myself. I asked, “Why can’t I just have a job where I read all day?” And my friend said to me, “You know, there’s a whole industry around that, right?”

Honestly, no—the fact that there were people who put the books together had never occurred to me as a career path. I was lucky enough that this friend actually worked at the university press, and she was able to help me get an interview there. I interned for one semester at the University Press of Florida and realized that I liked it. Afterward, I applied to graduate school at NYU, where I got my Master’s in publishing. And while I was there, I managed to land a general internship at Sterling Publishing, which is a company owned by Barnes and Noble.

RVC: What was it like at Sterling?

BV: Sterling did a lot of DIY books. That was what they had done for years. I walked into the office my first day, and they showed me this stack of paste-ups for books. Literally, what that means is that the pictures used to be glued to a board, and the text used to be typed up and pasted to the board, and then they would scan it that way. So I got there and they said, “We need you to take all the pictures off and find the author. Hopefully, the author is still alive! And we need you to mail everything back.” This was how I started my career in publishing—pulling 30-year-old pictures off of paste-ups in a dusty room.

After I’d been there about six months, a position opened in the children’s department. I had gotten to know the editorial director there, Frances Gilbert—who is now over at Random House—and she hired me on. That was how I got my start. She taught me everything. I learned so much working from her. And some of my favorite books I ever worked on were done there. Like Who’s Haunting the White House, which was a nonfiction about all the ghosts in the White House. It was such a fun book, and she really helped me shape it!

That’s the thing about publishing—it’s a mentorship business. You really have to find somebody who can teach you how to do the job, because you can’t teach it to yourself. You need someone who will sit and do an edit with you and teach you why they’re making those decisions. And what’s going to make a good book, as well as what’s not going to make a good book.

RVC: Let’s talk Disney. You worked there for seven years. What kind of hurdles did you face as an editor there?

BV: Working with the studio was one of the bigger challenges. They have really specific things that they’re okay with, and really specific things that they’re not okay with. The thing is, as an editor, you’re always getting on calls with the movie producers—both from current movies and ones that are years old! They’re looking at everything. They’re approving everything to make sure that it’s on brand, because the goal is always that they’re going to put out more movies, more shorts, whatever it is. And you, as the publishing arm, have become the storytelling arm of extending their brands. They need to know that you’re not doing anything that will then be at odds with their plans. Which means that sometimes you have to make changes you don’t expect.

RVC: Got an example?

BV: Sure. I remember working on this one book, A Frozen Heart, which was basically a retelling from the dual perspective of Anna and Hans. And they said, “You cannot say at any point in this book that Anna wants to find love.”

I said, “She sings an entire song about that.” And they said, “Yes. But you can’t do it.”

Whatever the reasons were, they had them, so we worked around it. But that was always the biggest hurdle—managing the needs of the studio, because everything we did ultimately came from them. They had to be happy with the end product and managing the needs of a good book.

The two aren’t always the same thing.

RVC: Here’s the question every writer wants me to ask. What’s the secret to getting to write a book for Disney?

BV: Know somebody. Honestly, that’s the secret. Most of the people who are hired to write a Disney book are industry insiders. We tend to turn to writers and editors that we know. We KNOW that they know the license and can knock it out of the park.

There will be other opportunities occasionally because things have changed in the last few years for Disney and the world as a whole because of the need for diversity and inclusiveness. For example, when Disney put out Moana, we weren’t allowed to bring on a single person to write or illustrate unless they had a Pacific Islander background. The same happened when they put out Coco.

I know somebody who just wrote a book for Luca, but she’d never done anything for them before. But she knew somebody who knew somebody, and they said, “We need someone who fits this mold, because we want to make sure that what we’re writing is true to the culture.” So, there’s always the chance that somebody’s going to find you and ask you to come in and do something. But unfortunately, it really is who you know.

RVC: Wow.

BV: There’s probably only 100 freelance writers out there who are doing all of the writing for every licensed product across publishing.

RVC: Does that feel like a lot to you? Or does that feel like a small number in your perspective?

BV: It’s probably about right. When I worked at Disney, I had about 12 to 15 authors that I went to every single time. Across our entire group at Disney, we had maybe 25 authors that we were turning to, but a lot of those are the same authors I was turning to when I was at Penguin. You take who you know, you take who you trust, you take somebody who’s maybe been at that company before and understands how it works.

Licensed publishing is its own unique piece, again, because of all the approvals processes, and that an author doesn’t necessarily have the freedom they would have if they were writing something for themselves. There are a lot of rules around what story they need to tell. There are a lot of rules around how a character can develop, and you need somebody who isn’t going to pitch a fit if you come back after you told them the manuscript is perfect and then, suddenly, the whole thing has to change.

RVC: I’m sensing that this has happened to you a few times.

BV: It’s happened to me as an editor and an author. A few years ago, I was writing a book for Scholastic around Disney’s Kingdom Hearts. We were under the impression that we could do one thing. My editor asked me to write the first three chapters, which I did. And then when it went off to all of the licensors—there are several tied to that franchise—they came back and said, “We’re not actually comfortable with this after all. Start from scratch.”

It’s one of those things where you go, “Okay, that’s the business.” You can’t mess with future plans.

RVC: Let’s talk a bit more about editors. Is it accurate to say that there is more than one type of editor at a traditional publishing company?

BV: That’s right. You have editors who are acquiring and editing books, and then you have the editors who are coming up with their lists, writing them, and getting them out the door.

So, for a traditional picture book, you’re going to have an editor who is getting all of the manuscripts in from agents. They’re looking at everything, they’re finding what they love, and they’re picking out the few that they really, really love, because the publishing house can only publish so many books in any one year.

A house might have an imprint that has five editors who are acquiring manuscripts. For any given season—which is how scheduling is broken out for publishers, with two or three seasons per year—you might have only four or five books each of them is working on. So, they’re finding the ones that they really love. They’re bringing them to the editorial group and the rest of their team, saying, “Do you love it as much as I love it?” Then they’re bringing it to a sales and marketing team and asking, “I love this, but can we sell it?”

As an editor, you need to have a sense of the market. You need to know that this really is something that can be sold, but it’s still going to come down to a sales and marketing thing. They might say, “It’s great, but I think I can only do 600 copies,” or they might say, “I think I can do 10,000 copies.” That input is going to make a big difference. But once an editor gets that yes, an editor’s job is to shape the story. That means working with the words, but also commenting on art and design, shepherding the book through the whole publishing process. A book’s success reflects on the editor, so it’s their baby to oversee from start to finish.

RVC: What do most people not appreciate or understand about an editor?

BV: I hear from a lot of people who say, “A publisher is just going to tear my book to shreds. It’s not going to be my book when they’re done with it.” I think the most important thing for anybody to understand about an editor or acquiring a book at a publishing house is all of the hoops that an editor has to jump through to be able to acquire your book. It’s not just one person saying, “I love it, and I’m taking it.” It’s also that editorial group, the sales and marketing group, and it might even be taken to Barnes and Noble and Amazon to see if they think that they can sell it.

Any book that’s coming from agents is going to be in a good place to begin with. It should be something that has enough promise that an editor feels they can get it where it needs to go. The editorial process is about going back and forth with the author, finding the things that can change as well as the things that NEED to change. And sometimes there really are things that NEED to change. For example, is this a book that Scholastic would take? They only take clean books. They don’t want anything that’s going to cause a parent to say, “Wait a minute, I’m not sure about this.” So, sometimes an editor has to go back to the author and say, “I know you love this part, but we need to change it.” Or, “I know you love this, but we’re talking about the difference between 2,000 units and 20,000 units.”

But here’s the thing. At the end of the day, an editor’s not acquiring anything they don’t love already. They don’t want to tear it to shreds—they want to make it as good as it can be.

RVC: In 2017, you shifted your career to freelancing. As a freelance editor, what’s the process you use when someone hires you to work on their picture book manuscript?

BV: I always break the manuscript down into two different pieces. I start with what I call an assessment, and that’s when I’m looking for all of the big problems. It’s pretty rare that I get a manuscript that doesn’t have at least a few big problems, like you’re telling me what’s happening instead of showing me what’s happening. Or there’s not enough emotion here—that happens a lot.

I’m also looking for potholes. I’m looking for places where something doesn’t make sense or is handled ineffectively. I had one manuscript come to me about a year ago, and I said to the author, “You’re going to hate me, but you’ve written this entire book from the wrong character’s point of view. This isn’t their story.” He looked at it and said, “Okay, I’m going to try.” He rewrote it. He later told me that he thinks it’s now 1,000 times better.

And of course I’m looking at word count. For a picture book, you can’t have 45 words telling me what somebody looks like when I can look across the page and see that for myself. All of those things need to go. A story needs to move along at a fast clip. It needs to keep a child’s attention. There are just so many stories that get bogged down in details that aren’t necessary. Sometimes details do matter. But it’s not necessary most of the time. Remember—a picture book audience is three to seven. They have no attention span. If you’re not moving the story along, and if with every page turn, you’re not shifting scenes or shifting emotional moments, you’ve lost your reader. They have gotten up and walked away to go find toys to play with, or different books to read or whatever it might be.

After handling a large-scale assessment on the manuscript, I perform my developmental edit, which is really just finessing it, bringing it all together, figuring out the actual words, determining where page turns will go, and offering up art notes for the illustrator.

RVC: Where does rhyme fit in here?

BV: There are two ways of writing a picture book. Either you write it in rhyme—which so many love to do—or you write it in prose.

With prose, it’s really easy for a reader to stop and say, “What does that mean?” and not lose the thread of the story. It’s a lot easier to use big words in prose. But when you’re rhyming, if a kid stops because they don’t understand that word, you’ve not only stopped the story, you’re asking the kid to reset their head back to the meter of the rhyme. That’s a big part of editing rhyme—looking at your meter. If you’re rhyming, are the beats hitting exactly where they need to hit? If a reader’s stumbling over the words, it ruins the whole reading experience. It’s got to be seamless.

All of that is what goes into making a manuscript sing—making sure the kid stays engaged and wants to turn the next page.

RVC: What tips do you have for taking rhyming that’s draft-good and making it publishing-quality good?

BV: There are two big problems with rhyme. Like I said before, one is not understanding meter.

The most common kinds of meter used in picture books are an iambic meter, which is stressing every other beat, and an anapestic meter, which is stressing every third beat. I recommend that writers literally stand there and clap out what they’ve written—clap hard for a stressed, and give a little clap for non-stressed beat.

For visual people, I color code everything. For iambic meter, my stressed beat is red, and my downbeat is black. Like this:

For anapestic, I do it a bit different. I keep my stressed beats red. My first downbeat is blue and my second downbeat is green. Then I’m back to my next red stressed beat. If the line isn’t following that pattern—if I have red, blue, green, red, blue, green … uh-oh, there’s an extra thing there—something’s not right.

Those are my top two ways to nail meter. As far as the rhyme itself, the biggest problem I see is either using words that don’t rhyme at all, or using words that are a near rhyme. It’s just so important with a rhyming book to make sure that the words you’re choosing to go with the end of the line ACTUALLY RHYME. “Talk” and “walks” don’t rhyme because the S at the end of “walks” throws it off. Yet I see things like that all the time. I always recommend people go to the website, Rhyme Zone, where you can type in a word, and it’ll tell you what actually rhymes. I use it myself all the time just because sometimes you get stuck.

If you can come up with true rhyme and use meter well, you’ll be in a good place most of the time.

RVC: Any warnings about rhyme?

BV: Rhyme doesn’t work well with heavy topics. It’s really hard to have an emotional punch in a picture book when you’re trying to use small rhyming words. When something’s especially dark or deep, I usually suggest taking it out of rhyme.

RVC: What type of clients do you get for your freelance services?

BV: Many of the authors that I work with are actually looking to self publish at this point. They’re looking at the difficulty of getting into a traditional publishing company. And they’re looking at the royalty structure of a publishing company and knowing that, unfortunately, publishers have maybe 10 lead titles out of the year. That’s where they’re putting their marketing dollars. So, all of the marketing efforts still has to go to the author. At a publishing company, they’re also only getting 10% of the profits instead of 100%.

While there absolutely are benefits to publishing companies—and don’t get me wrong, distribution is one of the huge ones—a lot of my authors want more creative control. They’d like to be the ones who are benefiting from their own work.

RVC: You’re still doing a lot of picture book writing, and many of those are with existing franchises. How are those happening?

BV: Like I said, it’s who you know. My colleagues from Disney and Penguin are at all the big companies now. One of my bosses at Disney is now the editorial director for Lucasfilm. So, the first season of The Mandalorian came out and they needed books. I got an email and he said, “I need three books, and I need them in seven days.”

So, I got them to him in four days.

RVC: I’ve said it before, but here it comes again: Wow.

BV: Yeah, that one was fun. Lots of hours on the couch watching TV! But really, it’s those existing relationships. Children’s book publishing is a really small world—there are very few people that you don’t know, or know in passing. Licensed publishing is an even smaller world, because each company is going to have one imprint that’s going to be doing it. Penguin has Penguin Workshop. Simon and Schuster has the Simon Says imprint, etc. All of the editors are moving around within a circle, and they’ve got their go-to people.

RVC: Do you ever get hired as an editor on a project-by-project basis with traditional publishers?

BV: I still do a lot with publishers. I was just hired by a publisher to work on all of their readers. I do a lot with Sourcebooks as well because my former boss is now their custom sales person. She’ll call me and say, “I need you to just take over this project because I know that you know their requirements and know you know how it has to go together—your understand the format.”

RVC: And custom sales are … ?

BV: Nonreturnable books created specifically for a particular store like Costco or Target.

RVC: Gotcha. What role does your family play in your writing or editing process?

BV: Not so much in the editing process. That tends to happen when I’m by myself, because the only role that my children play is being very loud, and it’s hard to edit when they’re screaming behind me.

But in the writing process, they actually do play a big role. And it’s funny, several of the books that I’ve written at this point have come about out of conversations with my husband. He used to say to me, “Why are you editing other people’s books? You should be writing your own book.” And I always said, “I don’t have anything original to say.”

Then he started throwing ideas out. “Well, why don’t you write about this?” I thought, “Okay, well, that sounds kind of fun. Let me noodle around with it for a while.”

And then the next thing you know, I’ve got six books sitting on the back burner, ready to do something with them. Because we do a lot together, there’s a big collaborative process around ideation. And because he’s a very critical person—not in a bad way—he will read something and tell me if it’s garbage. I know that if he’s not laughing at it, if he’s not smiling, I have to go back to the drawing board. If I get a chuckle out of him, I’m probably onto something.

RVC: What’s his background?

BV: He’s in real estate.

RVC: Sometimes non-writers are the best beta readers.

BV: Totally. I read all my books to my kids. If they like them, I know I’m doing well. If they tell me it’s boring and they walk away, then I’ve got to make changes. They’re the target audience.

RVC: Before we end this first part of the interview, I have to ask—what is Charge Mommy Books?

BV: When we were stuck at home last year because of COVID-19, I played out in the backyard a lot with my almost four year old and almost six year old. They started this game where they would literally pick up a baseball bat and run at me with it. They called it Charge Mommy. What I had to do was grab the bat in my hand and send them around in a circle, and then let go. They’d fall back on the ground and crack up, laughing, then they’d say, “Let’s do it again!” This became a common game in my house—Charge Mommy!

During that time, I started jotting down ideas for books. And because I actually had some time on my hands, I was able to start thinking about writing them and thinking about what it is that I like about books that I want to put out in the world. So, Charge Mommy Books is an independent publisher. And our focus is twofold. One is on publishing books that children can enjoy reading and want to read again and again—they’re just good, whimsical fun, and aren’t meant to teach about an issue or not meant to cover a problem in any way but just be something that you can enjoy. And the other piece of it is that we strongly support literacy, because it’s really important to us that children do learn how to read.

We’re starting with a handful of early readers that we’re dropping on Instagram right now, one page at a time, with a literacy activity that goes with each individual page. And we’re working with a literacy specialist to make sure that those are actually geared toward the right age range. What we really want and the reason we’re doing it on Instagram is because we know how much time parents spend on their phone. We want to give them a moment to engage with their children. Let’s look at this together. Let’s make this a useful technology moment.

We’re also planning to donate a portion of all of our proceeds to literacy foundations. I’m based in Connecticut, and there are certain areas here that don’t have the support they need, though there are obviously areas in New York City that could use our support, too.

RVC: Last question for this part of the interview. When will the first Charge Mommy Books be available?

BV: We’re looking at doing a pre-order on our first round of books, probably in December, with books to be available in the spring. Our list will be a mix of books written by me and books that we are republishing by authors whose rights have reverted back to them.

RVC: Okay, it’s time for the Lightning Round. Zippy zappy Qs and As please. Are you ready?

BV: Absolutely!

RVC: Your favorite eat-out place in Connecticut?

BV: Garden Catering is a little place here that has turned into a chain. They have the best chicken nuggets and French fries, plus these things called cones that are like tater tots, but puffier.

RVC: Your favorite Disney villain?

BV: Maleficent.

RVC: Biggest time waster?

BV: Internet—Instagram, Facebook, social media.

RVC: A recent picture book that really got your attention.

BV: One of my favorites is Calvin Gets the Last Word, which is from the perspective of a dictionary that has a boy who carries it everywhere to look up words. And it’s one of those stories that uses words that are well outside of the child’s understanding but still uses them properly. The end sheets actually give the kid version of the definition of those words. I think it’s so well done. Brilliant. It actually opens up conversation about bigger words, the importance of words. I’m loving it.

RVC: What’s the most important trait you bring to the keyboard?

BV: It’s my problem solving. There are a lot of veterans out there who will say to somebody, “It’s not working!” But “It’s not working!” doesn’t get you very far. It has to be, “It’s not working. And here’s how we fix it.”

So, what I bring to the keyboard is the “Here’s how we fix it.”

RVC: Your proudest moment as a writer?

BV: I think my proudest moment as a writer is probably still coming. Though I have a picture book retelling of The Goonies coming out next month that I’m quite proud of.

RVC: Thanks so much for this, Brooke. You were terrific!

Editor Interview: Connie Hsu (Roaring Brook Press)

On April 26, 2021April 26, 2021 By Only Picture BooksIn Editor Interviews

This month’s Industry Insider interview is with Connie Hsu, Editorial Director at Roaring Brook Press. She was born in Taiwan and grew up in Alabama, though Connie admits to being “one of THOSE editors” who didn’t dream of working in publishing when she was younger. Thankfully, she discovered the Sweet Valley Twins series in the school library, and really identified with the character Elizabeth, who wanted to be a writer. From that point on, Connie knew she wanted to be in media.

Connie took a detour in college as a psychology major at the University of Illinois, but after a year, she switched to advertising, followed by a Master’s degree in journalism. It took two internships—one with a Chicago magazine and one with an Atlanta magazine—for her to realize her true calling was in publishing.

Let’s find out how she went from that realization to creating an impressive career in children’s literature where she’s been able to work with some of the most exciting picture book makers working today.

Roaring Brook Website

Connie’s Twitter

RVC: One of my favorite PBs in the last few years is a book you edited–Dan Santat’s After the Fall, (which I included in OPB, of course). What was the biggest challenge you and Dan had in making that book work?

CH: From the get-go, we knew that the story arc would end with Humpty Dumpty climbing back up the wall, to show him overcoming his fears, after taking the time to heal from his trauma. But we felt that simply going back up doesn’t quite capture the sense of personal triumph, to push through so much pain and fear. We had several conversations about how to make the story and character feel transformative, to show how Humpty Dumpty is changed forever by his choice to climb up. Dan jokingly mentioned that Humpty should hatch, since he’s an egg, and noted that the imagery might terrify young readers. We laughingly referenced the iconic scene from Alien. But when Dan mentioned that, it felt right. Of course Humpty would hatch and take flight! And Dan was totally on board to try it, going through rounds and rounds of sketches to get the moment just right.

RVC: The Alien reference is hilarious. I’d never have guessed it, though, since that moment in the story is so sweet vs science fiction‑y.

Now, whether you’re working with Dan Santat or a fresh-out-of-college illustrator, how do you know how much you can/should push them?

CH: I think this varies from editor to editor. I’m accustomed to pushing my creators fairly hard, because I believe that the best work isn’t easy. To produce something truly standout and special, there should be some struggle, because we have to always questions ourselves and what we’re doing—and why it deserves notability.

That said, there are different styles of pushing. I saw that when I worked with the legendary picture book editor Neal Porter, who is so gentle and nuanced with his directives; he asks open-ended questions and encourages his creators to take time to incubate and think. Meanwhile, I feel I’m more like a coach on the field, running drills and patterns.

RVC: In early 2020, you picked up Mark Pett’s I Eat Poop: A Dung Beetle’s Story at auction. What specifically motivated you about that book to bid against other companies?

CH: It was Mark’s brilliant combination of great, evocative title, smart and innovative concept, and an expressive and relatable character. I knew from the tiny cover thumbnail in my email that I wanted to love the book. And when I got into the story about a young dung beetle who is embarrassed about eating poop, I saw so many layers to this story. It’s got the fun potty humor mixed in with important themes about identity, heritage, and self-acceptance. And it’s hilarious to boot!

RVC: In general, do you think book auctions are a good thing?

CH: In some ways, auctions are good for letting creators know what the market value for their work is, and it informs the publishers too. However, I find it challenging when advance levels skyrocket. It’s great for the authors and their agents, who take a commission, but I sometimes worry that it sets unrealistic expectations. A book that sells for a very high advance will need to perform even better in the market for the project to be financially sound, and sometimes, not even the best marketing and publicity can make that happen. Sometimes, it’s just luck. What I worry is that the book and its creator(s) will be seen as a business failure. This can mar a creator’s sales track and make it more challenging to bring on more books by them in the future. It’s also such a personal blow to go down in advance too.

RVC: I can hear the chorus of currently unpublished authors howling, “I’ll take a book auction any day of the week, even if my track record and future advances take a hit!” But there’s another solid route to success, isn’t there?

CH: I’ve been fortunate enough to have some authors who will submit to me exclusively. Their agents can still get them a very strong advance, and it deepens the trust and bonds I have with them, which I feel leads to better books.

RVC: Let’s back up a little bit. Before you got your New York publishing career going, you worked as an intern and a freelance writer for celebrity gossip magazine In Touch. Care to share any behind-the-scenes secrets?

CH: I know this shouldn’t have surprised me, but the majority of the gossip news was planted. Either someone would get a tip from a publicist, or we would try to create drama. For instance, one assignment of mine was to show a paparazzi photo of a woman celebrity to several doctors, who were willing to be quoted in the magazine, and ask if they thought the woman looked pregnant. My job was to go through a list of doctors until one said yes, and that would be the story we ran. That person did not ultimately have a baby, and I later felt bad that we probably just caught her at a bad angle and made a big deal out of it.

RVC: I’m glad you were able to move on from that to more rewarding work. Yet at one point, though, you were living in New York City, taking on odd jobs, and you ended up working for a daycare. How’d you go from that situation to landing a job at Little, Brown?

CH: Working at the daycare allowed me to revisit childhood favorites, like James and the Giant Peach. It also exposed me to more recently published books at the time, like Orphan Train by Verla Kay, which opened my eyes to the depth and complexity that a picture book could have. When I mentioned enjoying reading these books to a friend of mine, who worked at Scholastic Book Club, she forwarded me a job posting with Alvina Ling at Little, Brown and encouraged me to apply. I hadn’t thought about children’s books as a career at the time. When I had my first interview with Alvina Ling though, I knew I had to have the job. She inspired me from the get-go!

RVC: What are some of the biggest differences between working in the magazine world and the book world?

CH: The magazine world felt very ephemeral, and the timelines were also very tight. There’s this stress on making sure the magazine had content and it had to be created, no matter what, while the stress I feel from publishing is making sure authors and agents are happy and ensuring the best quality book possible. Books have more permanence, and the feeling of pride when a book is done is just so much more satisfying.

RVC: Back to the present. Let’s break down a typical day in the life of Connie. Put some percentages on how much is spent on each of the following–queries/submissions; email; meetings; editing; industry news.

CH:

queries/submissions: 10%
emailing: 40%
meeting: 40%
editing: 5% (mostly happens during nights and weekends)
catching up on industry news: 5%

RVC: I think writers have this mental image of editors hunched over manuscripts day and night–yes, in this mental image, it’s universally agreed that the manuscripts are always paper–helping us all make dynamite books that change the lives of young readers now and for generations to come. But like the rest of us, the reality for editors is an ocean of emails and an avalanche of meetings. Fair enough!

Let’s talk about happier things. Agent lunches—great thing, or the greatest thing?

CH: A great thing. Some agents have become genuine friends and trusted colleagues. I feel lucky when an agent I adore shares an author with me who becomes a success. It’s like building a mini family.

RVC: What actually happens at these lunches?

CH: Agent lunches are something I do miss, because it’s a comfortable way to get to know someone and connect on projects. Sometimes, the effect isn’t immediate; rather, it’s an investment in getting to know the person and seeing the payoff down the line.

RVC: Got a great example of that?

CH: Sure–the agent Judy Hansen of Hansen Literary. Judy and I met over lunch a couple of years before I changed jobs and moved to Macmillan, where her author Vera Brosgol publishes her graphic novels with First Second. Judy wanted to keep Vera at Macmillan for her picture books, and when I got to Roaring Brook, she thought of me as a possible editor for Vera. Fortunately, we all connected wonderfully, which resulted in Vera’s debut picture book, Leave Me Alone!, a Caldecott Honor book.

RVC: In light of the COVID-19 reality, what are you doing to replicate agent lunches?

CH: I’m having phone calls with agents, although I haven’t really had a chance to meet with new agents. The remote working has resulted in increased workload, so it’s been challenging to find time.

RVC: On average, how many submissions do you deal with each month?

CH: I average about 40 — 50 submissions per month.

RVC: While many editors (and agents, for that matter) use form responses to speed things up, you haven’t done that in the past.

CH: I try not to, because I understand that authors pour their heart and soul into projects and it helps them feel seen and heard to have a personalized decline letter. That said, with the increasing volume of submissions, I’ve had to resort to form letters.

RVC: How many of your response notes include an invitation to send it back—an R&R (revise and resubmit)?

CH: Maybe 10 projects per year.

RVC: How many manuscripts do you take to the editorial committee for serious consideration each month? And what stakeholders are there besides yourself and your editorial team (which includes Emily Feinberg, who OPB interviewed not so long ago)?

CH: I bring about 3 – 4 projects per month and discuss with my team: Emily Feinberg, Kate Meltzer, Mekisha Telfer, and Nicolás Oré-Girón. When we have an intern on staff, we invite them to participate. In the past, we’ve had our design team join, but not since we started remote working.

RVC: Beyond reading a manuscript aloud, what’s a strategy/technique most picture book writers don’t know/use but they really should if they want to move closer to the “YES!” they crave?

CH: Being aware of the marketplace is a huge help! Keep track of what’s coming around the bend and new deals. Signing up for Publishers Weekly’s Children’s Bookshelf gives writers a terrific resource.

RVC: Roaring Brook still has a small-press feel, despite having the backing of a Big Five. How do you maintain that?

CH: We have an extraordinary publishing history in the short time we’ve been around (~25 years), with several award winners, and more recently, major bestsellers. It’s a legacy and reputation we uphold, while also bringing fresh and exciting voices to the list. We’re also a small team, like a family, where each person has a distinctive taste, but we have shared goals in wanting to publish high quality, notable books.

RVC: One last question for this part of the interview. What are two Roaring Brook titles that really represent your brand in the way you want it to be?

CH: I’ll share two recent titles: I Dream of Popo and Outside, Inside. Both are emotionally rich and memorable reads, and they tug at the heartstrings in the most perfect way.

RVC: Those are some memorable books, for sure (we gave a strong review of Outside, Inside at OPB not that long ago).

But we have to move ahead because it’s time for the LIGHTNING ROUND! The point values are tripled and the clock starts……NOW! What’s a secret talent of yours that most don’t know about?

CH: I’m very good at parallel parking.

RVC: Best late-night reading snack?

CH: Baked Cheetos. All the pleasure, half of the guilt.

RVC: If you could be any picture book character for a day, who would it be?

CH: Peter from The Snowy Day.

RVC: What’s the One That Got Away?

CH: The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken.

RVC: Favorite non-Roaring Brook picture book of 2020?

CH: Me & Mama by Cozbi A. Cabrera.

RVC: Three words that sum up your picture book philosophy?

CH: Unexpected. Exciting. Extraordinary.

RVC: Thanks so much, Connie. It’s been great getting to know what the secret of Roaring Brook’s success is–clearly it’s GOOD people being at the core of all you do!

Editor Interview: Kelsey Skea (Two Lions and Amazon Crossing Kids)

On March 22, 2021March 21, 2021 By Only Picture BooksIn Editor Interviews2 Comments

This month’s Industry Insider Interview is with Kelsey Skea, the Editorial Director of Two Lions and Amazon Crossing Kids at Amazon Publishing. Prior to taking on this position, she worked as an editor at Disney Book Group—a real plus in my book, considering that I live in Florida which means I’m barely a stone’s throw from Orlando!

(Okay, Sarasota’s a brisk two-hour drive, but when it comes to The Mouse, who’s going to quibble about a little distance?)

And here’s another reason I had to invite Kelsey to be part of the OPB friends and family club—I’m a fan of Two Lions books, as you can see!

Witness Picture Book Reviews for Anna Kang’s We Are (Not) Friends (Two Lions) and Joy Jordan-Lake’s A Crazy-Much Love (Two Lions)!

Behold Educational Activities for Lindsay Gray’s This Book is Gray (Two Lions)! and Todd Tarpley’s Naughty Ninja Takes a Bath (Two Lions)!

So, let’s see if Kelsey can help us figure out what makes Two Lions Books so appealing!

RVC: Looking back at when you first got hooked on books, where did you think it was going to lead you?

KS: I’ve always loved books. I remember going to the library from a very young age and the very proud moment I got my own library card. I also loved writing stories and was encouraged to write by my family. As a young girl, being a writer was one of the many possibilities I imagined for myself. I feel so fortunate to have ended up in children’s publishing.

RVC: What key training/experiences prepared you for your editing career?

KS: I had a couple of internships and summer jobs that involved publicity, copywriting, and writing articles. Those, alongside my English literature classes at the University of Virginia, gave me insight into writing for different purposes and reacting to fiction (albeit of a different kind).

The best training was on the job. As an editorial assistant and assistant editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, I tried to learn everything I could from the senior staff I supported. I was fortunate that they were all generous with their time and expertise—that’s something I always remember as a manager.

RVC: What’s the best advice you’d give to a current college undergraduate who’s interested in an editing career?

KS: If possible, try to get some sort of work experience that relates to the field, even if tangentially. I came to my interviews for editorial positions with writing from a publicity internship, ad copy I’d written for my local radio station, articles I’d written for a local business journal, and some essays from literature classes. In a way, these all related to aspects of the industry, even if not directly. They showed I had the potential to write good jacket copy and critically analyze fiction.

During my interview, my first (future) boss asked me if I liked to organize. Reflexively, I said, “No.” Happily she started laughing, and then I jumped into how I was good at it even though I didn’t like it.

Pro tip: maybe be more enthusiastic about your organizational prowess than I was! Also, use your college’s alumni network to see if you can connect with someone in the field to learn more about it or possibly connect with a job opportunity.

RVC: Great advice indeed!

So, you joined Amazon in 2013, right after they acquired 450+ titles from Marshall Cavendish Children’s Books. How challenging is it to incorporate another press’ entire catalog like that and still keep up with your own publishing agenda?

KS: It was an exciting time to join the company. The Marshall Cavendish Children’s Books list had so many strong titles, and some of those titles absolutely took off at Amazon Publishing. For example, Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano and Lee Harper, has had such growth that we’re publishing a fifth book in the series this summer, Turkey Goes to School, with a sixth book signed up for next year.

That’s one of the things I love best about Amazon Publishing—our books are supported in many different ways over their lifetime and constantly exposed to new readers.

RVC: How did those original Marshall Cavendish books differ (or not!) from Two Lions books? And what makes a Two Lions book a Two Lions book, in your opinion?

KS: Well, the Marshall Cavendish Children’s Books all became Two Lions books (or Skyscape, in the case of the YA titles), but as every publisher’s focus evolves over time, so has ours. Many of those titles were acquired with an eye to the institutional market, and while that is important to us, we’re also looking for books that have an emotional core that kids can connect with, as with Anna Kang and Christopher Weyant’s You Are (Not) Small series, which uses bearlike creatures to examine broad subjects like perspective, fear, perception of perfection on a level that’s very kidlike and full of humor and heart. Another great example is A Home Again by Colleen Kosinski and Valeria Docampo, out this fall, which is from the perspective of a house who closes itself off after its first family moves away, only to rediscover that it can be a home once again.

RVC: Let’s get specific about your job. What’s something about the editing process that might surprise people?

KS: People outside of the industry often think that my work focuses on grammar-related issues. Thankfully, our terrific copyeditors make me look good in that respect. People are often surprised at how much of my day involves business decisions about our overall list or assessing and participating in new opportunities. Often they’re surprised to hear about the developmental process and how I work with closely with our art director from sketches through to the final artwork.

RVC: People talk all the time about the importance of community for writers and artists. What about community in terms of editors?

KS: I’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing editors over the course of my career, and lucky to work with some amazing women, in particular, who really lift each other up. But beyond editors, I also work closely with folks from marketing, production, publicity, sales, and various other departments. What I love about the kidlit community is that those connections last, even if you fall out of touch with someone and run into them at a conference (and I’m imagining a post-pandemic world where that will happen once again).

The publishing community wants the best for each other and that’s a nice thing to be part of professionally.

RVC: Complete the following sentence. Kelsey Skea is an editor who…

KS: …puts her heart—and her pencil—into working with authors and illustrators to make their book the best it can be.

RVC: What are a few of your proudest moments as an editor?

KS: It’s always a thrill to see a book you’ve worked on win an award or receive a great review, but the proudest moments for me are seeing a child’s excitement about a book or character, either in person or in a letter from their caregiver.

RVC: How do you balance the creative side of editing with the business side?

KS: As a publisher, I want to do everything possible to support the success of the books I acquire, so I spend a significant amount of time on the business side looking at the best opportunities for a particular title, whether that’s in terms of publicity, marketing, or placement in some of our programs, in addition to how it fits into the overall list. I work with these teams consistently to experiment and get creative with different ways to give our books exposure.

I spend a lot of time in creative development so the book is the strongest it can be. When possible, I try to group meetings to open up blocks of time when I can focus on a book-in-progress. I block out longer chunks of time for significant editing and sign out of email so that I can delve into the work uninterrupted.

RVC: Speaking of the business side of things…it SEEMS like you’re trying to buck the trend of books taking so long to come out. I especially note this with a series—like Dexter T. Rexter or Duck and Hippo—where titles come out without a year or two between them.

KS: We try lots of different approaches at Amazon Publishing in how we publish, including cadence. I always think about how long a child will be passionate about a picture book character before they leap to the next reading level or format. And so much in the way that people consume content now with binge-viewing, I’ve tried to launch follow-up picture books quickly so that if a child loves a character, they can read the next book as soon as we can get it to them.

RVC: What are some forthcoming projects you’re excited about?

KS: So many projects! It’s always a special treat to work with debut talent, and I have two titles this year that fall into that bucket: Julius and Macy: A Very Brave Night, a gentle tale of friendship and bravery from author-illustrator Annelouise Mahoney that is enchantingly illustrated and comes out on April 1^st, and Dancing with Daddy, a debut from Anitra Rowe Schulte and established illustrator Ziyue Chen, that tells the story of a girl who uses a wheelchair and communicates through gesture and a book illustrated with pictures that show her dreams of her first father-daughter dance. I love that it’s a story many young girls can relate to, but coming from an underrepresented point of view.

Also this year, we have a couple of titles that address the importance of community and finding common ground: Hudson and Tallulah Take Sides from Geisel winners Anna Kang and Christopher Weyant, out this May, which features a cat and dog who can’t agree on anything, and Between the Lines from Lindsay Ward, out this fall, about a neighborhood that drifts apart and literally loses its color until a boy takes matters into his own hands.

RVC: I look forward to seeing those books!

But let’s toss a submission-related bone (or two!) to writers. What are you just not interested in seeing right now?

KS: We’re pretty well covered on turkeys, dinosaurs, monsters, and fractured fairy tales. And no counting books, please!

RVC: And what’s the flip side of that? What kind of submissions would you love to see?

KS: For Two Lions, we’re looking for books from a diverse group of authors and illustrators that have an emotional arc, either driven by a memorable personality or featuring standout writing and illustration. We’re also always looking for seasonal titles.

RVC: One last question for this part of the interview. In all your experience as a picture book editor, what has most surprised you?

KS: I think what surprises me the most—in a good way—is the sheer reach and impact a picture book can have each time I experience it. I love seeing a child in the UK dressed up as a character from a book I edited, or seeing a child’s reaction to a book knowing it is helping them cope through a difficult time. It’s easy to get a little caught up in my own world, so these moments are always a refreshing surprise that centers me and reminds me why my job is so important.

RVC: Thanks for that! But now it’s time for the SPEED ROUND, Kelsey. That means zippy questions and zoomy answers, please. Are you ready?

KS: So ready!

RVC: Favorite lunchtime pick-up spot in Midtown?

KS: When I need to grab a quick lunch, I like the chicken shish at Naya. I’m looking forward to getting some once we’re back at the office. There’s always a line out the door, but it moves quickly.

RVC: You’re caught singing in the shower. What song is it?

KS: Assuming I’m not groggy, maybe a little Zac Brown.

RVC: Biggest time waster?

KS: Twitter. And pulling information into spreadsheets!

RVC: Five things you can’t do your job without?

KS: Creative thinkers. Outstanding authors and illustrators. A team who is passionate about kidlit. Literary agents. A sense of humor.

RVC: What are some recent non-Amazon picture books that really caught your attention?

KS: Well, of course all of the Caldecott honorees—such a terrific group this year. Watercress by Andrea Wang and Jason Chin—can’t wait to flip through that. Oona by Kelly DiPucchio and Raissa Figueroa (Raissa is working on a book with us in 2022, We Are One), and The Tree in Me by Corinna Luyken.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there.

RVC: Let’s end with a single fave line from a picture book you edited.

KS: “You’ll show them a world that’s bright and true, so ever after, when they think of you, the world will feel full of love … and soft and sweet and new.” This is from World So Wide by Alison McGhee and Kate Alizadeh, and the pairing of Kate’s gorgeous art and Alison’s lovely text gets me every time.

RVC: What a terrific way to end! Thanks so much, Kelsey. It’s always a treat to partner with my friends at Amazon (like we did with Marilyn Brigham a few years back!).

Editor Interview: Melissa Manlove (Chronicle Books)

On December 28, 2020December 28, 2020 By Only Picture BooksIn Editor Interviews1 Comment

This month’s Industry Insider interview is with Chronicle Books senior editor Melissa Manlove. I first met her in Miami back in 2018 when she gave an inspiring one-day workshop on picture books with Sylvie Frank—I have pages of scribbled notes to prove it! And I’ve been a fan of Melissa’s ever since.

Melissa didn’t go the regular route to a job in the kidlit world. Her college major was Classics, and she also immersed herself in mythology, folklore, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Hindu religion, poetry, and more. Talk about a wide-ranging liberal arts education!

Now it’s no secret that I’m a fan of Chronicle books, and Melissa’s own list has too many faves to list here, so I’ll simply limit myself to three really fine picture books that I urge you to read.

Now that we’re all pals with Melissa, let’s chat!

https://twitter.com/mmanlove

https://www.chroniclebooks.com/

RVC: Let’s start by talking about Chronicle. You’ve been there for 16 years. What’s the best thing about working at an independently owned company?

MM: There’s a lot of trust invested in the people making the books—aside from covers, the book making process is the privilege of a very small group who work with the author and artist, and I think that makes space for the selfhood of the book itself.

RVC: That’s a great phrase–“selfhood of the book.”

Among your various superpowers is an ability to translate Latin and Ancient Greek. How did your college degree in Classics prepare you for a career in kidlit?

MM: I’ve forgotten most of my Greek and Latin, but my studies of those languages, as well as Russian, French, and Spanish really helped to underline that each language has its own rhythms and music. That and the background in mythology have been a help to how I understand story as a performance art.

RVC: How IS story performance art?

MM: Not all story is necessarily performed, but picture books—especially for the younger ages–are most often read aloud, and that requires the author to consider how their text informs performance. In my talks, I point out that all of the clues authors leave that might inform performance add up to voice. Storytelling started before writing, and passed from voice to ear to mind long before there was written history, and it is still in the profoundly human circle of firelight and voice (whether the firelight comes from a screen these days or not) that we remember what it means to have a shared story.

RVC: And there’s a great explanation on why so many editors are deeply concerned with a manuscript’s “voice.” Thanks for that!

Speaking of editors, I’ve got a few students at Ringling College who are interested in that as a career. When I tell them that a shockingly large percentage of an editor’s day is spent handling email and attending meetings, they don’t quite buy it. Care to drop a truth bomb on me/them/everyone?

MM: You are so right!

An editor’s job is in the vast majority a communications job—passing and filtering information between designer, production manager, copyeditors, proofreaders, fact-checkers, sales reps, marketing, author, artist, agents … Editors are meant to be the hub of a wheel of people, and the guardian of what the book is meant to be to all its stakeholders. It means that I actually edit and read submissions on the weekends, mostly.

RVC: Let’s dig a bit deeper into the life of an editor. How many submissions do you see in a week?

MM: 10–15 from agents, another 5–10 from writers’ conferences that I’ve taught at. But Chronicle’s Children’s Division accepts unagented submissions, and of those we get about 200 per week.

RVC: What’s your favorite part of a workday?

MM: Editing is always my favorite—talking to writers about the craft of writing; talking about the infinitely varied path toward finding what a book wants to be.

RVC: Now I’m going to get all complimenty. It’s clear to me that you’re open to nonfiction picture books that avoid the expected approach, which often is cold precision and a sense of linearity and/or formality.

Take Josephine, for example. That book delivers facts, but it’s got real heart, too.

MM: True stories fascinate me, but even more fascinating is what makes a story feel true. That’s something you could give many names, and yes—heart is one of those. After all, what’s the point of telling kids about the world if we don’t also communicate why we should care?

RVC: Is it fair to say that Josephine—as well as many of your nonfiction books—fundamentally presents a transformation arc? Is that something you’re looking for in submissions?

MM: Often, yes! Readers love a transformation arc because when we see how a character can change themselves, we know we have that power, too. And changing ourselves is changing the world.

RVC: From looking at what you teach at conferences and at Storyteller Academy, rhyme is something you appreciate (when it’s done well). So, let me ask—how do you know when it’s done well? What do you look for?

MM: Poetry of all kinds is aware of the space it occupies—in its rhythms, in its breaths, in its white space on the page. Some people are more naturally attuned to the way language moves through its music. But every poet becomes familiar with the idea of scansion, whether they decide to use its structure to build something, or break it purposefully.

RVC: What’s the easiest way to help aspiring rhymers understand syllabic vs accentual poetry?

MM: The question is which you are counting to make a poem. Haiku counts syllables. Sonnets count syllables and accented syllables. Mother Goose just counts accented syllables. Take Humpty Dumpty—the first and second lines have a different number of syllables than the third and fourth lines. But all four lines have the same number of accented syllables—beats.

RVC: What are a few of your favorite rhyming books?

MM: I love Bubble Trouble, Go to Sleep Little Farm, Goodnight Moon, All the World, Bad Bye Good Bye, I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More…

And of course I’m very proud of my many rhyming picture books, which include Interstellar Cinderella and its sequels, Mighty Mighty Construction Site and its sequels, You Are New, Water Sings Blue, Green Is a Chile Pepper, and of course parts of Josephine.

Look for Bathe the Cat and It’s So Quiet coming soon!

RVC: Attendees of your SCBWI workshops on picture book voice rave and rave about them. Now, let’s be honest—if we wanted to really go deep into voice, that’d need to be its own interview. But can you share a misconception about voice that gets writers into trouble?

MM: I think the worst misconception is that a great writer has a single voice. That might be true of reporters. But adapting voice to story, character, mood—that’s what storytellers do.

RVC: In all your experience as a kidlit editor, what has surprised you the most?

MM: There are too many to count or rank!

One of the great gifts of this job is how wide a variety of skills it asks of you, and how wide a variety of experiences it offers. I suppose one is that I’m now teaching public speaking—something I feared and loathed for years. There’s a transformation arc for you!

RVC: What was your secret for moving from a state of fear about public speaking to being comfortable teaching it to others?

MM: The psychiatrist Fritz Perls said “fear is excitement without the breath” and that’s the truth—if you can take a breath and get excited about what you fear, the nervous energy before you go on stage becomes the energy you use to reach out to your audience, and to give them something that matters.

RVC: Love it. Thanks for that!

One last question for this part of the interview. You’ve been a bookseller for a long, long time. Do you still do that? And do you still put on puppet shows?

MM: Sadly, my mother (with whom I did the puppet shows) decided to retire from show business, but I still work at a bookstore on the weekend! I love recommending books.

RVC: Alright, Melissa—it’s time for the SPEED ROUND! Lickety-split questions followed by zappity-fast answers. Are you ready?

MM: Oh! Really? I—

RVC: What’s a secret talent of yours?

MM: Um. I can recite Ladle Rat Rotten Hut from memory?

RVC: If you had to live inside a picture book world for a day, which book would you choose?

MM: Oh, well, here at the end of 2020 I’m wishing for something cozy. Maybe something by Phoebe Wahl?

RVC: How would you use a 30-second ad slot at the next Super Bowl?

MM: Probably for an encouragement to reading aloud to kids. Parents give it up too early and too easy, and it makes a huge difference!

RVC: What’s the One That Got Away?

MM: Small in the City. *shakes fist at Neal Porter* (Neal knows I love him)

RVC: Five things you can’t do your job without.

MM: People! That’s who it’s for.

Kids, educators, my friends and colleagues at Chronicle, my brilliant authors and artists, and my own child self.

RVC: Something your authors and illustrators probably say about you.

MM: Oh no. My anxiety and guilt wants to answer “delinquent”—it’s so hard to keep up with this job, especially in a pandemic year. But I guess what I hope I am to my authors and artists is someone who wants their hearts—what’s best and worst about them, what’s true.

RVC: Thanks so much, Melissa. It was great having you come by OPB!

Editor Interview: Kristine Enderle (Magination Press)

On October 26, 2020October 26, 2020 By Only Picture BooksIn Editor Interviews

photo credit: Elizabeth Dranitzke

Hello! We’re here today with Kristine Enderle, the Editorial Director of Magination Press. One of the things that intrigues me most is how she came to publishing in such a roundabout way (more on that in a moment!). Her Twitter bio declares her a “full-time mom, all-the-time-feminist, serious ally, and native Hoosier.” In terms of her publishing career highlights, she offers this sample of titles:

Girl: Love, Sex, Romance, and Being You by Karen Rayne (starred review from Publisher’s Weekly; one of Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Nonfiction Teen books)

This Day in June by Gayle Pitman (Stonewall Award winner; ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom’s Top 100 Challenged Books)

My Anxious Mind: A Teen’s Guide to Managing Anxiety and Panic by Michael Tompkins and Katherine Martinez (ABCT Self Help Book Seal of Merit Award)

Something Happened In Our Town: A Child’s Guide to Racial Injustice by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazard (A New York Times and #1 IndieBound bestseller, A Little Free Library Action Book Club Selection, and an NCSS-CBC 2019 Notable Social Science Trade Book for Young People)

Whew! That’s a great start. But let’s move on to the interview to find out a bit more about Kristine and her career.

RVC: As mentioned in the intro above, you might win the award for most unusual path toward becoming an editor—at least in terms of industry insider interviews here at OPB! You’ve got a BS degree in microbiology (minor in psychology) from Indiana U, right? What kind of career goals did you have back then?

KE: I honestly didn’t have any career goals! I was lucky enough to be allowed to just study whatever I wanted in college! I grew up in an enormous old house (with actual bats in the attic) in the middle of the woods in southern Indiana. There was always something smashed on the road that we could poke at, or strange insects or fungi living on rotting logs. My dad was a doctor and my mom was a nurse, so there were always ongoing conversations about medicine and health in my house.

RVC: That sounds like an awesome way to grow up.

KE: You bet! I grew to love the natural world and naturally (hah!) that flowed into biology coursework. Eventually after taking a microbiology course, my sights were set on what is unseen and I became fascinated by fungus and bacteria and have a sweet spot for infectious diseases.

RVC: After college, you worked as an AIDS research tech for the AIDS Vaccine Development Program at the National Cancer Institute, and then as a tech at Northwestern University’s Lurie Cancer Center. Isn’t the latter position where you started taking classes in writing?

KE: Yes. While working at Northwestern I took fiction writing, linguistics, and communication courses. I needed to move away from lab work to exercise the other side of my brain. I always hung out with English majors and musicians in school, so I finally got to take all those classes I missed as an undergrad.

RVC: What’s the most valuable thing you learned in those writing classes?

KE: That I am NOT a fiction writer! I have so much appreciation for storytellers and creative people now. Plus it’s more fun to be the oddball science nerd in the room than the way-too-serious poet.

RVC: What was the learning curve like going from a science researcher to a development editor at Human Kinetics, a sports science textbook publisher in Illinois?

KE: Between working in the lab and my first publishing gig, I was a Medical & Scientific Affairs manager at the Alzheimer’s Association. This was pre-Internet, so I wrote newsletters and fact sheets for the general public and answered the phone, fielding a ton of questions from families and caregivers about Alzheimer’s disease. Working there taught me to explain complicated concepts and technical language, so maybe this was what got me from the lab to publishing?

RVC: Sounds like GREAT training to be an editor.

KE: At Human Kinetics as a development editor, I had to look at big picture things in planning a textbook–editing and organization becomes a puzzle to solve as you need to figure out a way to fit and package a ton of information into ways people can understand and into one comprehensive and complete book, visually with photos, diagrams, charts, and graphs. I still do that at Magination. Our books combine science and literature (or evidence-based information and creative expression) into something that is accessible and interesting to read.

A great example of this is Move Your Mood which is a hoot and teaches readers about how physical movement positively affects mood–there is psychological research to support this. Or Layla’s Luck. People tend to attribute a woman’s or girl’s success as them being lucky and not relating to their smarts, skill, and hard work. Layla takes aim at that.

RVC: Let’s dig a bit deeper into your publishing career. These days, you’re the Editorial Director at Magination Press. How does that compare to being a developmental editor? Writers ask me versions of this all the time—what’s the difference in terms of those roles?

KE: Editorial director really means that I am responsible for editorial strategy and focus of the press and oversee major initiatives, budgets, planning, and staff. But having come up through the ranks, I am still developing and editing and acquiring books because I have a hard time leaving that behind. I am still a senior/acquiring editor and have a nice group of house authors I have been working with since their debut work. Many authors call me their editor (and that’s the best thing ever!)

RVC: Compare that to the roles of your Magination colleagues, Senior Editor Sarah Fell and Editor Katie Ten Hagen.

KE: Sarah and Katie do all that, minus the planning and overseeing, and have a bunch more books than me to develop. And they work with new authors mostly, and I’m technically their boss!

RVC: Thanks for that!

Now, some people might not realize that Magination Press is connected to the APA (American Psychological Association). How does that work?

KE: APA’s mission is to promote the advancement, communication, and application of psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives. So what that means for Magination Press is that we share world mental health expertise and psychological knowledge to help kids through rough patches. Some of our books deal with serious issues like depression and anxiety; others are more of those everyday things that bug you or that you may confront sometime during your life. Also just recognizing the sometimes-tough job of being a kid these days. We want kids and teens to know that we are listening, we see what they are dealing with, and might have something that can help.

I’d like to think that books like Bye Bye Pesky Fly, Lucy’s Light, Jacob’s Room to Choose, and Lulu the One and Only really make a difference in the lives and well-being of kids.

RVC: Here’s something else that people might be surprised by. Not only do you publish books exclusively for kids (ages 4–18), but you’re putting out 20+ books a year!

KE: Yeah. We are kind of overachievers that way.

RVC: What’s the common denominator with all your kidlit?

KE: The stories (and nonfiction) really must be grounded in evidence-based research. It’s true that there is a little bit of psychology in everything, but to be a publication of the American Psychological Association, the work must be based on science and fact. It would be irresponsible otherwise!

RVC: How vital is it that your writers have backgrounds in psychology or the sciences? Or know APA style?

KE: We prefer our authors be psychologists or are mental health professionals, but it’s not a prerequisite. If an author doesn’t have those credentials, we will hire a psychologist to write the endmatter/readers note (to provide the psychological context for the story). Also all of our books are reviewed by our editorial advisory board that is made up of child psychologists. They act as peer reviewers and comment on the accuracy and relevancy of the psychological content and whether the coping strategies have merit.

Extra points for folks using APA Style/Pub Manual 7!

RVC: Let’s say you publish a picture book on depression and so, too, does a NYC press. What are some of the likely differences in how a Magination picture book covers a topic like that?

KE: Reviewed and vetted by the American Psychological Association, maybe?

RVC: That’s a key distinction, for sure.

Now, you just signed When Nana Dances, a picture book by Jane Yolen and her granddaughter about the relationship between children and grandparents, and how dance can be at its core. This isn’t as clear of an “issue book” as some of your others. Why did you have to snatch this one up?

KE: Because Jane Yolen!

No, really it’s a joyful celebration that combats ageism and models mentally healthy and happy intergenerational relationships. You know that emotional stress can speed up aging at the cellular level. So, this is stress-relief and mental wellness at its core!

RVC: Your press is always at the trade shows—in fact, that’s how I learned about it. I chatted with one of your sales reps at BEA (Book Expo America) at the Javits Center in NYC a couple years ago, and I was impressed by the quality of the books and topics covered.

KE: Thank you! You can find us all over, from the Bologna Children Book Fair to the Texas Library Association annual meeting to National Council for Teachers of English. We also attend psychological conferences like American Counseling Association, and of course APA’s Annual Convention.

RVC: For people considering writing for your press, what’s the most important thing they should know or understand?

KE: Despite our serious and sensitive topics, we love humor, humility, and honesty. Not sure what that means exactly for books… might speak more to who we are and our community of authors and illustrators we take up with.

Otherwise a couple things come to mind:

Do your research. Before submitting a proposal, please review our catalog: we don’t repeat topics year after year and are unlikely to acquire new titles on already-covered topics.
Keep it universal. We are not interested in autobiography, reflections on childhood, or personal stories about family members, pets, or friends. Keep the appeal wide and general and keep the focus on interesting characters and good storytelling. Be careful with first-person narrative. Good stories and excellent topics can sour with unrealistic, adult-sounding, or dated dialog.

RVC: In all your experience with editing picture books, what has most surprised you?

KE: Just how many books I have signed after just reading the cover letter. Another book hooked me immediately with its proposed title–There’s a Cat in My Class!

RVC: One final question for this part of the interview. Your Twitter bio says you’re a “part-time troublemaker.” Care to support that impressive claim with evidence?

KE: I live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, DC. Marching and protesting is what we do!

RVC: Okay, Kristine. We’ve now reached the SPEED ROUND. Speedy questions and even faster answers. Ready?

KE: Ready!

RVC: “If I didn’t have a career in publishing or science, I’d be…”

KE: A park ranger!

RVC: Fave secret lunch spot in DC?

KE: Indigo!

RVC: If you could be any picture book character for a day, who would it be?

KE: Nancy Drew!

RVC: Something that’s on your picture book wish list?

KE: A book about a whale.

RVC: An underappreciated Magination picture book that you simply adore?

KE: Underappreciated? I’m a huge fan of King Calm: Mindful Gorilla in the City. But I also adore our more recent relatively unknown activity book, How Do You Doodle: Drawing Your Feelings and Emotions.

RVC: The one must-have for every picture book you acquire?

KE: A good pun or a dog.

RVC: Thanks so much, Kristine!