Michael: Promoting Middle Grade: Tough Calls and Stress Balls

Like most authors, I try hard to help promote and publicize my books. But after two YA novels, I've found myself at a bit of a loss when it comes to promoting my first middle grade novel. The approaches that worked in YA—social media, blog tours, etc.—aren’t much use when it comes to, say, 10-year-old boys. They’re not on Twitter, and the cops tell me I have to stop hanging around schoolyards.

Since it’s my first middle grade, I assumed it was just that I didn’t know what I was doing. Throughout me life, that has been a pretty safe assumption. So I asked around. I live in NYC, I know a lot of authors, SCBWI was in town . . . The result: If anyone knows, they ain’t sayin’. I heard a lot of “No idea,” “I wish I knew,” and “I was about to ask you!”

There were some long-term strategies thrown in: “Do more school visits,” “Go to conventions,” and “Hang around schoolyards.” But none of those are much help in the, let’s see, two days until Plunked officially comes out. Here’s a look at some of the extreme, questionable, and extremely questionable things I’ve tried in the mean time:

1) An animated book trailer (it will surprise no one when I say I made this myself).

Get Plunked!
by: MDNorthrop

2) Here’s Plunky! Say ‘ello to my little friend (the star of my latest blog post):


3) Two words: stress balls. (I'll just pause while we all come up with our own jokes here.... Moving on!) I am seriously considering getting a whole mess of these squeezable mini baseballs made up with the title of my book on the side. I doubt it’s cost-effective (they’re about a buck each), but they might help. And I could definitely use the stress relief.


4) And, as the final act of a desperate man, I even joined Goodreads. I was definitely hesitant—rumor has it the place is littered with the hollowed-out husks of formerly happy authors—but it was necessary in order to list the book for a giveaway. I heard someone tell this other person that they heard from a third person that it might be a good way to promote your book. The conditional tense remains in effect [Update: Or does it? Check out what Yat-Yee has to say in the comments...], but I'll say this for Goodreads: They hide their husks well. My giveaway is up and running, and I'm "14% done" with the new Howard Cosell biography.

5) Which is not to say I have no answers. I do have one reliable, time-tested way of dealing with launch week . . .



Well, maybe not time-tested so much as cask-aged, but still. Cheers, gentle reader. I will not ask you to buy my book—well, I won’t beg—but if you could raise a glass to its success (or untimely demise) this week, I’d appreciate it.

Michael: NaNoWriCrowe

Just click on the arrow to advance to the next frame:

Michael: Raise the Woof: Underdogs in YA

I stayed at a bar and listened to “Live Irish Music!” last night. You know why? Because no one else was. The musicians outnumbered the listeners, and I felt a little bad for those forlorn fiddlers. It got me thinking of the importance of underdogs, not so much in bars (though, please note, I can now write-off that trip) as in young adult literature.

There may be no other type of writing where the underdog is more common and more important, because in one way or another, almost every main character in YA is one. No matter how confident and competent they are, they are still teens living in an adult world—and possibly vampires living in a human world, wizards living in a muggle world, delicious, delicious humans living in a zombie world, or something else, but let’s stick with that first one for now.

And of course many of these characters are much less than completely confident and, in terms of competence, are at least as much MacGruber as MacGyver. The main characters in my first book, Gentlemen, are classic underdogs: They are lower-class kids from broken homes, remedial students, and they definitely have a tendency to bite. The narrator of Trapped, on the other hand, is basically an average kid—a good athlete and a decent student—but he’s at least as much of an underdog.



What makes him one is the weeklong blizzard that strands him and six other kids at their high school. Frankly, he could be the love child of Jack Bauer and La Femme Nikita and still be an underdog in that situation. All sorts of obstacles conspire to stack the odds and make characters sympathetic in YA, whether it’s being the new kid in town or subject to the machinations of a hellish dystopian society.

But the biggest obstacle remains adolescence itself. It is a confusing age, and it definitely doesn’t seem to be getting any less so. (Thanks a lot, global political/economic/cultural/technological upheaval.) The characters are sympathetic because they are going through the same things the readers are (or were). They are misunderstood, uncertain, disrespected (it’s right there in the word “minors”), and liable to be ignored on the one hand or to attract the wrong kind of attention on the other.

If you write YA, whether you intended it or not, your main character is probably an underdog. Of course, that’s true of many types of books. What’s remarkable about YA is that, if you look closely, the bullies, jocks, rivals, crushes, exes, friends, and enemies who round out the cast are probably underdogs too.

Michael: 3... 2... 1...

In the movies, launches are serious business. They often involve two people who must, after exchanging a somber nod or shouted threats, turn their keys simultaneously to release a dread projectile. Launches are serious business in publishing, too. They involve at least as many people acting in unison, and at least as much dread. I mention this, of course, because my second YA novel officially launches February 1.



My key contributions have included sending a box of ARCs (advance review copies, but the acronym is pleasingly ICBM-ish) all over the map and an all out offensive of Q&As, guest posts, Top 10 lists, character interviews, and other strategic initiatives for dozens of websites and blogs.

My publisher’s key contributions have included sending out even more ARCs, some carefully targeted at the top trade and review outlets, and a lot of clandestine, behind-the-scenes work, like conversing with buyers, briefing sales reps, and pouring over proprietary data. Their part is cooler, but whatever, we both have to turn our keys.

Six days from now, we will have. The silo door will open, the smoke will shoot out the side vents, and we’ll see what happens. It’s possible that Scholastic will turn to me and say, “What have we done?” Either way, Trapped will be out there.

And then we’ll both go back to turning our keys—I’ll be doing readings, more guest posts, whatever—and Scholastic will do more of that spy stuff. The missile launch metaphor really falls apart at this point, and that’s OK. It’s not the sort of metaphor you want to follow all the way through on. You just don’t want the thing to land 18 feet away or fall over sideways once it clears the silo.

I don’t think that will happen. The keys seem to be working, our nods were sufficiently somber, and the design of the thing, if nothing else, is impeccable. But, really, only time will tell.



Which reminds me: When I was around 6, I had a water rocket. Finally, I pumped it up one (or eight) too many times and it flew so high that it got stuck in the big tree in our front lawn. As far as I know, it’s still up there. That's the kind of launch I'm looking for, and why I still get all keyed up for these things.

Michael: "What's your book about?"

What’s your book about? If you’re an author, you probably get asked that question a ton. It helps to have a quick, catchy answer. I know because I didn’t for my first book, Gentlemen. I would either give half-answers that I thought might be enough (“It’s a mystery about a missing boy”) or just a description (“It’s a dark mystery”). Neither answer was quite right, but it’s a tough novel to summarize. What I wanted to say was, “I can tell you in approximately 58,000 words,” which is, not coincidentally, the length of the book.

Also no coincidence: The fact that, after being unable to answer the same simple question over and over again, my second novel has a quick, easy summary. It’s about seven kids trapped in their high school during a weeklong blizzard. In fact, the book can be summarized with just the title and the cover art:



I don’t think that makes it a less complicated or serious novel, but a year and a half after my first novel came out, I think I understand the process a little better. Word of mouth matters, and the book is pitched on every level (between very busy people). Publishers pitch booksellers and librarians who (ideally) pitch readers who (double ideally) pitch friends; authors pitch everyone, and a few lines of text has to get the job done online. In every case, the response to “You should check this out” is liable to be “Really, what’s it about?”

I still think it’s the quality of the book that matters most. If it’s not good, no one’s going to spend much energy recommending it. Once they do, though, good hooks and resonant ideas are a definite advantage. The examples are as endless as the number of children who would dearly love to attend a school for wizards. And while ideas (and execution) like that come along very rarely, here’s some incentive for the rest of us: Also endless? The number of people who will ask you “What’s your book about?”

Michael: Cookin' up a bookaversary vlog

My first year as an author has given me plenty of food for thought.

More good news!

HOLD STILL by Nina LaCour and GENTLEMEN by Michal Northrop are both on the ALA's 2010 Best Books for Young Adult's List,

SECRETS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY by Megan Frazer is on the ALA's Rainbow List

and

GENTLEMEN by Michael Northrop and FAR FROM YOU by Lisa Schroeder are on the TAYSHAS list for 2010.

Congratulations, all!

Michael: The Author Blog

Michael: What I saw at BEA (a cartoon)

Michael: Launch Day (An Animated Discussion)

Michael: The Books That Made This Writer (slow-track edition)

I am dyslexic. This is the #3 ranked fun fact about me. (The first two involve Jonathan Swift and bees, in that order.) I repeated second grade in honor of my, you know, brain problem, but I am "highly functional" now. Or so I claim. I still read letter by letter, rather than gobbling up words in bunches—I'm still amazed people can do that—but what I lose in speed, I make up in accuracy and recall. 

It may not be an issue now, but it definitely affected my reading habits when I was a kid. Which is to say, I didn't have any reading habits when I was a kid. I began reading for myself late, haltingly, and only because my brother seemed to be having so much fun with it. But while Matt would blast through a thick Stephen King novel in a few days, I labored. I mostly chose short books, and they had to be worth it. 

The first book I remember reading as something other than a homework assignment was The Book of Three, the first in a five-book series by Lloyd Alexander. This was completely because of my brother, who read all five and liked them so much that he named his main Dungeons & Dragons character after one of Alexander's creations. That was an almost unfathomable compliment in our world, and I just had to see why he'd done it. 

I loved The Book of Three—featuring Taran, the heroic assistant pig-keeper!—and even made it through the second book, the very awesome  The Black Cauldron. Loved that too, more even, but that was as far as I got. It was a lot of work, this reading for fun, and I already knew how the series ended from my brother.

So even after that postive start, books weren't a big part of my life. When it got too dark for climbing trees and riding bikes, there was TV and Atari. The next book that had a major impact on me was Watership Down. Technically, that was a homework assignment, but I devoured it in a way that was above and beyond the call of academic duty. That book floored me. Floored me. Still does.

That was fifth grade, fifth or sixth, and again, I didn't run out and start reading everything I could get my hands on. It was more of a growing suspicion that this reading thing could be kind of amazing sometimes. At about the same time, I started writing some poetry because, basically, it was short and I liked rhyming. Still, that was when I started writing for myself.

My dyslexia was thoroughly beaten down by then. It is, essentially, a problem of processing the symbols that make up language in a non-standard way, and years of assigned reading and individual attention in my no nonsense, small town elementary school had effectively retrained me to process those symbols properly. In the space of a few years, I'd gone from Special Ed to the gifted program, and that was really more about my teachers than me.

So now I had the mental tools for advanced reading and knew it could be fun, but I still wasn't an avid reader. That wouldn't happen until Robert Cormier. And then S.E. Hinton. I guess that was seventh grade. The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish... Kids were passing these books around: You have to check this out.

The books were darker than anything we'd read before. I'm not sure if anyone would have actually disapproved, but we acted that way, passing the little paperbacks around like contraband. And what seventh grader can resist something both portable and forbidden? 

The books were fantastic and now they were cool, too. That was that. I read pretty consistently from that point on. And then, in 10th grade English, we read the poem "Hawk Roosting" by Ted Hughes. Floored again, gobsmacked, whatever. I'd never heard anything like it:

There is no sophistry in my body;

My manners are tearing off heads...

It was the same thrill I'd felt reading Cormier for the first time. How could something be so dark, resonant, and cool and made only of words? And it was my old friend poetry again: still short, though no longer rhyming.

I was an English nerd 4eva after that. I plowed my way through all of Faulkner and then through NYU and into a job in publishing. Eventually, I started writing fiction, and when I made my way to YA, there was no doubt what sort of books I wanted to write. Something dark, something for kids who aren't necessarily avid readers, something they could pass around under their desks.

Will they? I guess we'll find out in April, when Gentlemen comes out. In the mean time, if you'll excuse me, I have some reading to do.