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The Great Greene Challenge

The Great Greene Heist goes on sale today! Have you taken the Great Greeene Challenge? Here's my post from a couple of weeks ago:

 

Author Kate Messner threw down a challenge this weekend. “At the end of the day, publishing is a business that needs to make money to survive. Given that reality, the best way for readers to ask for more diversity in children’s literature is not with words and tweets and blog posts alone but also with dollars.” She picked THE GREAT GREENE HEIST, a wonderful middle grade coming out in May by the incomparable Varian Johnson, and challenged everyone to preorder a copy to show that yes, we want great books that also have diverse characters. (and a cover showing an African American boy front and center!)

Bookstore Eight Cousins got involved, challenging Odyssey Books to a handsell-off. I love this idea and proposed opening it up wide.

So here’s the game: what single bookstore can sell the most copies of THE GREAT GREENE HEIST in its first month? It comes out May 27, so from May 27 to June 27. (If the bookstore has multiple locations, then the numbers are counted by individual stores.) To the winner goes the spoils! How can you help?

1. Are you an author? Care to sweeten the pot? If you’re going to BEA, please bring me something to add to the treasure chest going to the winning bookstore. Signed books, bizarre items, a box of chocolates, anything fun you think the winning booksellers would love.

2. Are you a reader? Contact your local bookstore. Let them know about the Handsell-Off (if they don’t already) and pre-order your copy of THE GREAT GREENE HEIST. Let’s get everyone excited about it! Let’s get this deserving book (and author!) on the NYT bestseller list!

3. Are you a bookseller? Read the book and handsell like crazy!

This is going to be fun. Common wisdom often states that books starring POC can’t be best sellers, especially if the POC is on the cover. I’m eager to blow that out of the water. In ten years, let’s look back on that outdated belief and laugh.

UPDATE 2 (ignore all previous updates!): The party’s on, bookworms! John Green threw down a gauntlet of his own: “Any store in the U.S. that can handsell 100 copies of The Great Greene Heist in its first month will get 10 signed copies of TFIOS. I’m a huge Varian Johnson fan and really want to see this book succeed. Winning stores can email me: sparksflyup -at- gmail.”

And The Great Greene Heist author Varian Johnson helped clarify the sitch:

"1) One package will go to the bookstore that sells the most copies of The Great Greene Heist.

2) The second package will be a random drawing of all the bookstores that have “signed up” for the challenge (no purchase necessary, just need to know who you are).

3) A separate set of goodies (provided by me) will go to the winners of each “one-on-one” challenge.”

If you’re an indie and want to participate or an author and want to donate, “email me at vcj (at) varianjohnson (dot) com, or send me a tweet at @varianjohnson.”

Also, Varian Johnson is donating $1.50 for each book sold the first week (starting today!) to Girlstart. Wahoo! Let’s do this!

The Slushpile Family Circus

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New to the Annual Children’s Book Art Silent Auction and Reception at BEA this year, The Slushpile Family Circus, an entertainment and comedy variety show displaying the non-authorial talents of various children’s writers and illustrators. Masters of Ceremony Shannon Hale and Michael Buckley will emcee with their trademark Verve™ and Panache™ the phantasmagorical cavalcade of “talent” and showmanship.

Come witness such luminaries as David Levithan and Jon Scieszka display never-before-witnessed “talents”! What shocking tricks will Pseudonymous Bosch and Melissa de la Cruz be up to? We would give you a sneak peak of the hidden talents of Brandon Mull, Jason Reynolds, and Paul Zelinsky but we’ve been sworn to secrecy! Jarrett Krosoczka, Maryrose Wood, and Scott Westerfeld will amaze and delight! Libba Bray, Daniel Kirk, and Tom Angleberger will provoke and alarm! And who will be the Mysterious “Talent” Guest? Come one, come all and witness the bizarre, the unusual, but the always entertaining Slushpile Family Circus at this year’s Silent Auction!

The Silent Auction runs Wednesday, May 28, 5pm-7:30pm at the Javits Center in New York City. Get your tickets here!

Can white writers write non-white characters?

This past week, a group started a campaign on twitter #WeNeedDiverseBooks that trended for days. Blogs, twitter, tumblr, instagram facebook were lit up with people sharing photos, stories, ideas about how diverse books are both wanted and needed.

Diversity just means "reality," i.e. books (and movies, etc.) work best when they reflect the richness and variety of the real world rather than only representing one sliver of it. But diversity most often connotes race. And so lots of race questions rise up in this conversation, such as, is it okay for writers of one race to write from the point-of-view of a character from another race? Lisa Yee wrote her thoughts about this, which I appreciated.

Here's my own experience. When I was drafting The Goose Girl, I originally was going to make Bayern an African-type continent, everyone there having a deep-brown-to-black skin, while Kildenree would be the European-type continent with pale skin. I was inspired by Le Guin's Earthsea books. But I quickly realized the story required Ani to hide in Bayern, so she couldn't look too different from the Bayern people. I could have chosen to make Ani dark skinned as well but I decided not to, out of misguided respect and fear. As a white person, I was hesitant to try to speak from the point-of-view of someone of another race, even in a fantasy setting. I felt like I only had access to the heritage of my own bloodlines. So I based Bayern on Germany, both because the tale was recorded by the brothers Grimm and because it is one of the lands of my ancestors. I'm not saying that was the wrong or the right choice (I don't believe there was necessarily a right or wrong here), but that this was my creative process.

When I began a new series with Princess Academy, again I felt that I only had rights to the lands of my ancestors, so I chose to base the setting on Scandinavia. And the research and writing was a lovely experience for me.

While I was drafting Book of a Thousand Days, I was also studying about Mongolia, because my parents were about to go live there for two years. And the more I learned, the more the research slid naturally into the story I was working on. Perfectly. As if that had been my intention all along. I had a moment of crisis. I wanted to base the setting on medieval Mongolia, but did I have the right to appropriate a land I had no blood or familial ties to for my story?

Eventually I decided, yes. I am a human being. I can take inspiration from the stories of our shared planet. It was a little easier for me to make this jump since I wasn't writing a true historical setting but a fantasy kingdom inspired by a historical setting.

Dangerous is my first young adult book not set long-ago-far-away but in our own world. I don't remember my exact thought process in deciding to make my main character biracial with a Paraguayan-American mother and white American father. There was reason to have a bilingual character and the choice seemed interesting for the story. The supporting cast also has a Russian-American, African-French, Korean-American, German-American, and African-American. These choices make sense in the story, but if this had been my first book, I don't know if I'd dared to make them. Again, out of misguided respect and fear, I might have been hesitant to try to embody the experience of a character who has a different race than me. I think that would have been a mistake. This story makes more sense, is richer, and is truer with the diverse cast. If I'd tried to write this story with an all-white cast, that would have been forced and untrue, because it wouldn't have reflected the actual world the story takes place in. Making creative choices from a place of fear (even fear mixed with loving and honest respect) is never a good idea.

I appreciate writers who are respectful of other cultures and experiences. And I don't think that every book needs to have a diverse racial cast. A book set in a town where everyone is white can exist. Those stories matter too. But I always want to make sure I'm open to what the story needs. And all stories (ironically perhaps, but especially fantasy and science fiction stories) need to have a foundation of truth in order to work. And the truth of our world is colorful, rich, expansive. I think it's wise, as writers, that we're always checking ourselves, making sure we're not just defaulting to all white, straight, able-bodied, non-religious, etc., characters. Not defaulting to Neutral. But keeping our stories open for the possibilities of diversity.