Columbia Publishing Course, Days 5-9

Days 6-7 were free. Next!

I continue to be absolutely floored by the speakers. Highlights of the past few days have included:

• Megan Tingley (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). Megan's presentation was on children's publishing, and as someone who doesn't know as much about picture books as I ought to, I was happy to hear her talk about authors and artists like Todd Parr and Darren Shan. (Let's not forget that from approximately 2001 to 2007, Darren Shan positively owned the YA horror market.)
  
• Chip Kidd (Knopf) had us all in stitches. My seat partner laughed so hard during Kidd's presentation that she cried. Besides the funny, we got to see a montage of the process of some of the book covers Kidd has done. He also talked about the production of the cover art of his own book, The Learners. (It's about the Milgram Behavioral experiments, for those who are interested. I am!) I have all the artistic ability of a toddler, but Kidd made me want to work in book design.
• Carolyn Pittis (HarperCollins) talked about global marketing strategies. Wow. Just. Wow. She crammed a phenomenal amount of information on sales, tracking, marketing, and new technologies into that two-hour presentation. It was quite energizing, and you know, I think there's actually a lot that fits into where public libraries can go in the future.

Tomorrow we have our meetings with individual editors, who will be looking over our reader's reports on the unbound manuscripts we all received. Many different kinds of crazy awesome this week there will be, says Yoda.