SCASL pictures

I was pretty slack at the conference in my picture taking. As a matter of fact, I took no pictures at all. I handed my camera to Sarah when I was heading to the restroom after we had the table set up for her to take a few pictures. I really thought she would have taken a ton of pictures, but she is young and still learning the ropes - lol. This is what our booth looked like:

We were right next to Scholastic who had a double booth but ours looked pretty good sized considering we had paid for an extra table and ended up with 3 tables in our booth some how but only two were for display at the front.

Here is Sarah's end of the table:

Here is Sybil's section of the table:

And my end of the table:

The next event the SC Author Connection will be together is the SC Book Festival in May and I'm thinking if the person we just added also joins us, we will need to do the table a bit differently. I'm thinking we will do racks (I'll need to buy a couple between now and then since Sarah's third book is so thick and that way we can put two racks up and use the sides as display space for other things - bookworms, afghan samples, Sarah's tigers and t-shirts. I'm also thinking of getting some plain white clothes or sheets to use for our table cover since we all have different looks; this way we can have a bit of unity going on. See you all in the postings - Ma America - :)

SCASL conference update

Overall, I consider this is a successful event and we are planning on being at next year's event as well, which is on the calendar for March 6 through the 8. It will be held in Columbia and Sybil has already booked our hotels. Sarah and I will be staying at the Hampton Inn Vista and Sybil will be staying at the Embassy Suites (Sybil's husband works for the Hilton group of hotels, so she can discounted rooms for events like this - $29 or $39/night - yeah - who wouldn't take advantage of booking rooms a year in advance?).

I sold ten copies of State of Successes and two copies of Finally Home and maybe eight or ten bookworms. I did sell one extra chance for the afghan drawing in addition to the chances I gave away with each book sale. I also talked about the plan of going interactive ebook for the state series and the librarians all think this is a great idea.

Basically this is in the baby stage but Heather and I have talked about it and she is in the process of developing the prototype for the interactive ebooks. I'm not sure how much we would sell the apps or whatever we come up with for the ebook program for and not sure how we will market it but all that will happen as things develop.

We were right next to the Scholastic booth and they were a busy booth because the librarians were using all their "Scholastic bucks" to add new books to their libraries. Sybil came up with a similar idea for our group, "SC Author Connection", to help get us in the schools around the state of SC. We talked with the ladies in the Scholastic booth and they suggested that we try to get in the schools at the same time that Scholastic book fairs were occurring and that way we would feed off each other, and we can offer them something that Scholastic can't - authors to do book signings and presentations/workshops because the authors through Scholastic are very expensive and schools can't pay for them (at $5000/event, I guess that's a bit much). So we are going to start recruiting a few more authors to join our group and participate in book fairs. This will be a growth over the next year and we hope to build up to a group of ten authors from different parts of the state so that we would be available everywhere. We are going to create a flyer/order form and a brochure for our group to be sent to the schools in advance.

Sybil had great sales (last I heard was over 35, and could have been close to 40) and Sarah had pretty decent sales (I didn't ask her what her final count was but it seems she sold over 20 books over the course of the three days). I was the one who sold the least amount but I think in the long run the contacts and school visits will be worth it.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted on what takes place with the SC Author Connection and where the JGDS series goes. Stay tuned - Ma America :)

SCASL Conference

If you happen to be a school librarian and will be attending the SCASL conference next week (March 14 - 16, 2012), stop by booth 25 and visit the SC Author Connection (Elysabeth Eldering/Ma America, author of Finally Home and the JGDS, 50-state, mystery, trivia series; Sybil Nelson/Leslie Dubois, author of the middle grade level Priscilla the Great series and several YA novels; Sarah Renee, author of the middle grade level Saderia series).

Elysabeth will be doing a presentation on how to shelf faction, in particular the JGDS series, for the librarians on Thursday at 3:15.

Stop by and see what we have to offer. See you all there - E :)

SCASL workshop proposal

I've been asked to do a presentation at the SCASL (SC Association of School Librarians) conference in March and had to turn in a proposal for my intended workshop by today. I finally figured out a new workshop to do for librarians and got the proposal turned in last night. The Workshop is titled "Digital Reports: From Book to State Reports" and will utilize "paper slide videos" for the basis of creating digital reports. This is a brand new workshop and will be presented for the first time at the conference. I hope the school librarians in South Carolina who will be attending this conference will come visit me during my workshop. Looking forward to meeting new people who can help get my books out there. See you all in the postings - Ma America :)