Gabrielle Prendergast's Blog, page 2

VIDEO: ALA Midwinter Panel: GET BOOKED – Making the Most of Author Visits to Classrooms and Libraries

I appeared on a panel with Deb Caletti, Abby Cooper, Mia García and Claribel Ortega at the American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Seattle. It was a very lively discussion and we were able to share a ton of information and anecdotes about classroom and library visits. The panel was video recorded and that recording and here it is:

In addition here is the handout from the panel:

GET BOOKED panel handout

 

 

Open Letter to Teachers and Librarians who Devalue, Disrespect and Dismiss Young Adult Literature

[image error]Like many kidlit authors I am also a parent to a kid. And like most kidlit parents I have heard multiple variations on the general theme of disrespecting my work and the work of my colleagues from the reading professionals who serve my teen and her peers.

I’ve about had it. The last time it happened I got closer than I ever have to becoming one of those parents. You know, the ones who write a letter of complaint to an overworked and generally beleaguered teacher? I’m sure my daughter’s English teacher didn’t mean to insult both my daughter’s tastes and her mother’s profession in her literature class, but the fact remains that she did.

The below is my response, posted here to save my poor daughter the embarrassment of some kind of diplomatic incident at her school.

Open Letter to Teachers and Librarians who Devalue, Disrespect and Dismiss Young Adult Literature

Dear Reader

I’m assuming you’re a reader because you obviously like books. You teach English, or you’re a librarian. You’ve made books your life; you must like them, right? It’s just that it sometimes seems that you only like a particular type of book. Classic Literature, you call this, a designation so amorphous as to include novels, plays, poetry and even non-fiction from every century right back to the ancient Greeks, in multiple languages, and from most countries in the world (though with an unhealthy emphasis on Europe). The truth is, it seems for you “classic literature” is more easily defined by what it is not.

It is not most science fiction or fantasy.

It is not Stephen King or Nora Roberts or anyone like them.

It is not part of a Disney or comic book franchise.

It is not fantasy.

It is not romance.

And it is, according to you anyway, not, most emphatically NOT, books written specifically for teens, otherwise known as (scary voice) young adult fiction.

Quite apart from the fact that you are dismissing a vast women-centered and vibrant segment of the publishing industry, and one that is, though still imperfectly, much more responsive to social changes and justice movements than the publishing industry at large, that you are dismissing me, please consider what you are saying to your teenage students and patrons when you disrespect Young Adult Fiction.

For most teen readers, YA is the only time they encounter a teen or youth character who is the captain of their own destiny. In many of your treasured examples of classic literature, teen characters exist only as victims—of murder, sexual assault, bad parenting or disastrous governing, or as insignificant side characters. Sometimes important characters appear as children or teens in the early chapters, but in these instances it seems their only goal is to leave that pointless period behind them and get to the real business of adulthood: the insecure coastal cannery job, the loveless marriage and subsequent infidelity, the inevitable loss, the misery of loneliness in a world far to cruel to understand the unbearable…eh, whatever.

Many, MANY teens of color, indigenous teens, LGBT teens, or teens with disabilities first saw a character like themselves in a YA book written in the last five years. Your so-called “classic literature” is almost devoid of racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, religious or body diversity. YA literature has a whole movement devoted to it (We Need Diverse Books). More books representing this diversity are published every year (progress is slow, but steady). But you dismiss them, because they’re for teens.

When you dismiss YA fiction to teens, you are dismissing them. You are saying that books written to their tastes are in bad taste, and that therefore they have bad taste. When you say a book about a teen falling in love or changing the world is silly, you are saying it is silly for your teens to think they can love or change the world. When you say that the language of YA is too simple or pedestrian to a kid who enjoys and relates to YA language, you are saying that they are simple or pedestrian.

When you tell a teen that something they like is bad, you are telling them that they are wrong for liking it.

As YA authors, we write to appeal to teens—it’s true—and to be frank most of us don’t give a moment’s thought as to whether our books appeal to adults (they do, of course. As is widely known, up to 50% of the readership of YA is made up of adults). We write for teens and to teens and we do this intentionally and with great care. When you then tell teens that this product, made for them, is not of value, what are you telling them? That we don’t value them? That they don’t have value? That we’ve measured their value as lesser, and thus tailored lesser books specifically for them?

Come on.

I have a teen daughter, and for a long time I’ve wondered why the books she is assigned in school are the same ones I read in school over 35 years ago. Why isn’t she reading one of the many of thousands of brilliant YA books written in the intervening years? I had been thinking it was budget, and access to materials, and other logistical issues but I’m beginning to wonder. Is it because schools and educators simply don’t respect these books?

What are you saying to today’s teens when you insist on assigning books written for and studied by your teens’ parents’ or grandparents’ generations? That your teens’ generation (Gen Z) or the previous one (Millennials) aren’t important? These are the generations that brought us #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #NeverAgain, #WeNeedDiverseBooks, #MarriageEquality. In fact these are the generations that brought us hashtags! Can you not take a second look at the books that they love? These books are international bestsellers, win multiple awards, are translated in film, TV and graphic novels, not to mention dozens and dozens of languages. Can you not integrate them into the classroom?

Can you not, at least, respect them and more importantly, respect your teens’ desires to read them?

That’s really not that much to ask.

Sincerely

G.S (Gabrielle) Prendergast

A YA Author.

 

 

ALA Midwinter Panel: GET BOOKED – Making the Most of Author Visits to Classrooms and Libraries

I appeared on a panel with Deb Caletti, Abby Cooper, Mia García and Claribel Ortega at the American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Seattle. It was a very lively discussion and we were able to share a ton of information and anecdotes about classroom and library visits. The panel was video recorded and that recording will be uploaded as soon as it’s ready.  In the meantime here is the handout from the panel:

GET BOOKED panel handout

 

 

Writer’s Digest Novel Writing Conference 2018 – Presentation materials

This past weekend I gave two seminars at The Writer’s Digest Novel Writing Conference in Pasadena. I promised attendees I would upload both my Powerpoint Presentations and the handout so here they are for all to enjoy:

Perfecting POV Powerpoint Slides

What is YA Powerpoint Slides

Perfecting POV Handout

What is YA Handout

Audio recordings of these seminars will be available later this year on the Writer’s Digest Conference site.

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Writer’s Digest Novel Writing Conference – Presentations and materials

[image error]This last week I gave two presentations at the Writer’s Digest Novel Writing Conference in Pasadena. It was a great conference! My two sessions were well attended and as promised I’ve got the presentation materials here:

The end now what.pptx

The End handout

The End handout2

Dual POV.pptx

Duel and Multi-handout

I hope you find them helpful. Please feel free to get in touch with any questions.

Top 10 reasons Book Bloggers Matter

It started innocently enough. My mother was visiting, and she brought a newspaper with her – a major national newspaper she gets so she can do the daily crossword. Normally I hate newspapers, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the mess of paper that always seems to accumulate around my house. Why would I PAY to have more crap to recycle at the end of the week?

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Anyway, said newspaper was left on my dining table, and idly as I ate my breakfast that morning, I perused the Arts section – in particular the pages dedicated to books. My first cursory glance didn’t reveal much to capture my interest. But on second look something occurred to me. I began checking author names. Specifically, I began to circle MALE author names. What I discovered didn’t surprise me exactly but, it did confirm some stuff I’ve heard about the publishing industry.

I did a quick statistical analysis:

Of the authors reviewed or profiled 83% were male.

That’s not right, is it? That’s not fair, that’s not representative of the population at large. It should be about 50/50, right?

Well I did another quick count, this time on the bestsellers list, and here’s what I found:

Only 33% of the authors on the bestseller list are male. This includes fiction, non-fiction, paperback and Canadian books. Of the 60 books on the six different top ten lists, only 20 were authored by men (notably, on that day, the YA and children’s bestsellers weren’t listed. If they had been the ratio would have been even more skewed). So what that tells us is that despite the fact that women are selling the majority of books, men are still getting the majority of column inches in major newspapers.  That also tells me that when it comes to speaking to the book creating and consuming population at large, the mainstream media has a very limited outlook.

And you know what else that tells me? Unlike the mainstream media, Book Bloggers are awesome.

Book Bloggers Matter. Book bloggers matter A LOT. And to drive that point home here’s my own top ten.

The Top Ten Reasons Book Bloggers Matter:

[image error]Book bloggers review genres that rarely get reviewed in mainstream publications – specifically but not limited to YA, romance and erotica and other genres that are typically maligned by mainstream publications.
Book bloggers review indie published books. For an indie author to get a look-in at a major publication they need to be “a phenomenon” and even then they are usually only profiled as some kind of offensive or embarrassing anomaly.
Book Bloggers come from all walks of life. You don’t need a degree in journalism from Stanford to be a book blogger. You don’t need to be the son of a prominent newspaper editor. You need a laptop and a library card. You don’t even need a laptop.
Book bloggers can specialize in certain genres, and become not only experts in that genre but evangelists for it. Many blogs focus on paranormal books, or YA for example.
Book bloggers are often (though not always) women, though they rarely have a bias toward women authored books. A good book is a good book in their eyes.
Book Bloggers come in all ages. Unlike the Baby Boomer dominated mainstream media, bloggers come as disaffected Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers, hyper-connected Millennials, and the online natives Gen Zs. Boomers are in there too. And kids as young as seven or eight blog about books–it’s awesome.
Some book bloggers specialize in books authored by under-represented groups or books depicting under-represented characters. Several blogs specialize in writers and characters of color for example, while some others are particularly interested in LGBT themes.
Book bloggers are not beholden to advertising. If they want to sing the praises of smut-tastic gay erotica, or pan a treacly and didactic Christian romance, no amount of pressure from Chic-Fil-A is going to stop them.
Book Bloggers ENGAGE with readers and writers. They don’t sit atop some Manhattan high-rise sipping kale smoothies with Jonathan Franzen while Joyce Carol Oates reads poetry in the light of an Arco floor lamp. They drink cheap martinis in dive bars in Vegas with Jimmy Thomas and Sylvia Day while fans line up to get their décolletage autographed.
Book bloggers are ON POINT with social media and new technology. If they like a book not only will it appear on their blog but it will be Facebooked, tweeted, pinned, tumbled, Instagrammed and Snapchatted up the wazoo. Not only that but they RULE when it comes to eReading and eBooks. If a book is exclusive to eBook, book bloggers will be ALL OVER it.

BONUS:

Book bloggers not only respect trends, they make them. They practically invented the New Adult category (and maybe later killed it. Oh well), despite the mainstream industry’s insistence to “stop trying to make New Adult a thing. They have kept paranormal romance alive and kicking, despite the mainstream’s weary protestations that it was “over”. Things don’t become “over” with book bloggers. If one book blogger gets sick of Shifter Erotica or dystopian YA, there’s always another who just discovered it.

I could go on. While the mainstream media floats around in the haze of their own over-educated, organic lemongrass- scented farts, book bloggers have revolutionized how books are written, promoted, bought and read.

I, for one, am for it. You got this, girls (and guys). You got this.

On Writing While the World Drowns

Yesterday my book came out, a book I’ve been working on for six years. This is not my first book but nevertheless it does represent a few “firsts”. It’s my first USA deal with a big five publisher, my first big advance, my first genre book, my first book with my first New York agent. It’s also my longest book (four times longer than the next nearest contender). All my books are the books of my heart but this one…this one is important to me.

And it came out yesterday, while the world drowned. I had promos set up, bloggers I had promised to retweet, a group giveaway I had committed to, and of course, a book to sell. I did it all in between retweeting flood images, fundraising calls and heartwarming stories, researching places to donate, and talking to my daughter about the science, politics and history of devastating climate change.

“What would happen to us if there was a flood?”

“We’re not at risk of flooding here. People in Richmond and Delta are though.”

“What would happen to them?”

“They would lose their homes, I guess. We could have some of them stay here.”

“What if there was an earthquake?”

And so on. But I still kept doing my job–retweeting reviews, posting graphics, thanking people for their congratulations, writing a little, when I could concentrate on it. I kept doing my job.

To fully explain why this was so important to me, I need to go back, a long way back to my own teen years and tell you a story. It was Christmas season and my dear sister was in high school herself one day when they had a fire drill. She obediently left everything behind in the classroom and came back a few minutes later, not noticing anything untoward.  That afternoon she took the bus into town to buy some Christmas presents for me and our other sisters, but when she went to get the money out of her wallet, money she had been saving from babysitting for weeks, it was all gone. Someone had stolen her money during the fire drill.

My sister told me about this that night. She told me how on the way home she had stood at the bus stop and cried. My parents, though not poor, were not the kind of people who would just replace stolen money, or broken toys or lost possessions. We wouldn’t have even asked. As I sat listening to my sister sadly tell me about the lost money, feeling impotent and angry, a little fire bust to life in me, a fire that became a vow. I didn’t want to ever cry about money. I didn’t want anyone I loved to cry about money.

Full disclosure, I’m a bit of a mess, and I was even back then. While I had the grades and the brains to go to law school or whatever, that was never realistic for me. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, no one bothered to examine why I so often bombed out on things that should have come easily to me. Now I know, of course. Anxiety. Depression. Attention problems. Even now these things turn writing a book into a painful, sisyphean ordeal.

But I do my job. I make money. I do other things to make money too, from investing to teaching, to designing, to taking in boarders. And of course I support my husband and his well paying but exhausting job in tech. I do this all a little obsessively to help allay the lingering sadness about my sister’s tears. It was more than thirty years ago. It was only twenty dollars, about fifty dollars in today’s terms (babysitters were paid $1 an hour then). And I still hate to see anyone, let alone someone close to me, cry about such (to me anyway) paltry sums. I still do whatever I can to dry those tears.

Those who know me personally know I don’t have expensive tastes. I wear stretch pants from Target and eat home-made beefaroni. I fly economy. I shop at Value Village. To be honest even with the good book deal I’m not sure I can afford to live any other way. But I don’t want to either. That’s not what motivates me. I want to be in a position where I can help. Since I’m useless at emotional support (I either break down myself or I get distracted and confused) and I’ve never been able to successfully “rally the troops”, money is my best means. If I’m ever to be in a position where I can blithely give a million dollars to flood recovery (as Sandra Bullock just did) or even a thousand dollars I need to keep working. I’m of no use to anyone if I can’t keep my own roof up. Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.

Yesterday and the day before, and many other days during natural disasters or other calamities I’ve seen people scold me and my writing colleagues about doing promos on Twitter or elsewhere. I’m some cases, especially in the hours immediately after a tragic event, I’m inclined to step back from any planned promotions. Some of my colleagues have auto tweets set up though, and if they happen to be away from their computer, these promos might still go ahead. I’m not going to judge when this happens. Just like doctors and nurses and librarians and truck drivers and teachers keep working when the world goes to hell, so must writers. Selling books is part of our job. We can’t help the world stay afloat if we’re sinking ourselves.

So we keep working, we keep writing, we paste smiles on our faces and tell people about our imagined worlds. I took part in a group book launch on November 9, 2016. Everyone was in shock and miserable but we kept working.

We did our jobs.

My sister lives in my house now. She’s single and doesn’t earn much and Vancouver rents being what they are, when she was recently “renovicted” it made sense for her to just move in. If she’d needed to search for a new rental there would have been tears.

Not on my watch.

Post any good causes you think I should know about in the comments. I’ve got some big checks coming!

 

Spreading the diverse books love

I need to rant about something. Really I should be writing my book, but whatever. It’s Sunday and it’s hot and I can’t mooch around on Twitter because of Game of Thrones spoilers. So here I go.

I maintain a little Pinterest board about diverse books covers. It goes back years to my early days as a cover designer for indie clients when both my clients and myself found it very difficult to source photographs to use on diverse covers. Not only that but I was well aware, because of an excellent piece by Kate Hart, that there was a dearth of diversity on young adult covers (there still is). So I started keeping track of as many YA covers depicting diversity as I could find. Soon I expanded that to included picture books and middle grade covers. It’s really just a tool for myself to keep track and have something to point people to if they’re looking. Happily the list has been growing steadily. But that’s beside my point.

I’ve been neglecting my board for a while, busy with writing my books and no time to do the research needed to keep things up to date, so I’ve really only been adding books as I come across them on social media, mainly Twitter and Instagram. But the other day I thought I’d try to catch up a bit by going through the current and archived covers at Netgalley.

I found a bunch of stuff, and added over a hundred covers! But here’s where I started feeling a bit ranty. So many of these covers I’d never seen before! I follow a TON of diversity positive Twitter accounts and regularly see tweeps boosting current and upcoming diverse titles. But at best, it seems only about a quarter of the diverse titles out there are even getting a look in terms of the real influencers in this area. Now I know some influencers prefer to focus on #ownvoices and marginalized authors and that’s fine. But I found several titles by marginalized authors that I’d never seen before, never heard of, even some stuff from major publishers. And a LOT of stuff from small publishers.

I think you’ll all agree with me when I say that despite some gains, there is still a lot of work to be done in the literary diversity movement. For my part, I’d like to diversify the range of diverse titles we’re all talking about beyond just the buzzy titles from big publishers. I don’t do much evangelizing on social media, apart from retweeting colleagues posts, and I don’t review at all anymore (except occasionally for friends), but in future I’m going to put a bit more effort into talking up lesser known diverse titles, rather than just raving about the same ones everyone else is raving about. I hope some of you consider doing the same.

New COVER! ZERO REPEAT FOREVER

I’m over the moon excited to show you all my new book cover for my upcoming science fiction YA novel, Zero Repeat Forever. Here it is in animated gif form:

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Zero Repeat Forever comes out from Simon & Schuster in September 2017. You can read more about Zero Repeat Forever here.