New Year, New Look
Two years ago, I did a reading from GIRL'S GUIDE TO WITCHCRAFT for a group of librarians. The day following the reading, one of the librarians sent me email telling me that she was "disgusted" and "repulsed" by my website, because it used martini glasses to attract young girls to reading my book. (She then asked me for help getting a job, but that's another matter...)
I was somewhat flabbergasted at the time. The librarian had sat through my reading. She had heard narration from the book. She knew (or should have known) that the "girl" in the title was a twenty-something young adult.
I thanked the librarian for her opinion and continued to use the martini glasses on my website and as an icon here on LiveJournal.
This coming summer, though, GIRL'S GUIDE and SORCERY *are* going to be presented as YA books. They'll get new covers - the text will stay the same, but the design will be different. And since I'll be marketing to a different demographic, I've updated both my web design and my default LiveJournal icon.
www.mindyklasky.com
Happy New Year!
Mindy, wondering what people think - about the new artwork or the old librarian-created controversy
I was somewhat flabbergasted at the time. The librarian had sat through my reading. She had heard narration from the book. She knew (or should have known) that the "girl" in the title was a twenty-something young adult.
I thanked the librarian for her opinion and continued to use the martini glasses on my website and as an icon here on LiveJournal.
This coming summer, though, GIRL'S GUIDE and SORCERY *are* going to be presented as YA books. They'll get new covers - the text will stay the same, but the design will be different. And since I'll be marketing to a different demographic, I've updated both my web design and my default LiveJournal icon.
www.mindyklasky.com
Happy New Year!
Mindy, wondering what people think - about the new artwork or the old librarian-created controversy
At the same time, if the books are going to be presented as YA books, I think the new design is both more appealing and more appropriate. Did you do the design yourself?
The new design is stock artwork from one of the online sites; I purchased a web-license for it, and now I can use it to my heart's content (well, not for Cafe Press gear or that sort of thing, but...)
As for the grumpy librarian, it's possible that she was trying to look worldly and well-informed on marketing or something before hitting you up for help. This happens enough that Max Adams has an entire chapter telling people not to do that in her Screenwriting book.
1) At least one person will object to the design based on the models' clothes (too provocative, encourages girls to become sluts) or weight (too thin, encourages girls to become anorexic).
2) The girls themselves will love them and being smart enough to read books for recreation will not base their behavior on logos they have seen on websites.
You can't please everyone so you might as well please yourself. Happy New Year and good luck with the YA line!
Edited at 2008-01-01 05:29 pm (UTC)
As for the librarian, Americans (as a culture) have what is to me a ridiculous issue with alcohol. On the one hand, "forbidding" it as if one taste of alcohol will send a teen into a permanent lifelong drunk (that's the Puritan thing, I guess) and on the other hand tacitly through advertising and lifestyle encouraging it, but only with shame attached. I suspect if people learned to drink responsibly from a younger age we would have fewer problems on college campuses?
(Anonymous)
Adrianne