Greetings readers of Stupid Blog Name! While on my latest book tour (England, Sweden, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand) something truly exciting occurred. I came up with the idea for the official Crack and Stack Challenge.

Editors, publicists, and booksellers who are reading this, please let your authors know:

It’s on.

The Crack and Stack Challenge has been informal up until now, but that’s over. I want official numbers. I want to know—who is the fastest stock signer on earth. That’s right. ON THE PLANET.

Because, I’ll be frank—I think it’s me. (Robert B Parker, who only signs using his initials, doesn’t count. To participate in the Crack and Stack Challenge, you must sign with at least one full name. Do you hear me? One. Full. Name).

In case you’ve never heard of the Crack and Stack Challenge, allow me explain: I made it up. I made it up on my past book tour due to my being sick of authors who take forever at their stock signings (for those of you who don’t know, a stock signing is when authors are sent to a warehouse or book outlet and asked to sign thousands of copies of their book, which are then sent on to random customers or shops to be sold as “autographed copies”).

Authors are asked literally to sit there and sign their name over and over several thousand times, and some will take forever to get through their books.

This is, of course, excusable for elderly or infirm authors. For those authors, it is reasonable to expect their books to have to be handed to them individually for signing.

But that is not okay for perfectly healthy young authors. Perfectly healthy young authors should, in my opinion, be required to participate in the Crack and Stack Challenge.

Why is Crack and Stack so important?

Because due to perfectly healthy young authors who take forever to sign their books, my publicist insisted I get up at six in the morning to make the two hour drive to the book outlet where the thousands of copies of my books were waiting for me, so that she could hand feed me each book one at a time.

I did not WANT to get up at six in the morning to do in four hours what should take one. There was no reason for it.

But do you know how hard I had to argue with my publicist that it would not take me four hours to sign a thousand books just because it took some other perfectly healthy young author four hours to sign a thousand books? I had to prove that I could do it!

Which is why I came up with the Crack and Stack Challenge.
(more…)

I was talking a while back about doing school visits to promote the paperback of GONE and the launch of HUNGER (GONE 2) and the editor I was talking to made a good point.  She said, “Look, the question is how you’re going to present yourself.  You have to put some thought into that.”

The gold standard is someone like Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler.)  He would play the accordion and tell jokes and basically put on everything just short of a Broadway show.  I only met Mr. Snicket while getting a book signed for my kids.  So I didn’t have a chance to talk to him and say what I would like to say.  Which would be, “Thanks a lot, jerk, you’ve really raised the bar for the rest of us.”

I don’t play a musical instrument.  I don’t tell jokes.  I’m a big, fat, baldheaded, cranky old man.  The things I care deeply about are politics and food.  If I had to sit down and talk to a group of YA readers the topics of conversation that would come naturally to me would be, 1) My preference for the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, 2) Why food ideologies are ridiculous and beside the point.  I can do a good extemporaneous half hour on either.  Or on any number of other topics that would cause a 14 year-old (and most other sensible people,) to fall into a coma.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy talking.  It’s hard to shut me up unless you have a baseball bat handy and are prepared to use it.  But, man, what do I talk to “the kids” about?  The things I’m interested in are things that will either cause students to consider jumping out of the window, or, things that will make their teachers want to throw me out of that same window.

(more…)

I got my pages done today, so it was a good day. That’s the question that defines my day: did I get my pages done?

The number of pages I have to get done in order to feel that I “got my pages done,” changes. It’s not a fixed number.  Today I decided 7 1/2 was enough. Yesterday I was in a lousy mood because I crapped out after 3 1/2. Two previous days were 9 pages each, so I was feeling pretty good about that. When I lose a day of work I am impossible to be around.

My name is Michael, and I am a workaholic.
(more…)

Hi SBN (What a great acronym! With an acronym like that we’ll rival CNN or China’s CCTV in no time!). We need everyone involved to go around saying, “I SBN” we’ll make pin badges and everything . . .

I work in marketing and publicity for Egmont UK (there’s an Egmont US now too). We’re the UK publishers of Gone, and were invited to blog by Michael- Thanks!

I’ve just come back from the Bath Festival of Children’s Literature where we had a number of authors. Basically I’m the person that has to tell people like Meg Cabot (see her post below) to get off their couch and go and promote their work!

I understand what she’s saying, one of the authors we dragged along kept complaining that she could have been at home finishing her next book instead of promoting her last one. But I was unrepentant and kept her chained to the signing desk for 2 long hours, without water. I’m hoping to get some electrodes together for my next tour  - that’ll keep them in line.

Actually the real benefit of touring is that the kids get really excited about seeing authors talk. One child who was listening to Andy Stanton talk laughed so much he threw up and had to be removed – awesome. Another group watched enthralled as Jackie Morris painted an alternative book cover live in front of them.

Moments like that make festivals and tours really special places to be.

Meg Cabot and Gossip Girl’s Cecily von Zeigesar at the Gothenburg Book Fair in Sweden (reporter in the middle)

Greetings readers of Stupid Blog Name! I was so excited when Michael and Katherine asked me to be part of this blog because of course I’m a HUGE fan of the Making Out series, and I was always hugely jealous of Animorphs because it was such a genius idea.

I haven’t read Gone yet but I’m insanely jealous of it too because I had an idea I thought was sort of like it and I was worried if I wrote it Michael would think I was copying him, until Michael assured me (when I explained my idea to him) that it was differentish enough (from what Michael told me about the Gone sequels, we’re headed in very different directions—his sound outrageously good, whereas mine are just…well, insane).

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying reading the blog but haven’t been able to contribute much because right now I’m on a book tour to promote the UK releases of some titles of mine (Airhead and Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls).

Book tours sound super fun to people who’ve never been on one but of course when you’re actually on one they’re almost the most hideous things on earth, possibly not as bad as having your fingers pulled out of their sockets by Jack Bauer on 24, but depending on the time of day when you’re asked, then they’re about even. I think it’s because you spend so much time as a writer just sitting around writing…or staring into space. Or watching Judge Judy.

And then suddenly someone says, “You can’t do any of these things anymore. You have to get up by this certain time and look nice and be here by this time and speak in front of 500 people and then go on television and then go on the radio and then be at this party with all these people you don’t know until midnight and then wake up at six the next morning and then get on a plane and do it all over again in a new city and you can’t go back to your normal life until this date,” and it’s really…well, startling is one word for it.

I went to the State Department website once to see what to do if I’m ever kidnapped in a foreign nation and what it described was a LOT like being on book tour. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.

When I was first starting out as an author I longed to be sent out on book tours. I longed to be put up in fancy hotels and be waited on hand and foot, to have intellectual chats with reporters about my books.

And yet somehow this never transpired. The fancy hotels do, occasionally, but I rarely get to spend more than a few hours in them, always sleeping, and the reporters and I almost never have time for tea. They’re too busy running off to get their next scoop and I’m too busy running out to get to the airport.

I used to be disappointed when I’d have a book out and there’d be no tour set up to promote it. Now when I have a book out and I find out there’s no tour I’m super relieved.

I realize it’s fantastic when you’re publisher even gives you a book tour. Most authors don’t get one , unless they pay for it themselves. I’ll admit, without a book tour it’s very difficult to crack the bestseller lists these days unless you’re a Big Name Author.

But there must be an easier way to sell books!

Anyway, I have to go to bed now. Not that I have any pajamas to wear or a toothbrush because my suitcase didn’t make it here to South Africa from Sweden. Maybe it will catch up to me tomorrow, before I leave for Hong Kong.

Who knows?

More later.

Meg

So, negotiations continue.  Dark, shadowy forces, (lawyers, agents and editors) are at work.  Naturally, Katherine and I are very, very busy.  Dealing with cat butt string.  Or is it cat butt-string?  (Editors?  help me out.)

Here in Italy the kind of advanced technology that allows Americans to seal their garbage bags by pulling on a space-age device called a “drawstring” is unknown.  Trash bags here come with a sort of filament.  A long and exceedingly fragile plastic thread that is in no way capable of actually sealing the bag against the sorts of super-pressures built up by American waste production habits.

There’s a five stage process involved in properly sealing the Italian garbage bag:

1) Stall until garbage is spilling over the top.

2) Lift garbage bag up while producing old man grunts.

3) Attempt to use the filament despite the failure of the previous 912 attempts.

4) Find the duct tape, curse Italians for their refusal to do the hard work necessary to produce state-of-the-art bag-sealing technology, the children for creating trash, the wife for creating children, the numbness in my left thumb caused by stabbing myself with a knife opening a Nerf pistol two years ago resulting in a degree of clumsiness in tearing off duct tape, and George W. Bush because why not?

5) Drop the stupid string on the floor where it will be eaten by the cat.

(more…)