I don’t know what you’ll be doing with your Sunday afternoon, but I’ll be spending it with my best buddies* Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Moore in San Francisco, chatting about books, life, family, and dandruff.
http://www.booksinc.net/event/carl-hiaasen-coversation-christopher-moore-sunday-afternoon-chapel
So hopefully I’ll see you there. And please, this event is about Carl and Christopher, not me. So please, no autographs.
* Warning: may not be actual buddies.
For those of you who were putting off buying (well, downloading) Verano the Fish because you couldn’t see what was actually inside the book and didn’t want to risk downloading some sort of fish snuff book that was far too dark for your children, well, your fears are assuaged!
And you should get downloading.
After many trials and tribulations, we now have screenshots of the book up on the iBookstore!
Tell your friends, your neighbors, leave a review, leave a rating — we’re currently just slightly behind on our goal to win the Caldecott Medal this year (though 2013’s winner was a fish book, so we’re not holding our breath).
We (my son and I) presented Verano the Fish to his class yesterday for Book Day, and we handed out a reading guide for it, to show the kids how we made it.
It was accompanied by a short Keynote presentation (since the illustrations for the book and book itself live on the iPad we did it all from the one device) and the main goal was to show these second graders how they could create their own book from their own stories.
We even showed them a sneak peek of a Read Aloud version we’ve been working on, in which the kids provide the audio soundtrack while the words are being highlighted for young readers.
All-in-all it was a fun little event.
You can download the reading guide yourself: Download the Reading Guide for your classroom [PDF]
You can also download the Keynote (upon request, I suppose), but it’s a little less useful, because it’s very few words, with a lot of explanation, and I haven’t put any of that in the notes or anything.
This is a continuation of the story begun in The Story of Creating Verano the Fish. Now on with the story…
So, as you can tell from the great pile of money I’m sitting on to write this, I’m something of a promotional genius. It’s certainly not for my posture, as my posture goes to pot when I’m sitting on a pile of money, attempting to type. I’ve never read, anywhere, that, to improve your posture you should sit on a pile of money.
Because of this pile of money and fame (the fame isn’t piled, that is incredibly difficult to sit on, and I don’t recommend it), I expect that you’ve come here, looking for promotional advice. “How on earth do you do it?” you might be saying.
Well, I’ll tell you. Per-book pages.
And now Verano the Fish has its very own page, since you can get it from more than one source.
I can tell you, in confidence, because I know you’re that sort of person who will keep a secret, that the main reason for setting up a page for Verano was to be able to hand out the link to people as an easy, mostly reader-agnostic way of getting people the book. Got a Kindle and an extra $2.99? Great, click on the Kindle icon on that page! Have an iPad and thus no more money? Great, click on the iBookstore icon on that page! And, well, that’s it. If you have a web browser and eyes, click on the Goodreads.com icon! I’m afraid you’re out of luck, if you don’t fall into those categories. For the moment.
The brilliant thing, the amazing thing is that, if you only have access to papyrus and the blood of a chicken, well, if we end up getting a publisher which will fulfill your needs (hopefully whilst wearing an apron), we’ll chuck a link to it up on that page and future-you will find it there! Hurray!
Plus it’ll make a great promotional tool when we present the book in the kids’ classrooms.
So there you have it, very sage promotional advice from someone who’s sold (or given away) at least 20 copies of his books.
So I don’t know quite why you’d do this, expect, perhaps, to support my family and myself, allow us to put food on the table, but you can now pay real money for Verano the Fish at Amazon.com.
It’s $2.99 because that’s the lowest Amazon will let us go, but it’s also at some special, technical tier where they might price match, if they find it elsewhere cheaper, so it may become free there, in the future. And what a future it’ll be! One with flying cars, inflatable bouncy houses we all live in, fast, efficient train services, all of our food in handy pill form, and cotton candy provided as a free service of the state!
It’ll be magical!
But, until that day, you’ll have to pay $2.99 (other prices in places that use currencies that are not the US dollar) for the privilege of reading Verano the Fish, the heart-warming tale of a fish and his family, on your Kindle.
Just know that, with your purchase, we will continue to feed and clothe the children, which would be nice for them, since they provided half the content for this book.
Fresh off the publication of Verano I’ve already got my hordes of nearly illegal child labor hot on the tails of the next big thing. And I’m here, today (or whenever you read this, really), to present to you the next big thing out of our children’s book publishing house:
It’s Verano, back again for a second installment!
I can’t reveal too much about the story without killing you, but I have been cleared to tell you that, yes, those are teeth.
And our other new franchise, all I’ll tell you about this one is that it’s long been a family favorite at dinner time, and that he, too, seems to have acquired a younger sister, a liberty taken by the artist that may result in some sort of fine or other punishment, for going off-script.
So don’t you fear that you and your family will get to the end of Verano the Fish and lack for more thrilling content to read and pictures at which you can cast your beady eyes.
For those of you who had been putting off downloading Verano the Fish for that very reason, fear not! Point your iPad or copy of iTunes at http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/verano-the-fish/id643479931?mt=11 and download away! It’s free! It will change your life*!
And when you’re done with it rest assured that the next book will be along in the next year, maybe two, seven, at the outside.
* Warning: Actual life-changing properties may involve unwanted rabbit infestation, a convertible appearing in your driveway out of the blue, water damage, a plague of locusts, and/or the ghost of Ned Coleman narrating every Thursday for the rest of your life.
So until now you had to be one of those lucky enough to have an iPad to read Verano the Fish, but today I’m announcing the immediate availability of Verano the Fish right in your very own web browser!
So if you have eyes and a computer you can now read Verano the Fish, for free!
At great personal expense and risk, I’ve put Verano up on Goodreads.com, where you can read the book from the comfort of your browser or you can download it and stick it wherever you like (though you’ll probably void the warranty on your device if you do that):
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17924912-verano-the-fish
So go read it! Be merry! And leave a review!
We started working on Verano in a furniture store.
I’ll be writing a bit more about this book in the coming days, in particular the production of the thing, but if you are a child or have some of them around, you might want to go check out our “deftly wrought parable for the modern age,” said no one, called Verano the Fish.
It’s an iBookstore exclusive, it’s free (besides, of course, the iPad you had to buy to read the thing on), and it’ll thrill and amaze you (or those kids you’ve borrowed for the purposes of this experiment).