Getting Michael Vey into Our Schools

One of the questions asked was "How does a book get selected by a school dristrict?"and "How does a book get included on the reading lists of teachers in middle schools and junior highs? I think one important way is to win some awards with the book. The Newberry Award is the biggest, as I'm sure you are aware, but there are many other awards and lists that are also very helpful.

http://www.ala.org/: This is the American Library Association. They have 16+ awards books can be nominated for! One is for "Best Fiction for Young Adults". Another division of the Library Association is the ALSC, which is the Association for Library Service to Children.
http://www.reading.org/: This leads you to the IRA, which is the International Reading Association. This organization is very well respected and has been around forever! They publish all kinds of "choice" reading lists as well.
http://www.teachersfirst.com/: another resource for lists of recommended books for schools.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/: This is the ERIC website for education resources.
http://www.nea.org/: This is the National Education Association website. Here you can learn about a program called "Read Across America" and the "Cat-A-Van" they use to promote this program. This made me think of what Rick said about creating some sort of traveling assembly for schools. Maybe there would be a way to piggy-back off that program or create our own similar one.
http://www.nagc.org/: This is the National Association for Gifted Children. This is the association for which Rick gave the Keynote several years ago in Salt Lake City.

Some of the ideas floating around in my head are: 1. Create a National ad campaign that would promote book clubs for students...not the Scholoastic "book club" advertisements that they get bombarded with, but an actual book club...starting with the Michael Vey series! It would be really neat if we could get big celebrities to do public service announcements for this. 2. Create/promote some sort of "Book Pal" (like Pen Pal) program in which students from different schools in different states communicate via Skype or email or even snail mail about books they are reading. 3. Do what one of Rick's characters did and create a billboard ad campaign with clever billboards all across the nation that say things like "Who is Michael Vey?". Also, something to note..."Bullying" is a really big buzz word these days, so anything you can do to promote the book as a way to help with the bullying crisis in our country would really help make the series popular with school boards, teachers and principals.

Jenni Davis - Public School Teacher