**EDITED TO ADD
Kate also challenged independent bookstores to handsell The Great Green Heist. To sweeten the pot, I will give any bookstore who participates a print from my etsy store. Once you start selling, just contact me at gracelin.manager@gmail.com with your mailing address and I'll get the print out to you! Let's make The Great Green Heist a bestseller!So this whole WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS campaign* has really gotten my ginger up. Like I said, it bothers me that there are more cats than people of color invited to the BookCon and, now, most recently the official response to the controversy is that only industry people find the line-up problematic, not readers and customers.
The sad thing is that to companies that run Bookcons it probably seems true. As author Kate Messner said in a recent blog post, "At the end of the day, publishing is a business that needs to make money to survive. Given that reality, the best way for readers to ask for more diversity in children’s literature is not with words and tweets and blog posts alone but also with dollars."
Which is probably why the 3rd portion of the WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS campaign asks people to purchase diverse books and photograph them. Not sure what book to get? In that same recent blog post by Kate**, she also challenged everyone to preorder the mg novel The Great Green Heist (which looks awesome!)
So, to encourage participation in the WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS campaign, I am having a giveaway!
I have pre-ordered the The Great Green Heist:
I have a paperback copy of Starry River of the Sky:
and I have restocked the prints in my etsy store:
If you participate in the WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS campaign, I will put your name in for a random drawing for one of these prizes. There are 3 parts of the campaign and you can enter for each part you participate in!
All you have to do is copy and paste the url of your photo (of your sign and/or your bookshelf as requested by the campaign, I'll just go by the honor system for the twitter chat!) in the comments section of this post. If there are a lot of entries, I'm happy to offer even more prizes!
So, please spread the word and participate!
* I am not an organizer of the campaign nor did I have anything to do with its origins. I just think it's awesome and want people to support it.