Little Airplane Children's Book Academy

Last summer I attended the Little Airplane Academy in downtown New York. (Little Airplane has made shows/characters like Oobi and Piper Possum and currently produces The Wonder Pets and 3rd & Bird in the UK.) It was a three-day intensive workshop that featured sessions on screenwriting, licensing and merchandising, directing animation, directing live action, budgeting and scheduling, curriculum development, music, puppet design, legal issues, and a host of other topics. It was also a great networking opportunity, not only among the attendees but also with the presenters, people who are the top in their field; I have since had profitable relationships with several of them, including one top-tier executive who I never would have had access to otherwise. I am particularly grateful for the work Melinda Richards put(s) into the Academy and her conscientious follow-ups into my professional progress in the subsequent months.

All of that is preamble to an email--a press release, really--that I got from Melinda last week. The text is on the Little Airplane site, and it announces the premiere Academy for children's book writers. It will be hosted by Brenda Bowen, CEO of Bowen Press (see this interview from Publishers Weekly last May), and will cover the same array of literary issues that the traditional Academy covers for television production--from writing and illustrating through binding, production, and legal issues. It will run concurrently with Book Expo America here in the city--Academy dates are May 30-June 1--and tuition includes entry to that event. Tuition is $1,500, and that was the only downside for a poor up-and-coming talent like myself, but since I was able to save up the money beforehand the experience has proven well worth it. 

I don't know as much about this, but I should mention that the Academy seems to be in conjunction with the launch of Little Airplane Books. Their first publication, as far as I know, is a collection of children's poetry by company founder and Wonder Pets/Oobi/everything else creator Josh Selig entitled A Book For You. 

While the Little Airplane Academy for television is fairly unique in the world, a children's literature workshop is slightly less so. The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, for instance, hosts a continual series of workshops, classes, and conferences, including their main annual conference in Los Angeles, which I understand to be the biggest kids' lit conference in the world. That will be run from August 7-10, and preliminary details are already available on the SCBWI site. Regional chapters, including the very active one here in New York, also host their own events.

The recession has the book industry a little off balance, to say the least, but for me at least that's no reason to stop writing. Amidst all my television sample scripts I've managed to write a few picture book manuscripts over the past six months, something which I've found very rewarding despite not even having submitted them anywhere yet. Both the Little Airplane Academy and the SCBWI Summer Conference are opportunities for novices like me or seasoned veterans to meet new faces and pick up a few new tricks.