February meeting this SATURDAY with Harold Underdown!

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This month only we're bringing you our Monthly Meeting on Saturday, February 10,10am-12noon, Demaray Hall, SPU

Industry Low-Down with Harold Underdown

Join long-time children’s book editor Harold Underdown for a Q&A session filled with insider tips and techniques for success.

Register in advance if you plan to stay for Harold's masterclass on Editing Without an Editor- A Revision Tools Workshop, February 10, 1-5, Demaray Hall, SPU

This carefully condensed version of a Three-Day Workshop is set up to help you learn revision techniques to use on your manuscript. Harold Underdown of Kids Book Revisions will show how to use a variety of revision techniques and help you get more out of critique groups. More info here.

Picture Book Summer School

Are you ready to take the next step with your picture book manuscript? Harold Underdown and Eileen Robinson are offering a self-guided summer school version of their online class "Revising and Re-Imagining Your Picture Book Manuscript,” running from June through August, with registration open now through the end of June. Students can work their way through any or all of several classes, and also take part in an optional speed critique group.

Information

Critique option information

There is also a giveaway drawing, with the prize being a complete scholarship to this or one of our upcoming classes. People can enter by posting about the class. Full details here.

Heard a publishing term that leaves you flummoxed?

You might find a definition on Harold Underdown's helpful site.

Here are a few examples:

back matter--Supplementary material in the back of a book, such as a glossary, a recommended reading list, an index, or information about the book.

binding--What holds a book together. A trade hardcover binding is usually sewn and glued. A library binding is more durable, with cloth reinforcement and often a different sewing method. Paperbacks are usually bound with glue only.

bleed--Not what publishers do to artists and writers, bleed is a technical term referring to illustrations that extend off the edges of pages.

blues or bluelines--a printing, in blue only, from the final plates for a book. Usually only editors see these as a final check. If changes are needed, they have to be made to the film, which is expensive. Some publishers no longer use blues.

Read the rest.

Revisions class

Eileen Robinson and Harold Underdown, children's book editors, have a program called Kid's Book Revision, and they're offering a class that starts on Feb. 20.

Get the details here.

The economy and publishing: an overview

Here's the start of a longish piece by Harold Underdown, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Children's Publishing. He looks at the industry and how it's doing in today's economy:

For more than a year the attention of everyone working in the U.S. children's books publishing industry has been focused on the economy. And though 2009 began with some reasonably good news about retail book sales in 2008, and early information for 2009 suggested only modest declines, we still feel uncertain about the future of our industry. I've followed the news and write these comments to put what's been happening in context, to share my thoughts about what could happen in the coming months, and to suggest how we should respond.

Keep in mind that publishing generally does not move in synch with the economy as a whole, and children's book publishing does not always move in synch with publishing as a whole. One major cause of the lack of synchronicity is the impact of school and library funding, changes in which take time to take effect. I'll come back to that....

Read the rest.