Guest Post: How the Books Get Made (The Great Sea Dragon Discovery – Pippa Goodhart)

To celebrate the recent publication of The Great Sea Dragon Discovery,
I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Pippa Goodhart to The Reader Teacher today!

Without further ado, here’s Pippa’s guest post ‘How the Books Get Made’ where she talks about answering one of the questions that children often ask at school visits ‘How is your book made?’ After seeing pictures of Pippa on Twitter seeing her book being made, this is a superb insight in to the often behind-the-scenes process…

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Title: The Great Sea Dragon Discovery
Author: Pippa Goodhart (@pippagoodhart)
Publisher: Catnip Books (@catnipbooks)
Page count: 272
Date of publication: 5th July 2018
Series status: N/A
ISBN: 978-1910611081

Perfect for Year 5 & Year 6.

#3Words3Emojis:
1. Questions❔
2. Fossils  🐚
3. Curiosity 🤔

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How the Books Get Made

By Pippa Goodhart

When I do school visits one of the questions that children often ask is, ‘How did you make the book?’  After a quarter of a century of writing, and over a hundred books published, with this book I have at last seen the books being made … and it’s an amazing and exciting sight.

Let’s take The Great Sea Dragon Discovery from start to finish –

It all began with me taking an interest in the history of my home village where, in the year after Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, coprolites were being mined and fossils of ancient creatures found.  Bill began to grow as a character in my mind as I researched and wrote notes, then began writing my story.  It probably took a couple of years of me working solo before there was a draft to show a publisher.

Then comes the publisher, with an editor to guide the reworking of the text, sales people to choose the title, and a designer to create the cover, so a handful of people many months.

But the actual ‘making of the book’, printing and binding happens astonishingly fast.  At CPI Book Makers in Chatham they make more than 130 million books a year!  How?

The book files are arranged so that the printing and folding of paper will place the text for each place in the correct place and the right way up for both sides of each page.

Large flexible sheets of steel are etched with the book’s text, making plates from which the book will be printed.

Vast rolls of paper made from Finnish trees are fed into a printing machine, cascading like a waterfall between the rollers that print on both sides of the paper at one.  The machine then cuts and folds each ‘section’ of the book.

Meanwhile the colour printed card for the covers is printed elsewhere, printing four covers per sheet.

Book sections (in correct order!) are fed into the binding machine, as is the cover card.  What follows produces 3,000 books in about twenty minutes.  The compressed book pages are tipped onto their spines, then passed over rollers wet with hot glue.  Those spines are stuck to the covers, and the back and front covers folded to encase the pages.  At this stage, two books are together, head to head, as a single tall book with uncut pages.  The next process saws that in half.  Then each book is guillotined to cut the pages and give clean edges.  The books are stacked and shrink wrapped and labelled, ready to be sent to the distribution centre.

Then come the lorry and fork lift truck drivers, the pickers and more who send the books into shops and libraries.  There, bookshop staff and librarians select and display and recommend the book, bloggers review it, and people buy the book.

Only then does the book get into the hands of readers, and, as they read, into their heads.  It’s quite a journey!

Picture credit: https://www.egmont.co.uk/books/author/4/pippa-goodhart

Picture credit: https://twitter.com/catnipbooks

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Pippa Goodhart, author of The Great Sea Dragon Discovery

Picture credit: https://www.egmont.co.uk/books/author/4/pippa-goodhart

Pippa Goodhart is a popular author of over thirty children’s books including the Winnie the Witch series and A Dog Called Flow which was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. Pippa Goodhart’s Raven Boy was in the 2015 Booktrust Read for My School packs, while Finding Fortune was picked for the 2015 Summer Reading Challenge. Pippa is a history graduate and a former teacher and bookseller. She lives in Cambridgeshire.

Find out more about Pippa at http://www.pippagoodhart.co.uk and connect with her on Twitter @pippagoodhart.

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The Great Sea Dragon Discovery by Pippa Goodhart out now in paperback!
(£6.99, Catnip)

Connect with Pippa @pippagoodhart and Catnip @catnipbooks

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Huge thanks to Laura and all at Catnip for sending me an advance copy of The Great Sea Dragon Discovery and inviting me to host Pippa’s guest post! Extra thanks to Pippa for taking the time to write her really insightful and informative guest post!

Mr E
📚

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The Great Sea Dragon Discovery is available to order online or from any good book shop.

Guest Post: Planning a story is like planning a stunt (Stunt Double: Jungle Curse – Tamsin Cooke)

To celebrate the recent publication of the second in the very successful Stunt Double series, I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Tamsin Cooke to The Reader Teacher today!

Without further ado, here’s Tamsin’s guest post ‘Planning a story is like planning a stunt’ where she talks about being a proud planner when writing; her inspiration for Jungle Curse from a rather eventful dog walk and her brain scrambling with creative ideas… 

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Title: Stunt Double: Jungle Curse
Author: Tamsin Cooke (@TamsinCooke1)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Children’s (@OUPChildrens)
Page count: 288
Date of publication: 5th July 2018
Series status: Second in the Stunt Double series
ISBN: 978-0192749840

Perfect for Year 5, Year 6 & Year 7.

#3Words3Emojis:
1. Action-packed 💥
2. Elephants 🐘
3. Blockbuster 🎬

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Planning a book is like planning a stunt

Some authors have a great idea and just start to write. Well, I’ve tried this before, and my story goes nowhere. It just meanders along, with no sense of purpose.

So I am a planner and I’m proud. And I think planning a book is like planning a stunt. You need to ensure there’s a set up, everyone’s in the right place at the right time, there’s dramatic tension, and there are no holes in the story – just like you don’t want any holes in your safety equipment!

I know lots of people, especially children, who groan at the thought of planning, but this is part of the story process that I love. This is where you can allow your imagination to go wild. Once you have a seed of a story, you can play with ideas.

The inspiration for Jungle Curse came from a dog walk. Having just narrowly missed being hit on the head by a falling branch, I then had to pull an aggressive attack dog off my lovely pet Labrador, when I thought – what else could go wrong on this simple walk?  Then I froze because an idea struck me. What if things kept going wrong on a film set? What if people started believing it was cursed?

My brain started scrambling in all directions. I had so many ideas for what could go wrong and what could make it go wrong. Over the next few days, dramatic scenes played in my head, and I filled notebooks, as my story came alive.  However, my ideas were jumbled, with no sense of sequencing. If they were a stunt, people would definitely get hurt. Imagine someone had to jump out of a plane – I would have sent the stunt team to one place, the safety equipment to another. So I needed to put my ideas in order.

I wrote a title of each big scene onto a Post-It note. Then I sequenced them, working out which scene needed to go where; which one worked best at the beginning; which one needed to go towards the end; some I got rid of, filing them away for another book. Soon I had a whole list of events where my characters were challenged and grew. My floor was completely covered in Post-It notes.  I transferred the titles to my laptop, using a programme called Scrivener that helps separate the scenes.

Then I started to write. This part of my process is most accurately described as ‘word vomit.’ The words spill out of my brain into my laptop. There are always typos, half written sentences and imageless descriptions. It is awful writing, but I don’t care because at this point I just want to get the story out, and no one gets to see it at this stage.

But it is often at this moment that my pesky characters can derail my plans. As I’m writing, it becomes clear that they might not want to carry out what I’d planned for them. For example, I wanted Finn to have an argument with a certain character. I tried forcing him, as I thought it would make a great scene, but somewhere at the back of my mind he was nagging me – telling me this was wrong. In the end I had to cut it because he was right. Finn would not get into an argument with that certain person. 

Once my ‘word vomit’ is complete, otherwise known as the first draft, I am ready to start writing the real thing. I write the first scene again in detail. Then I edit and edit and edit… until I’m pretty happy with this one section. Then I move to the next scene and repeat. These scenes become chapters and soon my writing begins to resemble a book. This is the equivalent to rehearsing a stunt, where you make sure the performers know exactly what they are doing.

When it feels complete, I read from the beginning, going through each chapter slowly and carefully, making sure there are no plot holes. I edit again, ensuring the story flows. Often I’m reading aloud. This is when the cameras would be rolling and my stunt performer is falling through the sky.

With stunts, you need to make sure everything is in its right place and all the equipment works. You don’t want to have a faulty parachute. With a story you want to make sure everything works too, that the plot makes sense, and the characters behave in a believable way. Most importantly with a stunt, you need to make sure no one gets hurt. Well… in real life no one was hurt while I wrote Jungle Curse.  Words were deleted, there was some wailing, and a few nails were bitten – but there was no lasting damage!

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Tamsin Cooke, author of Stunt Double: Jungle Curse

Tamsin loves to travel, have adventures and see wild animals. She’s fed a tiger, held a seven-foot python and stroked a tarantula, but she’s too scared to touch a worm. She lives in Somerset with her adrenalin-junkie family. When she isn’t writing, she can be found reading books, eating jelly beans or tromping through the woods with her soppy dog.

Tamsin is back with the heart-stopping Jungle Curse, second book in the Stunt Double series with OUP Children’s.

You can find out more about Tamsin at her website or by following her on Twitter: @TamsinCooke1.

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Huge thanks to Hannah and all at OUP Children’s for inviting me to host this guest post! Extra thanks to Tamsin for taking the time to write her really insightful guest post!

Mr E
📚

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Stunt Double: Jungle Curse (Book 2) is available to order online or from any good book shop.

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Stunt Double (Book 1) is available to order online or from any good book shop.

Blog Tour: (4 in 1: Review, Extract, Teachers’ Notes & Giveaway!) The Storm Keeper’s Island – Catherine Doyle (Illustrated by Bill Bragg)

Today, it is my absolute pleasure to be a part of this blog tour for Waterstones’ Children Book of the Month for July, The Storm Keeper’s Island by Catherine Doyle.
Bloomsbury Children’s Books have provided me with an extract of The Storm Keeper’s Island, Teachers’ Notes and TEN copies to give away! See below!

‘Magic and myth combine to make The Storm Keeper’s Island a novel like no other. With a different kind of magic, this is a contemporary classic that will move its readers to feel like they’ve discovered and rediscovered their love for reading all over again.’

Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Title: The Storm Keeper’s Island
Author: Catherine Doyle (@doyle_cat)
Illustrator (Cover): Bill Bragg
Lettering (Cover): Patrick Knowles (@PatrickKnowle14)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Children’s Books (@KidsBloomsbury)
Page count: 320
Date of publication: 1st July 2018
Series status: First in the series
ISBN: 978-1408896884

Perfect for Year 5, Year 6 & Year 7.

#3Words3Emojis:
1. Memories 💭
2. Candles 🕯️
3. Island/Ireland 🇮🇪

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When Fionn Boyle sets foot on Arranmore Island, it begins to stir beneath his feet …

Once in a generation, Arranmore Island chooses a new Storm Keeper to wield its power and keep its magic safe from enemies. The time has come for Fionn’s grandfather, a secretive and eccentric old man, to step down. Soon, a new Keeper will rise.

But, deep underground, someone has been waiting for Fionn. As the battle to become the island’s next champion rages, a more sinister magic is waking up, intent on rekindling an ancient war.

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The first line(s):

In a field full of wild flowers, a boy and a girl stood side by side beneath an oak tree. The sky was angry, the thunder growling like an angry beast.

Extract

Download extract of The Storm Keeper’s Island

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Review:

Inspired by Cat’s very own childhood connections to the island of Arranmore – off the west coast of Ireland – and intertwined with the ripe richness and rurality of Irish mythology, The Storm Keeper’s Island is a novel like no other.

Originally, I had started to write this review after receiving an advance proof copy of this story back in May, before it had been chosen as Waterstones’ Children’s Book of the Month for July. It is safe to say that it is no surprise to me that it has proudly earned this accolade because it blows everything out of the water and far away across the sea.

Starting off in the school holidays, Ffion and his sister Tara are sent away across the sea, by their mother (who later on we find is still riddled with shock after the death of their father), to a lonely island to stay with their grandfather. From the very first page, Fionn becomes the kind of almost hidden hero you can really start to root for, as the angsty brotherly-sisterly dynamic between him and his sibling starts to seep through.

But the island and his grandfather are not quite what Ffion first expected, in fact they too are like no other. The island of Arranmore is a larger-than-life land surrounded from within by magic, ancient folklore and legend. An island steeped in a strong sense of history and with a beating heart all of its own. Inhaling, gasping, waking up and with a voice that seemingly speaks to Ffion in his deepest dreams, this is an island that breathes and begins to come to life before your very own eyes through Cat’s choice of beautiful and almost lyrical language that lilts and sings itself off the page.

As candles, memories (including a grandfather living with Alzheimer’s) and ancient wars meander and merge, Ffion finds himself in the middle of a changing of the guard as the island seeks out to select its next Storm Keeper but more than magic, mystery and myth stand before him.

With a feel of a contemporary classic, like a blend of Funke with Millwood Hargrave and Rundell, this is an all together different kind of magic and fantasy that’s on offer. One that’s very much multi-layered; it felt like there were so many stories within stories just waiting to be awoken to be told. And it is this that I cannot wait to see progress in Catherine’s future stories.

This is a stunning, secretly-enchanting story imbued with a strong, original and inherent sense of ancestral self from Catherine that makes it shine so brightly, and will embrace its readers and move them to feel like they’ve rediscovered their love for reading all over again.

Just as once in a generation, the island of Arranmore chooses a new Storm Keeper; once in a while, a book as special as this comes around.

If I could mould this book in to its very own candle, calling it The Storm Keeper – 1st July 2018, it would continue to burn to be relived and reread. For this is a light book that I hope never goes out and one that I will be waxing lyrical about for years to come.

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Huge thanks to Catherine, Emma, Emily, and all at Bloomsbury Children’s Books for inviting me to take part in this blog tour, providing me with the resources and sending me an advance proof copy, finished copy of this beautifully-written book!

Mr E
🕯️📚🕯️

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Catherine Doyle

Catherine Doyle grew up in the West of Ireland. She holds a first-class BA in Psychology and a first-class MA in Publishing. She is the author of the Young Adult Blood for Blood trilogy (Vendetta, Inferno and Mafiosa), which is often described as Romeo and Juliet meets the Godfather. It was inspired by her love of modern cinema.

Her debut Middle Grade novel, The Storm Keeper’s Island (Bloomsbury, 2018), is an adventure story about family, bravery and self-discovery. It is set on the magical island of Arranmore, where her grandparents grew up, and is inspired by her ancestors’ real life daring sea rescues. 

​Aside from more conventional interests in movies, running and travelling, Catherine also enjoys writing about herself in the third-person.

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Teachers’ Notes

Download The Storm Keeper’s Island Teachers’ Notes

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Giveaway!

I am absolutely elated that the very lovely people at Bllomsbury Children’s Books have kindly given me TEN copies of The Storm Keeper’s Island to give away!

If you’d like to be in with a chance of winning one of these copies of this truly sensational book, simply retweet (RT) this tweet!