Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Enter JacketFlap's contest for space at the Orange County Children's Book Festival

Hi everyone!

As you may know, The Orange County Children's Book Festival is a huge interactive and fun family festival in southern California that invites children of all ages to experience the magic of books. The Fifth Annual Orange County Children's Book Festival is scheduled for Sunday Oct. 5, 2008 from 10:00AM - 4:00PM. The Festival is free to attend and draws 18,000 people. A few of this year's featured celebrity and popular authors are Jamie Lee Curtis, Gary Soto, and Barney Saltzberg; and Guy Gilchrist and Steve Gray are two featured illustrators.

JacketFlap will have a booth at this year's festival, and we're going to use it to help promote the work of our incredible members. We are giving away space in our booth for six people to sign autographs, display, and sell their books. To qualify, you must be a published author or illustrator of children's or young adult books, and at least one of your books has to be listed on your JacketFlap profile in your published works section. How do you enter? All you have to do is post a comment saying "I want the space" on the Event's page on JacketFlap.

Six winners will be randomly selected from the entries between now and September 19th, 2008. If your name isn't selected, don't be too disappointed. We'll also have a flat screen monitor showing a slideshow of our members books. If you have books listed in the published works section of your JacketFlap profile, your books will appear on our monitor throughout the show.

If you want to purchase space in this year's festival, authors, illustrators and storytellers have the opportunity to participate on one of three presentation stages, personal and/or shared exhibitor booths and in one of three book stores. Contact the Festival organizers (see below) for how you can bring your books to thousands of families in southern California. We're told that the spaces are almost full, so hurry up!

Exhibitor Booths are fully enclosed with three walled. As a (full booth) exhibitor you'll be posted in the Festival guide. You will also be given a 6 X 1 foot name banner, a table, two chairs and a waste paper basket. Everything is included at a cost of $495 plus all day exposure to thousands of families. Authors (up to two) are permitted to share a booth. Martha's Bookstore is featuring author book signings for three hours time slots for $75.

To find out how you can be apart of this extraordinary event, email the Cofounder and Executive Director Pat Burns - speakr@aol.com or call her Mobile - 949.836.4722. Visit www.KidsBookFestival.com for more information. You can also see a short video about the Festival on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7EKVYZqCTY

Best,
Tracy

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Zoom! JacketFlap is MUCH faster now!

We've been hard at work for the last several weeks improving the software that powers JacketFlap. I don't know about you, but for me, the speed increase is incredible! Pages that took 10 - 20 seconds to load last week now load in less than a second. We have a bunch of new features that we'll be releasing shortly, but we want to be sure the overall site is as fast as possible first. Please leave a comment here if you run into a slow-loading pages or other problems, and we'll get them fixed ASAP.

Thanks!
Tracy