1. Water in the Park is all about observation. What’s your favorite place to people- and animal-watch?

EJ: I live in Brooklyn and am fascinated by the huge variety of people in the city — people from all over the world — and by the texture and rhythms of the street life in my neighborhood. I wrote about it in Lemonade in Winter: A Book About Two Kids Counting Money (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 4–7 years) and the Invisible Inkling series (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 5–8 years) as well as in Water in the Park. The feeling of the neighborhood is very fundamentally American in that it’s the proverbial melting pot in action. People are mixed, racially and culturally and economically and spiritually, but we all go to the same park and the same corner shop, you know? It’s thrilling.

My own stoop is my favorite place to people- and animal-watch. There’s a woman who shelters all these rescue dogs down the block, and an aged greyhound with a perpetually bandaged hind leg. Also an enormous fluffy dog with a brown head that looks transplanted onto its white body. There’s a veteran who sweeps his walk in a haze of illegal-smelling smoke, a noisy French-speaking family, and an old lady who puts her Agatha Christie novels out on the street for people to take when she’s done with them.

2. How closely do you work with your illustrators? Did anything about Stephanie Graegin’s pictures for Water in the Park surprise you?

EJ: Sometimes I get to see sketches and dummies before a project goes to final art, and sometimes I don’t. As I’ve gotten to know certain illustrators, projects have come from a desire to work together. Small, Medium, Large: A Book About Relative Sizes (Star Bright, 3–5 years) was a book Tomek Bogacki and I put together ourselves. Paul O. Zelinsky and I are doing a Toys Go Out picture book that originated in some conversations we had while on tour.

With Stephanie Graegin, I didn’t see the work until it was completely finished, but I was freaking ecstatic with everything she did, especially the way she threaded characters and little narratives through a story that hardly identifies anyone but the dogs by name. There are so many personalities and little dramas on her pages. And she draws awesome babies.

3. Your book What Happens on Wednesdays, illustrated by Lauren Castillo (Farrar, 4–7 years), also deals with time and the progression of the day. Do you have daily routines or rituals?

EJ: I love community rituals that involve large meals and a million kids running around like lunatics, jacked up on sugar. Hanukkah parties, birthdays, Sunday dinners, I’’m your person. Then I declare myself exhausted and want to see nobody for weeks. As for daily rituals, I think I am more of an observer of how those rituals are important to children, and what they mean in the fabric of a family or neighborhood.

4. The pets in your books, such as Mr. Fluffynut and Little Nonny from Water in the Park and FudgeFudge and Marshmallow from That New Animal (Foster/Farrar, 4–7 years), have fantastic names. What’s the best pet name you haven’t used yet?

EJ: Thank you. The nefarious kitten Pumpkinfacehead in Toys Come Home (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 5–8 years) was just a typo that made me laugh, but the others I chose quite deliberately. Perhaps I should now push my imagination in another direction. I love that the tiger in Life of Pi is called Richard Parker. So: maybe a guinea pig called Louisa May Alcott. That makes me smile.

5. You’ve written picture book reviews for various publications. How does reviewing other people’s work inform your own creative process?

EJ: It forces me to think carefully about what I value in picture books, and about the relation of text and image. It helps me remember to leave room for an artist to fully illustrate my books. I don’t want the text to do all the work. Or even most of it. There needs to be room for pictures.

From the May 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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1. Possible spoiler alert: At what point in the series did you think up this book’s Big Reveal (re: Jeffrey)?

Jeanne Birdsall: And how do I answer that without giving anything away? Here goes. While I was writing the first book I knew this would happen in a future book, but it wasn’t until I was writing the second book that I knew it would happen in this particular book, the third.

2. Is love in the cards for Aunt Claire? Or did I read too much into her friendship with Turron?

JB: No, you didn’t read too much into that friendship. Thanks for noticing. Was it the jigsaw puzzles of romantic places?

By the time Turron leaves Point Mouette he’s determined to see Aunt Claire again, and she’s hoping he’ll follow through. I can’t tell you any more than that. All will be revealed in the next book.

3. Your pastoral settings — in this case coastal Maine — are always so vividly described. How much is real and how much invented?

JB: My settings are a hodgepodge of real, imaginary, and (sometimes) places I’ve read about. (Arundel, the setting for the first book, borrowed a little of E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle.) Point Mouette started out as a real place called Ocean Point, near Boothbay Harbor in Maine. I found it through dumb luck, seized on the little private beach and the long dock, then began to add and subtract. The golf course was an invention, and the pinewood came from ancient memories of my Girl Scout camp in Pennsylvania. I was forced to subtract a flying blue bug that I just couldn’t work into the story and a beautiful stone chapel I was dying to use. But I couldn’t have Dominic skateboarding on hallowed ground.

 4. Is there one Penderwick sister to whom you feel the greatest connection? Has that changed as the books have progressed?

JB: I go back and forth between Skye and Batty, depending on which of them is struggling the most. (I connect with struggle.) Batty had a relatively easy time of it at Point Mouette, but Skye…didn’t. So right now I’m still feeling pretty Skye-ish. As I get deeper into the fourth book I’ll reconnect with Batty, who has lots to work out in that one.

5. Each of the books is a satisfying stand-alone while also being very much part of a whole. Can you share clues about further Penderwick adventures?

JB: The fourth, which I’m working on now, will take place five-and-a-half years after the end of the third book, which means that the three older sisters will be teenagers. However, to keep the book middle grade, everything that happens will be seen through the eyes of Batty and Ben, who will be eleven and eight respectively. Thus, two writing challenges: to portray the life of teenagers without getting inside their minds and to channel an eight-year-old boy, which I certainly never was. Challenges aside, it’s going to be fun to write about Rosalind, Skye, and Jane as teenagers. Jane will finally get her hands on all the books she hasn’t been allowed to read all these years, including Proust, which she’s reading (slowly) in the original French.

From the June 2011 issue of Notes from the Horn Book. For more on Notes — and to sign up — click here.

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Llama Llama…

1.What did your own children teach you about creating books for preschoolers?

My own children taught me several things about the reality of picture books.  First, that a book has to have compelling relevance to a child’s inner world to get picked up more than once or twice.  Second, that a picture book should be fun for everyone in the room (if it isn’t fun for the parent, then it is likely not fun for the child).  And third, that sometimes kids like seemingly unappealing books simply because those kinds of books address some developmental need; in other words, sometimes a parent will have to read Disney’s version of Cinderella every night for weeks…no matter how painful that is.  Most importantly, reading with my children taught me that “reading time” is often the most intimate moment of the day, and that its power in a child’s (or caregiver’s) world cannot be underestimated.

2.I enjoyed playing the Llama Llama game on your website. What are your thoughts about toddlers and iPhones?

I think that iPhones, iPads, Nooks, Droids, and all those gizmos are simply toys.  Whether or not a caregiver chooses to give that type of toy to a child is a personal decision.  As a parent, I can understand the use of a toy that has educational and entertainment value…after all, there are only so many car games a person can play on a six hour trip to Grandma’s house, and sometimes everyone (including a parent) needs down time.  I can also see value in a child learning some autonomous play skills, if they have a toy that teaches manual dexterity and/or reading.  However, if the toy is constantly being used as a substitute for the important stuff (creative play, interpersonal relationships, reading, and a sense of living on the real planet with living, breathing creatures), then I think it is no longer a toy for a child – it is a crutch for a parent, much like driving through McDonald’s instead of cooking real food.  I like a Big Mac as much as the next person, but I know it isn’t giving me real nourishment.

3.Why do you think young children accept the concept of animals dressed in clothing so easily?

What?  Are you implying that animals DON’T wear clothes? You haven’t met my bulldog!  (Just kidding.)

That’s a great question.  I think the answer may be that children can relate to animals.  Children know that animals are “people” too…they live, breathe, and exist on the planet, just as we do.  I don’t think children give a hoot about clothes until they start to see clothes as costumes that define them, and those costumes tend to be just that: costumes.  Why can’t dogs and cats (and llamas) wear costumes, too?  To children, animals aren’t the “other.”  After all, it is easier for a toddler to look right into the face of a lab than an adult; they can be eye to eye.

I think children are far more like animals than they are like adults.  In other words, I think that what differentiates an adult from a child is that an adult is often motivated from and controlled by things outside themselves, or by what Freud would call a strong ego and super-ego.  Small children are “unadulterated” beings.  They experience and recognize feelings in themselves and others much like animals do, without all that other stuff on top.

4.How does a picture book keep the reader-aloud and the read-to equally engaged?

A good picture book has to be engaging to the reader as well as the read-to, as I mentioned before.   It should allow the reader to become part of the action, to make the book a performance piece.   The reading of a picture book should be a special moment of mutual understanding that the reader, readee, and author all share.

5.Do kids ever ask you why llama has two ls?

Never.

Join us on Thursday, April 25, 2013, for a big day focused on the littlest people.

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Horn Book Editors: What’s the most dangerous creature you’ve ever encountered?

Nicola Davies: My first job as a TV presenter was to swim with a captive killer whale. The whale’s trainer had never swum with her, and seemed a bit nervous, but it was my first job and I didn’t want to seem like a wuss. Plus I had a good feeling about this whale, so I just dived in. She seemed really pleased to have company and she carried me on her back round and round her pool. Then I had to swim to the side of the pool and talk to the camera. Whilst I was doing that, she swam toward me with her mouth open and all those enormous teeth showing and closed her jaws on my arm.

I can’t tell you why, but I wasn’t even a tiny bit scared, and not at all surprised that she wasn’t biting me, just very gently grasping my arm and pulling me back into the water to play with me some more. But I think the cameraman and the producer almost had heart attacks.

I am the world’s biggest wimp and try to keep myself out of any sort of dangerous situation. But I also love seeing animals in the wild, so sometimes by mistake I’ve come close to animals that are dangerous. I was in Kenya a long time ago, travelling in the Nakuru Game reserve in a Honda Civic because I couldn’t afford to hire a 4×4, and almost drove into a buffalo in my teeny little car. Buffalo are responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other animal — they are huge, with enormous horns and absolutely foul tempers. I reversed faster than a racing driver at the start of the Monaco Grand Prix.

Four years ago I was working in the Sea of Cortez on a small research boat with my old friend whale expert Prof. Hal Whitehead. We were studying sperm whales but when it got too rough we anchored off a small island where there was a colony of sea lions. Although the water was pretty chilly I wanted to swim with the sea lions, so I got in the water. I stayed in for about twenty minutes until I got blue and the sea lions had shown they weren’t interested in swimming with the funny creature with the arms and legs. As I got out Hal — my “friend” — announced that all the time I’d been swimming there had been a large bull shark sitting under the boat watching me. Bull sharks are one of the species of sharks known to attack human beings. It was the last time I went swimming off that island.

Baleen whales are gentle giants, but being giants they can hurt you without meaning to if you aren’t pretty careful around them. I was working on a research boat in the Indian Ocean studying blue whales and sperm whales. We came upon a group of blue whales, which was very unusual as they are pretty solitary most of the time. I was standing on the prow, camera at the ready to take fluke shots of their tails as they dove. A blue whale’s tail was right in front of me when the helmsman switched from sail power to engine power. The noise startled the whale and instead of its tail slipping gently under the water it slapped it down with a giant bang. I felt the tail go past my nose and it missed the front of the boat by centimeters. Had it hit us it would have snapped the boat like a twig and we would have gone down in seconds, hundreds of miles from land. In that moment I really understood that blue whales are the biggest animals on the planet.

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Photo: Laurie Gaboard, The Litchfield County Times

Marilyn Singer had already demonstrated considerable versatility of poetic talents when in 2010 she debuted a new verse form in Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse (6–10 years, Dutton). This year she is back with a companion, Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems (6–10 years, Dial; both books illustrated by Josée Masse), in which another cast of folkloric characters get the “reverso” treatment.

1. You invented this verse form and named it. How did you come up with the name?

MS: A reverso is made up of two poems. You read the first down and it says one thing. When you reverse the order of the lines for the second poem, changing only punctuation and capitalization, it says something else. It has to say something different; otherwise it’s what one kid called a “same-o.” When I first started writing these poems, my friend Amy called them “up-and-down poems.” I liked that, but it was a bit of a mouthful. I wanted to use the word reverse, and my husband Steve Aronson, who is one smart cookie, said, “You need something Italianate. How about ‘reverso’?” He gets credit for the name.

2. Do you think folk literature has a particular susceptibility to this poetic form?

MS: At first I didn’t stick exclusively to folk literature. But many of the poems were based on fairy tales, so when I showed that initial batch to an esteemed editor, she suggested I base the entire collection on fairy tales. That struck me as a great idea because fairy tales have strong narratives, and I felt that I could find two sides to one character, or two points in time for that character (such as Cinderella before and at the ball), or two different characters, perhaps with opposing points of view. So far, I’ve written two books of fairy-tale reversos — Mirror Mirror and Follow Follow — and I’m planning to do a third volume based on Greek myths.

However, I don’t think that folk literature is the only possible genre that translates well into reversos. The main thing, really, is to be able to present two sides of someone or something. My forthcoming book, Rutherford B., Who Was He?: Poems About Our Presidents (Disney-Hyperion; illus. by John Hendrix), includes a reverso about a man who viewed himself quite differently from the way the press and public did: Richard Nixon.

3. What was the most difficult poem to write in Follow Follow? And what folktale left you defeated?

MS: Oy, a number of them were difficult. I recall several failed attempts at the title poem, “Follow Follow,” about the Pied Piper. The one about the goose that laid the golden eggs was also tricky. One tale I could not turn into a reverso was “The Fisherman and His Wife.” I couldn’t flip either the husband’s or the wife’s voice into that of the fish.

4. What is the most challenging verse form you’ve attempted to write?

MS: Villanelles are tough, but I was able to write one about flamingos in A Strange Place to Call Home: The World’s Most Dangerous Habitats & the Animals That Call Them Home (Chronicle). Sonnets are also challenging, but I’ve done a few of those as well, including one about mountain goats (in the same book). I have never attempted a sestina — and I may never attempt a sestina. And then there are those darn reversos…

5. Do I sing the book’s title to the tune of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” or “Try to Remember”?

MS: Well, would you rather sound like a Munchkin or El Gallo? I don’t suggest trying it to Crispian St. Peters’s “The Pied Piper.”

Actually, it took longer to come up with the book’s title than to write the actual poems. The Pied Piper poem originally had a different name, but when we (my editor, the publisher, the marketing department, etc.) all agreed on Follow Follow as the title of the book, it also became the name of the poem. And since it’s a “follow-up” to Mirror Mirror, I think it works, don’t you?

From the April 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Photo: Jean Hobbs

Since 1988 and the publication of Changes in Latitudes, Will Hobbs has been one of the preeminent adventure novelists writing for young people. Typically, his stories feature a young protagonist confronting some challenge or other posed by the natural world; in his new book Never Say Die, a boy and his adult half-brother face all manner of danger in the remote reaches of the Yukon Territory.

1. You’ve been writing for young people for twenty-five years. How have your books changed over time?

WH: Over the years I find myself writing with more suspense, more dramatic tension. A novel is a big commitment for young people accustomed to clicking from one thing to the next. My goal is to provide kids a slam-dunk experience in the rewards of sustained reading.

2. I’ve never been camping in my life and find the prospect terrifying. When you’re alone in the wilderness in a tent at night, what are YOU most afraid of?

WH: Backpacking in Colorado’s high country I feel snug in my sleeping bag and have no trouble sawing logs. If I’m camping alongside a thunderous rapid on a whitewater river, I don’t sleep well at all, on account of the wildly difficult rowing I do in my dreams. Tenting in grizzly country in Alaska or Canada has me repeating a mantra from Frank Herbert’s Dune: “Fear is the mind-killer.”

3. Where would you most like to get lost?

WH: In a cave in Madagascar riddled with sunken forests and subterranean streams. On second thought, I just remembered about the man-eating crocodiles.

4. What is the most convincing evidence of climate change you’ve seen?

WH: It’s in my home mountains, the San Juans of southwestern Colorado, where I’ve been backpacking since the mid-seventies. Periods of extreme winter cold used to keep over-wintering conifer beetle larvae to a minimum. The warming climate has produced beetle infestations that have killed huge swaths of spruce forest. Warmer summer temperatures above timberline have wreaked havoc on the lushness and diversity of the alpine tundra. If trends continue, climate scientists are predicting the brown-out of the alpine zone in the Rockies. What a sad prospect, the high country without its riot of wildflowers.

5. Your books thus far have all taken place in the western parts of the Americas. Any desire to wander further afield?

WH: On my author travels I’ve been tantalized by many a teacher and librarian offering me story ideas from the Adirondacks down to Lake Okeechobee, but I haven’t followed up. Maybe some day!

From the March 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Roger Sutton: Are you conscious of working as an independent publisher?

Mary Cash: Definitely. I used to work for what was at the time the largest publishing conglomerate in the world (what is now Random House; then it was Bantam Doubleday Dell), so I think about it every single day. At Holiday House we aren’t beholden to either shareholders or owners who are not accessible to us, or to a group of executives that are charged with making us all behave or making sure that we’re profitable.

Jason Low: The independent thing is pretty huge at Lee & Low, too. I’ve been in the publishing business for fifteen years, but I haven’t had any other type of experience — I’ve only known it this way. I work with my brother and my dad — it’s a small group of people, and there’s no red tape. Essentially, we get together, jointly make a decision, and then go from there. It’s incredibly challenging to run a small publishing company. Publishing is going through such changes — just to be in the business at this time is really interesting.

RS: Mary, at Bantam Doubleday Dell, you would have had an elaborate acquisition process, which I’m guessing is only more elaborate there now, in which several levels of approval would be required…

MC: …and paperwork that had to be filed before you could even make an offer. You had to do an entire research project! I was so used to this method that when I first got to Holiday House, for the first book I wanted to acquire, I went into John Briggs’s office, and I had my reviews, my sales figures, all about the author, how many awards she’d won, all kinds of things that I’m rambling on and on about, and John’s looking more and more confused. Finally he stopped me and said, “Mary, what about the book?” That is a big, big difference.

RS: Sales are just as important to small publishers as big publishers, but I’m guessing the scale is different.

JL: For us, it’s just that everything’s smaller. Print runs are smaller. Our expectations are smaller. We’re very realistic. If we can cover the initial investment, everything else is gravy. It frees us up to take a lot of risks, and we do. And really, there are a lot of risks, in terms of what we acquire. Because many of the things that we go after are, for instance, biographies of people you’ve never heard of.

RS: Like that guy with the motorcycles — Honda. I loved that book.

JL: Before we did Honda, I didn’t even know there was such a person; I just thought it was the name of a car company. What I like about that book is the universal theme of “follow your dreams.” Honda wasn’t a good student; he was terrible, in fact. But he was good with his hands, with machinery. I think that’s an important message to give to kids. You have your different things you’re really good at—it may not be school, but hey, look at this guy. Honda’s a great example of a project we might go after.

RS: And how does that work at Lee & Low? If an editor brings in a project, what does he or she have to go through in order to get that book approved for publication?

JL: The owners are all in the room — we all read everything that we’re going to acquire. And then the editors, and that’s it. We really just go by the notion that nobody has a crystal ball in terms of what’s going to be successful, so you’ve got to go with your gut. If the people in the room feel strongly about this manuscript, then we’re going to give it a shot.

MC: And so many things can change between acquisition and publication. At a big publishing house, you have to jump through hoops if you discover that a thirty-two-page book needs to be, say, a forty-eight-page book. And there’s always tension if you want to alter the specs, because it was not what was approved of or signed off on. And you’re signing up books two to five years before you publish them, and so many things can change in that time. Including the technology.

JL: We’ve seen a lot of change in technology. But I feel that it doesn’t speed up the process of making books, because the illustrations are still dealt with by archaic media. We’re still dealing with paintbrushes and paint, stuff people have been using for ages. And then you plan for a book to take six months to a year, but then, you know, illustrators — how often do they run into personal problems that basically make that fall down?

RS: Like sleeping late.

JL: Exactly. So more often than not I see books become multi-year projects. It’s not uncommon. I think publishing’s a very odd industry in that way. Economically it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s really based on this creative process that’s very old.

RS: So do you feel then you have more — I can’t remember what the latest business-world buzzword is for “flexibility.” Oh, yes, we must be “nimble.” You can easily say, “Okay, this isn’t going to be on spring 2014. We can put it on this list.” Or can you speed something up?

MC: We can do both. Although it’s easier to put things off than speed them up. In all of our decisions, as at Lee & Low, the decision-making process is completely streamlined. I always tell people I can get an answer right away, whether it’s the answer I want or not. It’s like the difference between trying to turn a small sailboat, which takes some thought and some skill, and trying to turn a gigantic ocean liner, where you’ve got to get hundreds of people working together. We can turn on a dime.

JL: We’ve had to do that many, many times over the years.

RS: Do you find that being smaller and more agile can work to your benefit with authors and agents?

MC: Definitely. For one thing, our contract is much easier to read. And agents do send us a lot of new people, too, because it’s easier for us to take on new talent. We don’t have to come up with a whole marketing strategy to sell the project to the publishing board.

JL: We work with a lot of new people, too. Part of Lee & Low’s original mission was to develop new talent, so that was the idea from the get-go. It lightens the negotiating of it — sometimes authors or illustrators are unagented, but if they are, they can’t really ask for the moon, and we can’t go there anyway. And large advances are just not possible. Our big thing is that our books stay in print a very long time, because we don’t publish many, and we can really pay attention to every single book that we are putting out. That’s something that agents like to hear, and authors like to hear it, too. They say, Well, I want to go with these guys even though I’m not going to get everything I asked for. And from an owner’s point of view, I know how much we’ve invested in this thing — time, money, everybody’s effort — so for me, I don’t want to see any books go out of print. I have a personal as well as monetary stake in this. I’ve got a lot of skin in the game, you know? So it definitely motivates us to try really hard on everything.

RS: One way that your companies think very differently from each other is in terms of audience. Mary, Holiday House is trying to reach traditional groups — schools, libraries, bookstores, general readers; basically the same people that Random House and Macmillan are trying to reach. Jason, your company has more of a mission: to bring multicultural books of all kinds, written by all kinds of people, to different channels. Mary, how does it feel to be the little fish in that big pond?

MC: It feels good. I have a huge amount of independence, which I would certainly not have at a larger publisher. And we still have our niches that we fit into.

RS: Holiday books.

MC: Yes, and holidays that aren’t necessarily big holidays to other publishers, like Groundhog Day and St. Patrick’s Day. We’re very attuned to what’s happening in schools, so we also do wacky grammar books and irreverent math books that still teach math, and I think these are areas that a larger publisher would not be as interested in. Because to pay for their overhead, they’ve got to sell a lot more copies than we do.

RS: And that’s something that’s true of both your companies — you really have an investment in the school and library market. Most of the Big Six publishers don’t depend on it.

JL: We made that decision many years ago. When I first entered the business, we worked with both the trade and the institutional market. But it seemed to me that the institutional market was the one that was embracing what we were doing. At that point I asked the question, “What kind of publisher are we?” We realized that, really, our strength was institutional sales. We went whole-hog and basically never turned back.

RS: But, like Holiday House, it’s trade books for the institutional market.

JL: Yes.

MC: Once librarians and teachers embrace a particular book or a particular author, it’s far more likely that it will have a longer shelf life. Because when a teacher starts to use it, when it’s part of the program, or when he sees that this book works well with a certain kind of kid, then he hangs onto it. It becomes part of his teaching.

JL: Yeah, it gets referred to kids year after year after year: the strength of the backlist.

RS: Mary, what do you miss most about big publishing? The deep pockets?

MC: The deep pockets are not available all the time, to everyone. They’re only available for specific kinds of things, and they weren’t necessarily the sorts of books that I was doing. I really can’t say that I miss that. Daily life is just so different. I spend much more time editing books. With a big corporation, communication is like this constant obstacle, and you spend much of your time doing presentations so that people in the company know what you’re doing, writing memos and reports, traveling to sales conferences in other places, having lots and lots of meetings. It’s so much more pleasant to be working on the books, with other editors, with the art director, calling up authors, having illustrators come in with their dummies. It’s a lot more fun than sitting in a meeting.

JL: All that stuff takes time away from what people are supposed to be doing. It takes time to put together a presentation. It takes time to do anything, really. If you were to run a timesheet on the things you do every day, even the simplest thing takes up your time.

RS: Jason, you’re an independent publishing baby. I mean, this is really all that you’ve known. When you see your opposite numbers at conferences, what do you envy about their situations?

JL: I do like, when I’m at an ALA conference or someplace, to see them building their towers [of giveaway ARCs].

MC: That’s the only thing I want, too. I want their booths.

JL: We just started a YA imprint — science fiction, fantasy, and mystery — and we’ve published two books. We’re just beginning to get those types of books, so my pathetic towers look nothing like their towers. I don’t have that many to give away, so my tower’s a bitty tower. We’ve just started asking: How are we going to get this new imprint’s books noticed on such a small scale? And I guess the social media stuff is going to come into play. But even that has its limitations, because you’re tooting your own horn to the people who are already following you. You’ve got to go out and try to get more people to subscribe, and that ain’t easy.

RS: So you both contend with big publishers. And now we have all these new self-publishers, digital publishers, or print-on-demand publishers. Do you keep your eye on that side of things?

MC: I would say not in a concerted way. I pay some attention, but there’s just so much out there. And I think that is the real disadvantage to being a self-publisher: there is so much out there. How on earth are you going to get any attention?

JL: It’s like the whole scheme of what’s being published anyway: there’s going to be good and there’s going to be bad. The only thing I take offense at is the co-opting of the “indie” label. These self-publishing guys are trying to take it for themselves, and I’m not willing to give it up to them.

RS: Are you ever presented with a book that you love, but you think is not right for Holiday House, or not right for Lee & Low?

MC: All the time. Certain formats we can’t do — novelty books, board books. Which creates a bit of a problem if you have an artist who wants to branch out into those areas. We don’t have the right kind of distribution for those sorts of things. We can’t get a book into Walmart or discount drugstores, or the kind of places where that sort of book needs to sell.

RS: Why couldn’t you get a book into Walmart, say?

MC: First of all, Walmart doesn’t even want to see your products if you don’t have a critical mass. And big bestsellers. If you’re Random House, you go in there and say, Oh, I have all these cookbooks by Rachael Ray. Don’t you want those? And then you can get some other books in there as well. We don’t publish on a mass market schedule, either, where you’re really publishing every month. We have two lists a year, still. And that’s very old-school.

JL: We would probably have to avoid something that required a very large advance, so that would rule out a lot of high-profile authors and illustrators. We avoid things like, say, a book about Martin Luther King, because how many Martin Luther King books are already out there? What new spin would we bring to that? But we would do something about John Lewis, who was MLK’s right-hand man.

RS: What does the news that Random House and Penguin are getting together mean for your companies?

MC: After a certain point of big, it doesn’t matter to someone like us anymore. I don’t think we’re going to be affected by the fact that they have merged, because we aren’t competing with them in the same ways that the other big publishers are.

JL: We’re also not looking at the big guys as competitors, really. They’re almost in a different universe than we are. We’re a small universe. We do our own thing. We run the company as best we can. We try to do right by everybody who works with us, people working for us, the authors, the illustrators, and that’s our world. That’s all we’re focused on. Yes, we’re trying to predict like everybody else what’s happening with the digital stuff, but nobody knows that yet. I would have to say we’re definitely playing more follower than leader in that respect.

MC: And the leaders, I don’t think know where they’re going.

JL: Well, that’s the thing. Everybody’s driving and the headlights are out, basically.

RS: Given you don’t have the big pockets, how do you keep the authors and agents coming?

MC: I have to say, at Holiday House, our authors have been really wonderful and loyal to us, and I think there are some people who will always prefer to work with the smaller publishers. Some will want a huge one, but just like we’re not the answer for everyone, the big publishers aren’t the answer for everyone, either.

JL: We’ve started a lot of careers, and now and then those people end up moving on, but I will say that a lot of them do come back, like Greg Christie, for instance. We published his first book, and he does publish with many different houses, but he does come back, and he says it’s because he really likes working with us. We work with Ted and Betsy Lewin as well. They’re Caldecott honorees and all that, and they publish with us now because a) they like the experience, but b) the stuff they want to do in some of their books, the big houses aren’t interested in. It doesn’t matter that they’re the Lewins. They like to do these travel books, based on their adventures, and we think they’re great, so we will do that for them. There are people who are loyal. I think that if they didn’t have a good experience — obviously we earn their loyalty in some way in return.

MC: Yeah, good or bad, I think it is a very different experience.

RS: What is the next step for Holiday House and for Lee & Low? How are the next twenty years looking?

MC: I think smaller publishers are going to be, in a way, better equipped going into the future because of our small overheads. I don’t know that print publishing — because it is going to shrink — will be able to support the infrastructure of a large company.

JL: I think for us it’s just keep doing what we’re doing. We’ve found a way to be profitable, doing the kind of books that we do. Our mission has definitely dictated that, but it has also grown and shifted to encompass a lot of the things that are coming up in today’s modern world. People know to come to us for multicultural books; now we also address issues including sexuality, same-sex parents, disabilities, autism. We brought out a book about a deaf baseball player. So I think that gives us even more places to go, in terms of the stories we want to tell. I’m happy with that.

The post Jack (and Jill) Be Nimble: An Interview with Mary Cash and Jason Low appeared first on The Horn Book.

1. How did you divide the work on Eve & Adam?

Michael: We keep promising ourselves to pay attention to process when we work together so that we can answer these questions intelligently. But it never works out in an organized way. If you imagine the full list of all possible methods, we could probably tick off everything on the list.

Katherine: It’s actually simple. I did the good parts.

Michael: That’s what I meant to say. She did the good parts.

2. If you could genetically modify one little thing about yourself what would it be? Dare I ask what you might modify in each other?

Katherine: Hmmm. Normally I might say I’d get rid of my OCD gene, but everyone needs a little weirdness, so I might just keep it. Maybe I’d change my nearsightedness because I hate wearing glasses. As for changing Michael, I would genetically manipulate him to have a greater tolerance for small dogs and the cheerful noises they make.

Michael: What would I change about Katherine? Seriously, you expect me to suggest my wife might have a physical flaw? I know you’re newly married, Roger, but take some advice: don’t ever admit to a flaw in the spouse. You’ll never hear the end of it. No, no, no, I’m an experienced husband; I’m not falling for that. As for a change in myself, I might have once said I wish I hadn’t gone bald, but now I kind of like the shaved head look. So I would change my attraction to sweets. Is that genetic?

2.5 Eve finds love in Frankenstein’s lab. What’s YOUR story?

Katherine: The lab was in Austin, Texas, not Transylvania or Tiburon, which we used for Eve & Adam. Other than that, it was pretty much the Frankenstein story.

Michael: Katherine was just finishing college with some made-up major. I was just coming off a hobo phase where I’d been living under a freeway overpass off I35. I got a job waiting tables and rented the apartment next-door to hers on Pearl Street, just a few blocks off campus. One day I saw this girl through the window and decided I had to go meet her. So I knocked on her door and pretended I needed a can opener. We went to the late, lamented Les Amis for a beer and twenty-four hours later we were living together. And we’ve been together for thirty-three years.

Katherine: Love at first sight. It’s a bit cliché. We apologize for that.

From the February 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Jonathan Hunt: How did you approach the difficult task of narrowing your list? Can you tell us who almost made it?

Andrea Davis Pinkney: Narrowing the list was daunting! One man I really wanted to include, but felt was too self-serving, was my own father, the late Philip J. Davis. Dad was one of the first African Americans to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was later appointed by the White House to help draft affirmative action legislation. Of the ten men featured in the book, my dad had a direct connection to six of them. A few years ago, Brian painted a stunning portrait of my father, so that aspect of Dad’s story was already complete.

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In last week’s Notes from the Horn Book, Roger interviewed author/illustrator Jonathan Bean about DIY and his latest book, Building Our House. Reviewer Betty Carter has a sixth question for Jonathan in the January/February 2013 Horn Book Magazine. Read the starred review of Building Our House here.

Betty Carter: What lessons or habits from your parents’ “homesteader” endeavors did you take away from your childhood that you now use in everyday adult life?

Jonathan Bean: When I was a kid, I remember asking for some small toy, and my father saying, “We could make something like that.” (Frustrating at the time because I wanted the toy now.) It wasn’t necessarily that he thought he could make a better toy (though he probably would end up doing just that), it was because making things and thinking about making things was fun! That’s exactly how I continue to feel. Sometimes it means not getting the result I want right now, but the work and the pleasure of holding the completed object is always very satisfying.

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