YA for Dummies and Prairie Storms

What sounds does a ground hog make? An earless lizard? A burrowing owl? Six months ago, I had no idea!

August, 2011 Release

Written by Deborah Halverson, founder of the writer’s advice website DearEditor.com, it has great advice on writing and publishing a teen novel. Deborah edited young adult and children’s fiction with Harcourt Children’s Books before picking up a pen to write the award-winning teen novels Honk If You Hate Me and Big Mouth.

The book is filled with great features, including:

• tips for targeting an audience, finding an angle that’ll make the story stand out, and writing a killer hook
• an extensive chapter on self-marketing to help writers move boldly into the realm of self-promotion–including book trailers
• techniques and exercises to shape plot, create teen-friendly characters, develop a convincingly youthful voice, write natural dialogue, and use setting to illuminate characters and plot
• 13 National Book Award winners and finalists, Newbery medalists and honorees, and other award-winning luminaries sharing their insights
• self-editing tools to transform a first draft into a strong submission-ready final draft
• insider tips for finding the right agent and/or editor and preparing a stand-out submission package
• answers to common book contract questions
• advice on self-publishing for YA writers

Read more at DearEditor.com

Finding Audio for a Book Trailer

To anticipate the release of Prairie Storms and celebrate the release of Writing Young Adult Fiction for Dummies, I’m debuting the Prairie Storms book trailer here today.

As the author of The Book Trailer Manual, I had some simple ideas on where to find public domain sounds and inexpensive audio tracks.

Sound Track. First, I knew that I wanted a sound track to back up the animal sounds. Jeremy Doss, my nephew, is a talented film composer with experience in creating the musical moods needed to accompany and enhance images. A graduate of Film Score program an University of Southern California, he also writes music for video games and other uses.

We talked about what sort of music I needed and Jeremy was fantastic to work with. Contact him at jersam1995@sbcglobal.net

Animal Sounds – FREE. Second, I needed audio of the sounds made by each animal. Any time I need audio or video for animals in the United States, I start at the Fish and Wildlife Multimedia Library. The government agency provides public domain multimedia, free for public use. Here, I found great audio for the American Bison and the Bald Eagle. However, none of the other animals had sound tracks.

Animal Sounds – Inexpensive. My next stop was www.SoundDogs.com, a site which has a wide variety of audio clips. Amazingly, they had every other sound I needed, except the ground hog. For these clips, I looked for short audio clips with clear sounds of the animal involved. You can sort by the length of a clip and I was looking for the shortest possible: I knew I wanted the whole video about one minute in length, so I would only need a 4-5 second sound clip for any one animal. I searched and listened to clips and made decisions. One disappointment was that the earless lizard had no sound; indeed, most lizards don’t make any sounds. I finally decided to go with a clip of a lizard running on wood as the most likely option.

After I put all the sounds into the shopping cart, I was a bit afraid to look at the total. It was a pleasant surprise to see that I had only spent about $20.

Ask Permission from Private Party. Then, there was that pesky ground hog. Fortunately, I found www.hoghaven.com, a site specifically about ground hogs, and they had a dozen sound clips of ground hogs. I wrote the site owner, explained the project and asked permission to use one of the sounds. They were gracious enough to give permission. That gave me the last sound that I needed.

Creating the Book Trailer for Prairie Storms

With Kathleen Rietz’s (www.kathleenrietz.com) watercolor images from the Prairie Storm book and the sounds, I set to work. I use Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope) to edit my video. No, it’s not a free program like PhotoStory, it has lots of flexibility and options. I searched and searched for a program when I started doing book trailers, until I came to Vegas. Here’s what sold me on this program: they have extensive tutorials right at your fingertips, built into the main screen. The learning curve for this program was minimal compared to anything else I tried, an hour instead of four or five.

To create this trailer, I made some decisions:
The trailer would run about one minute.
With twelve animals that meant about 4 seconds per animal, with the remaining time going to the opening screen and credits.

I set up the program with markers every four seconds and added the images on one track, the animal sounds on a second and the sound track on a third. Then, I went through and added to a fourth track the text that appears on the video. Vegas has the capability to scan across an image or zoom in and out, so I adjusted this. Initially, the images were full page, but the text of the book interfered, so I zoomed in on each animal, then panned across to create movement. Static images are weaker than moving images in a trailer, you lose the viewer’s attention.

After previewing it a number of times and getting feedback, I took my husband’s suggestion to create a bit of a splash at the end with the book cover. After the American Bison at the end, there’s actually a half second of nothing except the music track. This is followed by a thunder clap and the front cover of the book. To find the right thunder clap, I went back to www.SoundDogs.com and searched through their extensive offering of storm sounds.

The video ends quickly with credits to the publisher, Sylvan Dell, the film composer Jeremy Doss and thanks to hoghaven.com for the groundhog sounds.

Working with a publisher, I was careful to run drafts of the video past the editor, publicity director and publisher. Jeremy Doss approved the trailer, as did Kathleen Rietz, the illustrator. When all approvals were in, I uploaded it to YouTube. And waited. It was ready early June, but I knew that I didn’t want to show it until after I spoke at the American Library Association, where the trailer would have its debut. And now, here’s the debut on this site:

*|YouTube:uaUirE0ed6Y|*

TEACHERS: If your school blocks video through your server, please email me (darcy at darcypattison dot com) for a copy of the file to show to your class.

AUTHORS: Need more on how-to create book trailers? See my sister site www.booktrailermanual.com

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Festival Celebrates Literacy

The Arkansas Literary Festival will take place next weekend, April 8-11, 2010 in Little Rock, AR. If you’re anywhere close, please come!

Books, theater, music, comics, books, games, chess, puppets, origami, Shakespeare, books, authors in the schools, authors in the library, authors just strolling around, books, authors everywhere, panels and workships, art and illustration — and did I mention, books? And authors?

This year, I’ve served as the Co-Chair of the Children’s Programs for the Literary Festival and it’s been great fun planning the event. We tried to find a mix of activities relating to literacy and tried to schedule it so that families can take advantage of the range of activities.

Read the full program and schedule at www.arkansasliteraryfestival.org.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I hail from Arkansas and until now, we’ve been known for the Clinton Presidential Library, the US’s only diamond mine (Crater of Diamonds State Park), and the headquarters of Wal-Mart. But this year we’ll be known for the Arkansas Teen Book Award, established by Arkansas Librarians. (Facebook page.) The reading list was announced in December, 2009 and this year’s winners will be announced in December, 2010.

Two days ago, we looked at opening lines from 100 top novels and categorized them to learn how to open a novel. Yesterday, we looked at the opening lines from the teen novels on the 7-9th grade, 2010 Arkansas Teen Book Award reading list and challenged you to identify the novels. Today’s opening lines are from the 10-12th grade reading list for the Arkansas Teen Book Award.

Identify These Teen Novels from Their Opening Lines, #2

OK, TRY to identify these without any help. They are all 2008 copyright books. Need help? See the tip below.
(Actually, many of these are graphic novels and there’s at least one non-fiction on the list.)

• I look at my fingers again, the ones that trembled and shook just a few days ago at Mr. Bender’s kitchen table.
• Willow Creek Camping Ground, Willow Creek, Montana.
  Daddy?
• Yarlung Tsangpo Canyon, Himalayas – 1938.
  See anything?
• You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold.
• As with the banking industry, the Russian political system and the romantic liaisons on the Gossip Girl, all is not as it seems in the world of food and drink.
• Time 6:13:10 four minutes earlier…
  Readings look good, Annie.
• No doubt with all those grapes, Aristotle, the world’s first naturalist, passed gas.
• We live in a world where medical miracles and high-tech marvels are almost commonplace.
• In these dungeons the darkness was complete, but Katsa had a map in her mind.
• Needle doesn’t know which way to point.
• twenty-two years later -
  I’m dreaming of the boy in the tree and at the exact moment I’m about to hear the answer that I’ve been waiting for, the flashlights yank me out of what could have been one of those perfect moments of clarity people talk about for the rest of their lives.
• The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.
• I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez High in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world.
• Henry and I dug the whole seven feet deep.
• The strikers cheered as the tractor dragged the ancient Chrysler Newport in front of the main gate.
• just cause you can’t see, don’t mean aint nothing there. (See comments: Thanks to the author for adding the comment with the opening line!)
• “So I was reading this Vonnegut novel,” I said to Samantha.
• I was born in the United States of America.
• The Cosmic hurricane rips through uncharted space at one
  million miles per hour, gas plumes extending for a thousand light-years
  in any direction.
• Venomous by Christopher Krovatin

Tip No. 1: The Reading List (pdf) can be found here. These are the opening lines for the Level 2, Grades 10-12 list. I didn’t scramble up the list, it just goes down the line.
Tip No. 2: The links will take you to the Amazon page for each book.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I hail from Arkansas and until now, we’ve been known for the Clinton Presidential Library, the US’s only diamond mine (Crater of Diamonds State Park), and the headquarters of Wal-Mart. But this year we’ll be known for the Arkansas Teen Book Award, established by Arkansas Librarians. (Facebook page.) The reading list was announced in December, 2009 and this year’s winners will be announced in December, 2010.

Yesterday, we looked at opening lines from 100 top novels and categorized them to learn how to open a novel. Here, I’m taking the opening lines from the teen novels on the 2010 Arkansas Teen Book Award reading list and challenging you to identify the novel.

Identify These Teen Novels from Their Opening Lines, #1

OK, TRY to identify these without any help. They are all 2008 copyright books. Need help? See the tip below.

• Conner Broekhart was a remarkable boy, a fact that became evident very early in his idyllic childhood.
• The day I broke up with my boyfriend Evan was the day he wrote the song.
• We can hear someone screaming as soon as we get off the elevator.
• They’d stolen a march on the day.
• The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up.
• When my father died, I thought the world would come to an end.
• December 14, 2007
  To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors, Alabaster Preparatory Academy
• Ten minutes after the last class of the day, Lucy got a text message from her best friend Sarah Hebert, “Need u,” it said.
• Pugg Brothers. . .Please report to the principal’s office.
• . . . Gino Michelini on KLS-FM, 92.3 on your FM dial!
• Decatur, Alabama
  August 12, 1993
  Kevin Gardner was not home, even though it was way past his eleven-o’clock curfew.
• Long ago and far away in the land of ice and snow, there came a time when it seemed that winter would never end.
• Some people call me a child-witch,
  but I’m just a girl who likes to watch
  the hands of women
  as they gather wild herbs and flowers
  to heal the sick.
• There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
• When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.
• “You won’t believe this, but it’s true. I wrote a story called ‘The Savage,’ about a savage kid that lived under the ruined chapel in Burgess Woods, and the kid came to life in the real world.”
• Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cigar clamped between his teeth.
• Henry Smith’s father told him that if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.
• Maybe Mommers and I shouldn’t have been surprised; Dwight had told us it was a trailer even before we’d packed our bags.
• Imagine for a moment that it is early Saturday morning in the United States.

Interestingly, the list includes several graphic novels, but not as many as the grade 10-12 list (opening lines coming tomorrow), which is about a third graphic novels. Arkansas is currently having a big push in schools about encouraging kids to eat right and control their weight. So, both lists include books about eating.

Tip : The Reading List (pdf) can be found here. These are the opening lines for the Level 1, Grades 7-9 list. I didn’t scramble up the list, it just goes down the line. Tomorrow, we’ll do the same thing for the 10-12 grade list.
Tip No. 2: The links will take you to the Amazon page for each book.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Connect with Authors Through Skype

One site that quickly gained popularity this year is the Skype an Author, a Wetpaint site, billed at the key to Virtual Author Visits in Your Library or Classroom. Set up by Sarah Chauncey of the Grandview Elementary School Library in Rockland County, NY schools and author Mona Kirby, it is getting attention from many sources, including the School Library Journal.

The site allows authors to set up pages describing their books and how they might do a Skype visit. Skype is the online audio/video free phone service; a Skype visits allows an author to see students and students to see the author.

Authors are asked to do one of two types of Skype visits:

• No Charge – Meet the Author Visit – 10 to 15 minutes
• In-Depth Visit – 30-60 Minutes – Charge to be determined by author

Why Should you Want to Skype?

(See what Catherine Balkin said in yesterday’s post. )

Set Up Your Page

I recently updated the Darcy Pattison page on the Skype an Author site.

Here are some tips:

Set up your Webcam

One final thing you’ll want to do before going live with the Skype an Author site is to test out your Skype/Webcam set up. I discovered, for example, that the lighting in my office is great for doing work on the computer, but awful for doubling as a video studio. Here is one videos to get you started on simple lighting. Look for other tutorials.

How to Apply Simple 3-Point Lighting to Amateur Film Making

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Arkansas SCBWI Conference is this weekend in Conway, AR.

Featured speakers are Anastasia Suen, Greenwillow editor Martha Mahilick, and agent Jennifer (Jaeger) Rofe, from the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

Earlier, I linked to the websites and blogs of the speakers.

Full registration information is available on the Arkansas SCBWI website.

If you’re anywhere close, come join us!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Meet Editor and Agent at Arkansas Conference

The Arkansas SCBWI Spring Conference schedule is now online!

When: May 15-16, 2009
Where: Conway, AR

Speakers include:

• Anastasia Suen, author, teacher
• Jennifer (Jaeger) Rofe, literary agent, Andrea Brown Literary
  • Interview at KidLit Central news
  • Cynsations interview
• Martha Mihalick, editor, Greenwillow Books/Harpercollins
  • Greenwillow books on Facebook
  • Christy’s Creative Space report on Mihalick’s talk on Voice
  • Cheryl’s Musings reports on books edited by Mihalick
  • Market My Words interview with Mihalick about marketing
  • Mihalick’s personal blog, A Curiosity Shop
• Melanie Siegel, illustrator
• Darcy Pattison, author, teacher

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win