Tag Archives: Teens/YA

Design 101: How a Book Cover Gets Made, Part II

In the first part of our guest blog, Tu Books Editorial Director Stacy Whitman and designer Isaac Stewart discussed how they came up with the cover concept for the novel Vodník. In part II, they share covers they considered and explain how they came up with the final design.

Isaac: By the time we chose a direction for the cover, I had created something like twenty-two thumbnails. I’ll admit, I went a little overboard, but I really wanted to give Vodnik the attention it deserved. And honestly, it was hard work finding the desired balance between ominous and whimsical.

COVER 1: THE HORROR

Vodnik cover concept I

Isaac: This cover has a lot going for it, despite my getting the color of the vodník’s arm wrong. Initially, I wanted to have a hand thrust up out of the water, a crushed teacup in its grasp. As I searched for images that matched, I found this one and decided it played off the ominous feeling I was hoping for. I tried the whole fire and water dichotomy with the colors of the title and byline, and was hoping that the text itself would carry the Eastern Block feel. The large, in-your-face title was a precursor to what we wound up using on the final cover.

The biggest problem with this cover was it looked like a horror novel, almost completely ignoring the fantasy and whimsy that are also big parts of the story. To tell the truth, it didn’t even look like a YA book.

Stacy: Yeah, this one just wasn’t working for me. It looked too horror-y, and didn’t have the right sensibility that I was going for. Which brought us to…

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Design 101: How a book cover gets made

In this two-part guest blog post, designer Isaac Stewart and Tu Books Editorial Director Stacy Whitman discuss how they came up with the final cover for our new YA fantasy, Vodník:

Isaac: Before brainstorming ideas for a book design, I usually get a few pieces of key information from the editor:

1.     What age-range and demographic do we want the book to target?

2.     What would the editor like the cover to convey?

3.     What has the author said they would like to see on the cover?

Here’s how Stacy answered:

1.     The book’s design should appeal to both female and male tweens and teens, but should specifically target the male teen.

2.     Stacy wanted a cover that felt ominous, fantastical, with a dash of whimsy.

3.     Bryce [Moore, the author] specifically mentioned that he found covers with bold shapes and colors both beautiful and striking. But if we decided to go for a more photographic cover, he wanted to see the vodník statue or Trenčín castle.

Trencin Castle, Slovakia
Trenčín Castle

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Announcing Our first DiYA Monthly Book Roundup!

Some of you may be familiar with Diversity in YA (DiYA), a lovely project started last year by authors Cindy Pon and Malinda Lo to bring more attention to diversity in children’s literature. During the year-long DiYA project, Cindy and Malinda were kind enough to do a roundup each month of new titles coming out that featured diversity, and they defined diversity in the following way: (1) main characters or major secondary characters (e.g., a love interest or best friend kind of character) who are of color or are LGBT; or (2) written by a person of color or LGBT author.

Since DiYA is on hiatus, Cindy and Malinda gave us their blessing to continue their monthly roundup. We all felt that it was important to keep the spotlight on diverse books, and we hope you’ll join us in that mission!

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Diversity in 2011: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In our December e-news, we took a look at how 2011 has played out in terms of diversity with a few events of note:

Good: We started Tu Books! Which means more diversity in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.

Authors Cindy Pon and Malinda Lo organized the Diversity in YA tour and website to highlight diverse books and authors, and got a terrific response from readers.

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Video Thursday: Everyone’s Reading Yummy

guest bloggerWe know we’ve done something right when readers share their excitement for our books with the entire Internet. Amy Cheney, librarian at Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center, is one of those excited readers: she made a video with other staff at the ACJJC, all explaining why they love Yummy and why it’s great for the kids they work with every day.

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Mixed Messages

Recently, I’ve read a couple books set in fantasy worlds that reverse the skin-tone power dynamic of our world: where dark-haired and dark-skinned people oppress and discriminate against paler, blonder folk. Both are fine books—The Shifter by Janice Hardy and Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey—and neither oversimplify race relations or relies on our constructs of black and white in describing their characters and ethnic groups, but it does make me wonder about the message we’re sending to minority kids through books like these.

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Making Reading Part of Your Child’s Life

It is a proven fact that reading benefits children of all ages. Hand-eye coordination is improved, vital language and social skills are developed, and lives are enriched all through reading a book.

But, how do you get children interested in reading? Let us discuss this topic for specific age groups.

Babies and Toddlers

Introducing books at a young age is a great way to start the reading trend. Books will teach colors, letters of the alphabet, counting, shapes, and more. Children as young as 1 or 2 years old will begin to recognize letters or numbers and point out their favorite colorful illustrations.

A great way to get them involved is to read to them from the first day they are born. Babies and toddlers are reliant on their parents or caretakers to teach them. They are like a little sponge absorbing the words, the colors, and the process of reading a book. So, make it a routine that your kids will enjoy. Snuggle up and read a book before naptime or after dinner to wind them down each night. The consistency will make reading something that they look forward to.

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Confessions of a children’s book lover

I’ll just come right out and say it: I love reading children’s books. I do. And not just for work, or for industry research, or for educational purposes. I read them for fun, and I am not embarrassed about it.

That’s not such a revolutionary thing to say around here. Working in children’s publishing, you get spoiled – in this world, everybody knows how good a good children’s book can be. But out there in the “real world,” not everyone is so enlightened. Some people think that children’s books are only for (gasp!) children, and there’s a stigma attached to adults who read children’s books without some kind of excuse. It’s ok if you’re a teacher, or you work in publishing, or you’re studying to be a librarian. Then it’s work-related. But despite what the newspapers are saying, for those adults who have no excuse I think that being a regular reader of children’s literature is still very much looked down upon.

It drives me nuts. Once an aunt of mine asked me what great books I’d read recently. I had just finished Melina Marchetta’s wondrous Jellicoe Road and recommended it to her wholeheartedly, albeit with one caveat: it was a teen book. “You read teen books?” she said with a face. “Why?”Jellicoe Road

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Parenthood

The 1989 film Parenthood has inspired a TV show of the same name. I haven’t seen the show yet, but I have noticed some snappy ads on the streets. One sidewalk ad features the line, “Realizing you’ve become your father”—funny and true.

parenthood ad
funny ad for Parenthood

I read some online reviews of the show and one person commented that it was both funny and heart-wrenching. As the father of two boys, ages 9 and 6, that makes sense to me. When you become a parent you often get together with other parents to commiserate as you face different issues concerning your kids. It is always interesting when I meet parents who have kids who are older than mine, because I am curious as to what developmental issues lurk just around the corner.

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Mother’s Books

With Mother’s Day coming up next month, we’ve been thinking about mothers in books. There are plenty of mothers in picture books, but they are rarely involved in children’s novels; I remember reading an essay by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (sadly, I can’t find it online—it was in the March 2009 Horn Book Magazine) in which she argued that mothers are just too protective and too likely to take over, denying the kids their adventures. There’s a crossover novel, Boneshaker, in which a teenage boy goes into a zombie-infested city to discover the truth about his father and grandmother. His mother goes in after him. It’s really her book. To have their own books, children often are orphaned, or go to boarding school, or run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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