The latest Graphic guide adventure, coming out in Spring 2010.
“While Devin and Nadia spend summer vacation at a university camp for little kids—Nadia as a counselor and Devin as an unwilling participant—their mother’s research project is vandalized and her motives are questioned. Devin, Nadia and Simon stumble upon shady characters, corporate conspiracy and a plot to take over the nation’s food supply with genetically modified fertilizer.
Mixing action and suspense with information on the agricultural system and the intricacies of the food supply, Food Fight is another gripping installment in the Graphic Guide Adventure series.”
Ok, so in Media Meltdown there’s a scene where a piece of media the kids create gets posted and shared on BoingBoing.net. So, you’ll understand my glee when I opened my browser yesterday to find this fantastic review of Media Meltdown on boingboing.net.
Full circle, very cool, and a very welcome endorsement from a website and group that I’ve admired for several years now. Watching the review get tweeted, re-tweeted and shared around the web is equally cool. Particularly as this spreading via social media is a key part to the kids’ success in the story.
Check out the review on BoingBoing.net to read the review and feel free to tweet and share the news (you can also just pick up the phone and tell your friends too, like we did in the olde days before the interweb.)
When we decided to offer Media Meltdown as a free download, we hoped it’d catch some attention. In one week, we crashed the server and at last count have given away over 25,000 free downloads. This week, Publishers Weekly ran a great piece on Media Meltdown, calling the free download an “online feeding frenzy”.
They also spoke to Orca Editor Andrew Woolridge about the whole thing:
Unlike some authors who remain wary of undermining sales with free digital releases, Wooldridge said the the Graphic Guide creative team approached him about doing the free promotion: “The author asked us to give the free promotion a try,” said Wooldridge, who was encouraged by the gesture. “There’s a hunger for material like this,” he said. “Teachers see the book online or see the Web site and it all leads to book sales.” Indeed, while Orca is conservative with its print runs, Wooldridge said the first three books have averaged sales of about 25,000 copies.
Read the whole story at Publishers Weekly.
When my publisher and I started offering a free full download of Media Meltdown, the latest Graphic Guide Adventure last week, we figured it’d generate a bit of interest. We didn’t figure we’d burn through our bandwidth and break the website in the first week!
Since October 1st, http://mediameltdown.net has had over 52,000 visits and over 12,000 copies of Media Meltdown have been downloaded. When an average new Canadian children’s book is published, there usually only about 5000 copies printed, so these numbers not only melted our server they melted my head too! I couldn’t be happier that so many people are reading Media Meltdown and meeting Pema, Bounce and all the other characters for the first time.
And we’re not done yet. You can still get your free copy of Media Meltdown by heading over to http://mediameltdown.net and following the links.
Just try not to break the server. Okay?
