Greetings everyone. Plans are underway for the 4th annual Back To School Blog Tour coming up on Sept. 12-16. All week, authors will be featured with interviews and reviews of their books. Giveaways are also in the works. So, please stop by on Sept. 12 for a week of fantastic children’s literature to start off your school year.
Plus, there are still some slots open for this event. If you are an Indie children’s author and are interested, please email me at: tiff@tiffmester.net. Let me know you’re interested, what type of children’s book you have, age level, and any promos you might be interested in doing. Authors can set up their own giveaway, and I’ll be promoting the links. I’ll also be setting up a Back To School Blog Tour Giveaway that everyone can put on their blogs. The deadline to get back to me is Aug. 25.
To all the teachers and students going back to school over the next few weeks, have a fun and safe return. Happy reading!
The deals are on! 19 children’s books are on sale for $0.99 for the next two days through the website Lazy Saturday Reads. Several of the authors have been featured in past events on my website including Rachel Elizabeth Cole, author of “The Rabbit Ate My Homework”. Get your summer reading off to a good start. Load up for the Fourth of July weekend.
Summer reading was always something I encouraged when I was teaching. So, it’s something that I think is important, and I’m going to try my best to support that idea. To make it easy for you to read this summer, or help your child read, I’ve lined up to participate in two promos through the month of June. Look for the Crystal Keeper Chronicles to be on sale for $0.99. Plus, several other children’s books will be linked and listed along with mine for free or at a discounted $0.99. The first promo starts this weekend June 18-19. Look for more information starting on June 18.
***The next promo will be June 28-July 1.
**Each promo will be featuring different children’s books along with mine. It should give a boast to any summer reading list. Happy reading! You all come back this Saturday. See you then!
Tiffany Turner will be making an appearance at the Tartan Day Day celebration at Ardenwood Farm Park in Fremont, CA on April 2, 2016. She’ll be set up in a booth to meet everyone and sign books. Also available will be the opportunity to enter a drawing for a crystal pendant or a $25 Amazon Gift Card.
Mrs. Turner has been very involved in the Scottish Heritage community in Northern California for 10 years. She has played the First Lady in Waiting to Mary, Queen of the Scots in the Royal Court of St. Gyles Acting Guild. She was a founding member of the guild, St. Ida’s of Cill Ida. Recently, she has been playing her Gaelic Harp for the parade group Danse Macabre. Mrs. Turner proudly has Scottish and Irish heritage.
She will be signing books, giving out Tartan favors she has made from tartan purchased in Scotland, and visiting with her fans. All three Crystal Keeper books will be on sale. Plus, ask her about the current last installment of the series she is writing, The Lost Secret of Time. Also, stop by and sign up to win a $25 Amazon Gift Card or crystal pendant.
Also appearing with her will be the author of The Lost Celt, A. E. Conran. Ms. Conran is a children’s book author, freelance editor, and children’s book specialist at Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA. She’ll be on hand to sign copies of her new release, and talk about Celtic heritage. Her website is at: www.aeconran.com.
Come by and spend the whole day with the family learning about Scottish and Irish heritage.
Join in on the Back to School Blog Tour Sept. 7-11, 2015
PLANS ARE UNDERWAY! The blog tour will begin next week on Monday, Sept. 7. All week there will be author interviews, and links to participating author blogs with behind the scenes posts, back to school memories, and giveaways.
Here is the list of participating authors:
Participating Authors:
Marilyn Peake Monday Sept. 7
Rue Cole Tuesday Sept. 8
Sean McCartney Wednesday Sept. 9
Lee Winters Thursday Sept. 10
Recap day of giveaways
It will be a fabulous way to celebrate the beginning of school. Plus, I’ll be releasing my first Writing Project lesson plans in a Back to School Writing Project packet that will be available on Teacherspayteachers.com. All lessons comply with the new Common Core Standards and are drawn from my 18 years of teaching experience.
Looking forward to having you there! I’ll see you on Monday, Sept. 7!
I’d like to introduce you to a new feature here on the Indie Children’s Connection. Each month, I’ll be featuring a new Indie Children’s Author with links to their books and a spotlight, book review, and author interview or giveaway.
We’re starting off May with a feature on Arnold Rudnick. He writes several different types of books including middle grade novels and picture books. His books have a new twist on different genres. He fills his books with realistic characters that are easy to relate to. Often, they have some unique obstacle they have to face.
Arnold Rudnick has a gift for creating fascinating stories to challenge children toward self-improvement and self esteem. In LITTLE GREEN he introduces a little green frog (beautifully realized by illustrator Marcelo Goreman) who has big dreams to be special.
ISBN: 0981587976
Publisher Paraphrase, LLC
E.S. Pete: Sixth Grade Sense is about the perils of a paranormal preteen.
Pete knew there would be a lot more homework in Sixth Grade, but he didn’t plan on the reading list including the minds of his teachers and classmates. Knowing what they think can be helpful sometimes, but it also gets complicated — ESPecially when Pete thinks the substitute teacher is planning a big robbery.
ISBN: 0981587909
Publisher: Paraphrase, LLC
ARNOLD RUDNICK has written for many television shows, including THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR, STAR TREK: VOYAGER and THE NEW ADDAMS FAMILY.
If you picked up the special free copy yesterday, I promised an extra surprise today. To continue with the reading support, I’ve set up a special deal to go along with the Smashwords “Read An Ebook Week” all week along. So, I’ve included the second book in the series, The Lost Secret of the Greenman to be free for only this week. Here is the code to pick up your free copy of The Lost Secret of the Greenman: RAE75
I hope you enjoy your free copies of both books to help celebrate ereading this week. If by chance you liked them both, please remember that a book review is a great way to say thank you. Plus, I enjoy hearing what you thought about the books. Happy Ebook Reading!
Welcome to the first day of the Back to School Blog Tour for 2014. It’s part of my give back to the Indie Children’s Author community. I am featuring some unique and fabulous books this week from picture books to YA. With the new Common Core being adopted in many schools throughout the US, this is a great time to learn about new authors and possible new books for guided reading and novel studies. Plus, if you just want to find a great new book to read at the start of school, please check back each day for our new featured author.
This year, we have a Back To School Book Bundle Giveaway featuring books donated by the featured authors. Enter to win by joining featured authors’ social media links. It’s a great way to stay in touch with what the featured authors will be doing in the Fall and months to come. Plus, your welcomed to share what you learned by reposting any of the featured posts. The giveaway will run through the end of the weekend, Sept. 7, 2014. Winners will be announced on the blog 48 hours after the end of the giveaway. All the authors featured for this week have donated books for the giveaway. Here is your chance to support Indie authors and win something too! Here is what you can win:
Grand Prize Book Bundle:
Becca Price: Fairies and Fireflies
Rachel Cole: The Rabbit Ate My Homework
Clare K.R. Miller: A Star to Guide Her Trilogy (YA) Ebook Trilogy
D.R. Martin: Johnny Graphic Adventure Series (Middle Grade) Paperback or Ebook edition
Garrett Carter: I Want To Be An Athlete and a Teacher (Picture Book) Paperback signed edition
Runner Up: One runner-up winner will receive The Lost Secret of Fairies Ebook or Paperback edition and a $10 Starbucks Gift Card
Our first featured author is Becca Price. She first joined the blog tour last year, and has been up to writing many more books since she was last featured. She is almost done with her Fairies and Fey series, and is adding a bit more spice by working on a YA. It has been a wonderful experience to see her list of books grow over the last year. I had a chance to ask Becca about her current and future projects, and what she remembers about her favorite memories of her most inspiring teacher.
1) What is your favorite memory from the beginning of a school year?
Becca Price: The first day of school often coincided with my birthday (this was back when schools started in early September) so I’d get a lot of fancy school stuff and clothes for birthday gifts. And books! I’d usually get lots of books for my birthday — so I had the triple excitement of a new school year, a birthday, and new books to read in boring classes. (did I actually say that?)
2) Who was your most inspiring teacher? Why?
Becca Price: I had two very inspiring teachers in junior high and high school, and it is to my deepest shame that I don’t recall their names. In Junior High, I had a history teacher who recognized that I could write my stories and poems in class, and still keep up good grades in her class. She let me write whatever I wanted to, as long as I showed it to her when I was done. She was very encouraging, even though my poetry was mostly doggerel at that point. My stories were typical early teen self-indulgence, but she’d often underline a sentence or paragraph that was particularly good.
In high school, I took a creative writing class. My teacher there, too, was very encouraging about my way with words, but warned me that the path of a professional fiction writer was hard, and not very well paid.
3) What is the advice you would give children authors to get started?
Becca Price: Read all the children’s books you can. Read Neil Gaiman for sheer brilliance, Charles de Lint for his way of making every word and scene count, read the classic children’s literature because they’re fun. But read, read, read everything you can get your hands on. You never know what will spark inspiration.
4) Who is your favorite character from a children’s book?
Becca Price: Oddly, the little engine from The Little Engine That Could. “I think I can, I think I can.” Words that should be engraved in every child’s heart.
5) How could you sum up what writing means to you?
Becca Price: Writing is life, writing is breath. Writing is emotion, both joy and sorrow. I’ve always written, I can’t imagine not writing. There was a long period where I was on medication that decreased creativity (was known for that, in fact) and it was horrible. The week I got off that was the week I first published Dragons and Dreams.
6) What are your current writing projects?
Becca Price: Right now I’ve got several irons in the fire. The most pressing is re-releasing all my books with illustrations, and getting them professionally laid out. I’ve found the most wonderful artist, Sara Anderson, who really captures the story themes and my writing style, and I adore her. She also has several unpublished stories to illustrate for me, so that they’ll come out as a first edition with illustrations. I hope to have all those done by the end of 2014.
In the mean time, I’ve started a fairly major project, The Woods Between. It’s hard to describe. It’s for a YA/Adult audience, still a fairy tale, but a multi-generation saga of one family’s interactions with fairyland for good and ill. It will be composed of three separate stories for 3 distinct generations, showing how the actions of each previous generation affects the next generation. It started out as a simple quest fairy tale, and my husband asked a simple question, and the rest cascaded from there. I have no idea how long it will be, but don’t look for publication until early 2015.
I’m also about 2/3 done with my next collection, Quests and Fairy Queens — I’m hoping to work on the two or three missing stories when I’m not working on The Woods Between.
Thank you Becca for kicking off the Back To School Blog Tour this year. I can’t wait to see where this next year takes you. For more information or connect with Becca Price:
Plans are under way for the Back to School Blog Tour 2014. The dates are set for Sept. 1-5. I’ve decided to go with a theme for our featured authors: Connecting with Common Core. Participating authors will be sharing items to help students/teachers and parents help connect and utilize the new Common Core Standards in the US. Find discussion questions, activities, writing experiences for those young authors, and discount coupons through Smashwords for featured books. Last year we had fabulous Indie Children’s Authors participating such as Victoria Jeffrey, H. Y. Hanna, Sibel Hodge, Vivienne Mathews, W.N. Rae, Becca Brice, and Scott Pixello. I’m still finalizing this year’s authors, and will have up a list as soon as it’s available.
Plus, I’m working on a giveaway selection. I’d love to hear what you’d like to win. Ebook copies? Paperback copies of featured books? Amazon gift cards? What would get you motivated for the beginning of the 2014 school year? Since I’m in the planning stages, this would be a great time to leave comments and questions so I can incorporate them into the blog tour. I really want to try to meet the new Common Core needs, and make things go smoother for everyone as we start the new school year.
What can we do as Indie Children’s Authors to help support the Common Core and the start of the new year? After 17 years of teaching in elementary school, I have some idea of what teachers and students are up against with Common Core. But any feedback to share among everyone will be greatly appreciated. I’d love to hear from you over the next few weeks.
Today is the winner announcement for the Back to School Giveaway Bundle. It was linked through an on-line giveaway entry website called Rafflecopter. I’m sorry to announce there were no entries for the giveaway. Therefore, there was no winner.
But, let’s do this all again next year. I had a great time interviewing other Indie Children’s Authors, and I’d love to run the blog tour again next year. I think I’ll be making some changes, and focusing on certain features. Look for the Back to School Blog Tour 2014 next year. Announcements will go out for participation during the summer of 2014.
For now, enjoy the information from the blog tour, visit the featured authors, and have an excellent school year!
-Tiffany Turner
Editor and Head Writer for The Indie Children’s Authors Connection
Tiffany Turner will be making an appearance at the 
The Indie Children's Authors Connection 