Digital Book Creation and Marketing: A Workshop with Christopher Cheng

After posting about the "shoulds" of social media, I had the good fortune to attend a Toolbox Workshop given by the Austrialia children's author Christopher Cheng. The 20 workshop attendees in Hudson, NY were treated to three separate workshops concentrated into one day, beginning with a morning session on creating books in a digital age. This hour and a half session introduced the fast-changing world of e-books for young readers and concluded with an e-book Cheng made in one evening using photos from the SCBWI conference in Los Angeles earlier this month (Cheng is one of SCBWI's hard-working board members) and a cute teddy bear, Teddy Eddie, who accompanied Cheng and his wife on their global journey.

After lunch, Cheng covered book trailers, social media, and other marketing topics. Again, he used examples from his own work and gave the audience useful do's and don't's. Don't #1 was "Don't go over one minute--30 seconds is even better," advice I egregiously disregarded when making the trailer for Gringolandia. (But I loved that song so much!)