BookBar Puts 2500 Books in the Hands of Needy Children

This week, BookBar Denver, will be donating over 2500 children’s books to local students—and if that’s not fantastic enough, they made sure the books they plan to donate were written or illustrated by local authors and illustrators!

Don’t blink! When BookBar says they want to get something done, they move fast. At the beginning of May, BookBar Denver set a goal to get local author and illustrator books in the hands of needy children so these kids would have something to read over the summer. In order to meet that goal, BookBar reached out to the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) and allowed authors and illustrators to apply to have their book selected for purchase in BookBar's giveaway plan.

After carefully considering the following: relationship with individual publishers, book publication date, diversity of characters, settings, situations for the diverse community, price, and previous relationships with local authors and illustrators—BookBar chose 15 RMC SCBWI member titles and purchased an average of five cases of each title (all recorded by Bookscan). Here are the titles they selected:

Author or illustrator	Title
Regan, Dian	Space Boy and the Space Pirate
Fenske, Jonathan	Plankton is Pushy
Wing, Natasha	Night Before Summer Vacation
Cowles, Ashlee	Beneath Wandering Stars
Bertman, Jennifer	Book Scavenger
Jones, Traci	Silhouetted by the Blue
Tuell, Todd	Ninja Ninja Never Stop
Vega, Denise	If Your Monster Won't Go to Bed
Phumiruk, Dow	Maya Lin - Artist-Architect
Cooner, Donna	Can't Look Away
Feagan, Alice	School Days Around the World
Mills, Claudia	Cody Harmon, King of Pets
Rose, Judy	Look Both Ways in the Barrio Blanco
Crowder, Melanie	A Nearer Moon
Reidy, Jean	All Through My Town

More about their press release and birthday celebration: BookBar will be celebrating its fourth year as an independent bookstore and wine bar in Denver’s Berkeley neighborhood on Saturday May 27th. Festivities will include raffles, literary games and giveaways all day from 10 am - 10 pm. There will be a cake cutting and champagne toast at 8 pm. In appreciation of four years of collaboration with local authors/illustrators and local schools, and in partnership with RMC SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators), BookBar will be donating over 2500 children’s books by local authors to local schools!

These donations will be delivered to Northwest Denver schools the week of May 28th to ensure that children can take a book home for summer break. This is part of a program that BookBar and RMC SCBWI hope to expand upon in order to connect Colorado students with Colorado authors. BookBar is also excited to announce the addition of a 1400 square foot events and gallery space for the whole family. As the store continues to grow and thrive, there is an increasing need for a dedicated event space to serve our growing literary community. This space will include a mini bar / cafe and serve as a book art gallery during non-event hours, featuring local artists specializing in art created from and about books as informative literary showcases. In addition, it will be available for community events and meeting reservations

Thank you for all you do, BookBar!

What's a HIGH CONCEPT hook?

Agents love them, editors want them, so what are  "high concept" books? To know a high concept book, you must first meet the high concept hook.



Elana Roth of Caren Johnson Literary Agency describes a high concept hook as one where the premise is bigger than the characters and the pitch can be said in one line.


Liesa Abrams is an executive editor at Aladdin, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Children's Books (she acquires and edits tween and middle grade fiction). She describes high concept as something that is easy to say and easy to memorize. Her example is an upcoming title byTodd Hasak-Lowy called 33 Minutes: A countdown to recess when a boy's former bestfriend promises to kick his butt.

Liesa Abrams says high concept is "something easy to say and easy to memorize."

Elana Roth describes high concept, "when the premise is bigger than the characters and when the pitch is something you can say in one line."  

Today, in Publishers Marketplace, there are two great examples of HIGH CONCEPT pitches and high concept books to come:

(the logline is separate from the high concept pitch)

NO SAFETY IN NUMBERS is great example of High Concept YA: pitched as Life As We Knew It meets Lord of the Flies to Dial by Faye Bender Lit

Art sketch by David Deen

The logline: young adult trilogy, told from the perspective of four teens as the discovery of a biological bomb in the air ducts of a busy suburban mall unfolds, the entire complex is quarantined, people start getting sick, supplies start running low, and there's no way out

David Lipsky and Darin Strauss's THE UNACCOUNTED. The  high concept pitch: teenage Jason Bourne meets The Prisoner of Zenda,

logline: a love story and an epic adventure set in both a modern-day American high school and in a glamorous Europe, to Virginia Duncan at Greenwillow, in a three-book deal, for publication in Winter 2013, by ICM/UTA (World English).

Update: these aren't perfect examples, but they are recent deals reported in Publisher's Marketplace, and now books I want to read simply based on the logline.

Kate O'Sullivan of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt won a six-publisher auction for Andrea Tsurumi's debut picture book, Accident!, in which Lola the armadillo kicks off a crescendo of calamities in her Richard-Scarry-ish world. Publication is slated for fall 2017; Stephen Barr at Writers House negotiated the two-book deal for world rights.

Neal Porter of Roaring Brook's Neal Porter Books has acquired world rights to husband-and-wife team Aaron Bagley and Jessixa Bagley's Vincent Comes Home, which they are co-authoring and co-illustrating. The book is about a cat who has lived his entire life at sea and wonders what it would be like to go “home.”

Heather Howland at Entangled Teen has bought Never Apart by Romily Bernard, about a girl and boy who die repeatedly, falling between parallel worlds, but always being found by the same killer until the fall that unravels everything. Publication is slated for summer 2017; Sarah Davies of Greenhouse Literary did the deal for world rights.

Liza Kaplan of Philomel has acquired Emily Barr's YA debut from Camilla Borthwick at Penguin Random House U.K. in a six-figure, two-book deal. The One Memory of Flora Banks is a psychological thriller as well as a coming-of-age novel, starring a protagonist with no short-term memory who must navigate the Arctic landscape of Norway. The book will publish simultaneously in the U.S. and U.K. in January 2017.

Books for kids

Do you know what to buy for your children? Visit the the bookshelf detective dot ORG
Here's what’s on my bookshelf:

Picture Book Picks:

A Visitor for Bear by Bonny Becker (Caldecott Honor)

Pirates Don’t Change Diapers by Melinda Long

Piggies in the Pumpkin Patch by Mary Peterson and Jen Rofé

Chapter Books:

According to Humphry books by Betty Birney

Middle Grade Books:


Savvy by Ingrid Law (Newbery Honor)
A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck (Newbery Honor)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Newbery Medal)
The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice (winner of numerous awards for Best Middle Grade and also named as the 2010 Bank Street Best Book)
Paris Pan Takes the Dare by Cynthea Liu (a dozen kid's choice awards)
The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (National Book Award Winner)
When You Reach Me (currently my favorite in this list!) by Rebecca Stead, Newbery Medal

Young Adult Choices:

Down Sand Mountain by Steve Watkins (Golden Kite Award)

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler (Printz Honor)

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (this book has received more than twelve awards recognizing it as a top choice in Young Adult Literature)

The Hunger Games (trilogy) by Suzanne Collins