New stuff online!

If you’re not on our catalog mailing list, you haven’t been able to take a peek at our latest books. Well, the wait is over—our Fall 2008 books are now available on our website. Take a look at all of our new products, including brand-new series (Graphic Spin, We Are Heroes) and fresh additions to old favorite series (Claudia Cristina Cortez, Jake Maddox, and Graphic Flash, among others!). While you’re there, you can also check out our vast repository of educators’ resources, including free Reader’s Theater scripts, book report forms, and create-your-own-graphic-novel pages. Check it all out at www.stonearchbooks.com!

Stone Arch Books's Fall '08 Catalog

Our new catalog is here! The marketing team finished working on it just two weeks ago, so it was a great surprise when finished copies showed up on our desks on Thursday afternoon.

This season, our catalog is full of tons of new books we’re really proud of. Our new series, Graphic Spin, does for fairy tales what Graphic Revolve did for classic stories—in each Graphic Spin book, a fairy tale is lavishly told in graphic-novel format. You’ve never seen fairy tales like this before!

In Graphic Sparks, we have new books in our Eek and Ack, School Zombies, Time Blasters, and Buzz Beaker series. We also have the first two books in a brand-new series, Zinc Alloy, written by our own Donald Lemke. Kids will love the escapades of Zack Allen, the world’s newest superhero.

Our Graphic Flash set has grown by four new books—all stories of war that will fit in wonderfully to American history classes. And Graphic Revolve contains four new classic stories.

Jake Maddox is back with twelve new books—four boy stories, four girl stories, and four new extreme outdoor adventure books. Our bestselling and well-reviewed Claudia Cristina Cortez set is back, too—with four more stories from Claudia’s point of view. We also have four new Vortex mysteries (including Curtains!: A High School Musical Mystery by our own Michael Dahl) and six new Shade Books, perfect for the kid who’s looking for a little bit of creepy suspense (that’s still safe!)

And we’ve mentioned the We Are Heroes series before on this blog. This new series contains six high-low books about ordinary kids making extraordinary changes in their communities. Whether it’s planting trees at school or painting a room in a house built by Habitat for Humanity, these books show real ways kids can make differences. (And, of course, proceeds from the book Kids Against Hunger will go to the nonprofit organization Kids Against Hunger™.)

These books aren’t available yet, but they will be on July 15. Keep your eye on this blog for more information about all of our new products over the next couple of months! Take a look at all of our books, or request a catalog of your own, at www.stonearchbooks.com.

How Books Get Their Names

We’ve finished up our books for Fall ‘08. Proofs (the last final look at the pages, so we can double-check for errors) are rolling in, and soon we’ll see the first finished copies of our books. But that doesn’t mean we have time to relax and slow down. We’re already moving on to our Spring ‘09 list!

Next week, the entire staff will meet to talk about titles for each book that we'll publish in Spring ‘09. First, the editors meet to talk about the book’s plot and brainstorm initial title ideas. Then we run it by the large group. At Stone Arch, it’s important to us to get feedback from multiple staff members before we decide on a title for a book. We know that titles matter when librarians are ordering books, so we try to get as much information about the book into the title as we can. We also want kids to find the titles appealing, so we try to use kid-friendly words. And finally, we want unique titles, so once we’ve come up with a list of titles for our books, we search for other books with those titles. If we find a match, we start over!

Here’s a fun exercise for your classroom or library: Read the class a new story—try reading one of our Graphic Sparks books, using tape to cover up the title as you’re reading. Then ask them to come up with a title for the story. They can create covers for their newly titled books, too. Try the same exercise with a story they already know (one of our Graphic Revolve books would be perfect for that exercise). The results might be surprising!

Crunch Time

Readers of this blog might think that all we do here at Stone Arch Books is travel around the country, visit librarians and teachers, and talk about our books. But most of the time, the SAB staff is in the Minneapolis offices, working on the awesome books you’ve come to expect from us.

Right now, we’re in what we lovingly call “crunch time.” Our books for the Fall ‘08 season are due to the printer at the end of the month! Many caffeinated and energy drinks are being consumed by the editorial and design staff. Lunches are being eaten at desks. Red folders (the way we pass manuscripts from person to person for approval) cover our desks. Twice a year, we enter this crazy, high-stress, high-pressure time. We probably single-handedly boost the stock at various local coffee shops just in the two months a year that we’re in crunch time!

So far, we’ve sent about eight books to the printer (of a total of 58). All 58 of the books need to be at the printer by the end of April in order to be printed, bound, and in our warehouse by July 15. It’s going to be crazy around here for the rest of April! So if our blog is a little quieter than normal, don’t think we’re just out having fun and ignoring you—we’re hard at work here, pumping out more of the books you know and love.

January wrap-up

January was a busy month here at Stone Arch Books! We’re in the thick of working on our Fall 2008 list. All of the manuscripts are in. Illustrators are busily working away at covers, designers are starting the initial cover designs, our librarian reviewers and reading consultants are reading edited manuscripts, our marketing team is starting to work on sales flyers, and editors are polishing up the final manuscripts. Plus, we’re starting to receive manuscripts and talk about design concepts for some of our Spring 2009 books! But even when we’re busy working on our books, the rest of SAB life doesn’t slow down: we traveled to ALA this month, and are looking forward to SCBWI in February and ahead to PLA (here in Minneapolis—we can’t wait!) in March. We’ve got a lot going on—but the truth is, we like it that way.