Young readers' fascination with Wimpy Kids and Dorks clearly shows one thing: they want to be popular! And who better to lead them on the road to popularity than Amy Ignatow, former teacher and author of The Popularity Papers: Research for the Social Improvement and General Betterment of Lydia Goldblatt & Julie Graham-Chang (Amulet/Abrams, $15.95, 9780810984219/0810984210, 208 pp., ages 12-up). As a debut writer on her first bookstore tour during that transitional time between summer and the start of school, she will give kids tips on how to be popular no matter where they are.
Here's Amy's inaugural post on the Shelf, and if you miss any entries, you can see them collected on her tour blog.
Here's
the thing about being a new children's book author on tour: not many kids know
who you are. Sure, your numbers are "good," yes, your book got a
great review in the New York Times, causing
all members of your immediate family to simultaneously plotz, but this doesn't
mean much to the kid whose parent dragged them to the bookstore so that they
could meet a real live author and squeeze some culture in before the start of
school. To those kids, I'm just some round lady with frizzy hair who is
gripping a purple book in her hands.
I like kids and I spent a lot of years teaching, so it's not so hard to keep their attention for the 15 or 20 minutes that I have to talk about my book. By the end of it, after the last question is asked (often by a parent who wants to know how I got a book deal), the kids are relatively interested in the book and happy to have me sign it.
But then there's always a couple of kids, usually girls, who have already read the book. I can tell they've read it, because they're usually a little more fidgety and giggly, and they nod when I mention specific bits of the book. They've got these huge smiles on their faces when they meet me--I'm more than just a round lady with frizzy hair and a purple book, I'm Amy Ignatow, I'm the author of The Popularity Papers, and it's AWESOME.
My husband and I have just left Cover to Cover Books in Columbus, Ohio, on the fourth day of our book tour/vacation, and Mark, left to his own devices while I write, has decided to taste-test every Christian rock station. "Let me know if this is distracting you," he said, but seeing how he's doing all the driving right now I'm not going to complain about the dj who is talking about how great my salvation is going to be before putting on a screaming rock song. Every now and again Mark will blurt out "Yellow car!" when he sees one, but we're playing our Yellow Car game noncompetitively until I'm done with my work. Good thing, too, because otherwise if he calls four yellow cars in a row I have to sing the song of his choosing using only the Klingon word for "I salute you." It's become kind of a complicated game with lots of rules.
So far
we've been to Books & Co. in Dayton, where my in-laws came and asked
questions like, "Is Julie supposed to be you and Lydia supposed to be
Mark?" (Answer: no, we're an adult married couple and they are fifth-grade
girls.) Then we headed South to Cincinnati, to Joseph-Beth Books, where an
older gentleman asked, "What is the moral of your book?" I was
flustered--I never write with a moral in mind, I just write stories and hope
they don't influence kids to take piles of drugs and go on killing sprees.
"There is absolutely no moral to my book whatsoever," I deadpanned, and a couple of people laughed, although most of the attendees just stared at me. "It's about friendship," I said.
Onward to Indianapolis! We've put 736 miles on our own little yellow car so far, and we've got a long way to go before we can stop. Hopefully these events will get a little fuller and I won't say anything horribly off-putting to anyone, and I will see yellow cars before Mark does.
Ignatow is posting more about her travels here.