Penn PALs Day

Ready to promote your book with video? Want to make a book trailer or an Instagram reel? Let Sherene Strausberg help you get started. She will go over the different types of videos that can be used for book promotion. Plus some of the different tools that can be used to create them. And then break down where those videos will go from the myriad of social media platforms, to your website and video hosting platforms, too. Lastly, she'll discuss how to use the illustrations from your book for animated videos to bring your book to life!

When launching your first or fifteenth children's book, authors often find they are required to wear many diverse hats. In this session, author and marketer Kira Barrett will review a variety of marketing and public relations approaches that will take the guesswork out of book promotion. Authors will leave with an outline of marketing ideas and a few new tools to implement them.

Celebrate and promote your book’s birthday with a book launch! Engage readers prior to your book birthday with online enthusiasm. Keep the excitement going with a special book launch event for your new book. More than a dozen kidlit authors share their book launch stories of inspiration with tips to help you launch your book into the world.

Sherene Strausberg, is a unique creative, combining her experience in film, music, and sound engineering with graphic design and illustration to create animated videos for her clients at the company she founded, 87th Street Creative. Recent clients of 87th Street Creative have included Walmart, American Express, and Amazon Web Services. Her passion project, the short, animated film “Cool For You”, which she animated and scored, has been accepted to 47 film festivals around the world. In 2021, a video that Sherene animated for ProPublica, was retweeted by Senator Elizabeth Warren, received almost 80k views on Twitter, and was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy. Last year, her company created a short animated film for children's book author Lucy Hawking (Stephen Hawking's daughter) that's currently traveling to film festivals around the United States. She has been a frequent contributor as a guest blog writer and is also a teaching assistant at School of Motion. When Sherene is not working, she enjoys reading, running, and pottery. She lives with her husband and three children in New York.

Kira Barrett grew up running around on an ostrich farm in New Jersey. As a child entrepreneur, she would handwrite, illustrate, and “publish” her own books. As an adult entrepreneur, she would become a dual-business owner in the areas of PR/marketing and fitness education where she ran and top-edited the media site FitBump. After the birth of her two sons, Kira realized she had much more still to create — including lots of homemade baby food. Their mealtime adventures led to the inspiration for her first, self-published children’s book, Avocado Mustache. She holds a Masters in Children's and Young Adult Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. From her writing desk in Bucks County, PA she can see a magical 250-year-old waterfall, and avocados really are her favorite food.

Annette Whipple celebrates curiosity and inspires a sense of wonder while exciting readers about science and history. She’s the author of many fact-filled children’s books including The Laura Ingalls Wilder Companion: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide (Chicago Review Press), Ribbit! The Truth About Frogs (Reycraft Books) in The Truth About series, and Quirky Critter Devotions: 52 Wild Wonders for Kids (Tyndale). When Annette’s not reading or writing, you might find her baking for her family in southeastern Pennsylvania. Get to know her and explore her resources for teachers and writers at www.AnnetteWhipple.com.