Book Trailer: The Youngest Marcher
Curious City is proud to release a video in support of the picture book, The Youngest Marcher by Cynthia Levinson, illustrated by Vanessa Brantley Newton, and published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers. Our script intentionally asked young readers to place themselves in Audrey Faye Hendricks shoes: Imagine having Martin Luther King Jr. himself sit down at your dinner table. Imagine Dr. King asking you to stand up for your community, for your nation. While no child can now go to jail for protesting, we hope the book helps children explore how to express their views on injustice. It...
Read MoreCultural Authenticity in Marketing: Terry Farish
The conversation about cultural authenticity in children’s literature and #OwnVoices, painful as it may be, is essential for all writers. The book industry owes readers the honesty of voice and culture and the industry certainly owes creators of color a much, much larger share of the bookshelves. Cultural authenticity has always been deeply ingrained in Curious City’s marketing mission. If books are vehicles for engaging with a culture unlike your own (and books are prefect vehicles of such), the tools Curious City produces to facilitate that engagement should be vetted by that...
Read MoreBoys Who Challenged Hitler: Book Trailer
Curious City was proud to partner with Farrar Straus Giroux BYR (an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group) to produce a book trailer for The Boys Who Challenged Hitler by Phillip Hoose. Curious City scripted and storyboarded the piece and then worked with the strong voice talent and audiobook producer William Dufris of Mind’s Eye Productions on narration and sound. The brilliant videography came from our partnership with James Bailey. Pleased to have paid tribute to Knud Pedersen, the brave boys of the Churchill Club and the fine story crafting of author Phillip...
Read MoreAll Hat, No Cattle: Marketing Q&A
Thanks to all the creators that attended Curious City’s “All Hat and No Cattle Children’s Book Marketing in Today’s Wild, Wild West” talk at the SCBWI Wild, Wild Midwest Conference. You had great questions. I hope these are great answers. (For those with website or blog questions, I answered your questions over yonder.) CURIOUS CITY How does Curious City work with new clients? What do you cost? Does Curious City work with unpublished authors and illustrators? Self-published creators? Thanks for asking. That is swell of you. These questions are best answered on...
Read MoreTrain Spotting with Lisa Jahn-Clough
Curious City follows the train of story to create discovery tools for children’s books and young adult. We followed Lisa Jahn-Clough’s May 2013 release of Nothing But Blue (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) right to the tracks this week. Mark Mattos Photography and I drove through back streets, visited abandoned lots, and walked down secret wooded paths, beaches, and finally train tracks to find photo locations for images for the book trailer for Nothing But Blue. Puppeteer Bela Rieger, Lisa Jahn-Clough, and Lisa’s dog Rico joined us on those byways for a morning...
Read MoreThe Bow Wow Boys
Curious City’s mission is take books from what they are about to what they can do. When handed Mary Newell DePalma’s Bow-Wow Wiggle-Waggle (Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers) to produce a trailer, we knew we could not just tell you what the book was about. We needed instead to show you that the best picture books allow the reader and listener to completely engage with the page. We headed into Mind’s Eye Production’s studios with a reading 7-year-old, an observant 4-year-old, and their book champion mom. Together they read the story and talked...
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