I’m Publishing A Book

<<<<A Note>>>>

Hello! My name is Andy Sima.

If you are a parent, teacher, librarian, naturalist, public educator, or anyone else tasked with teaching children and you found this page while looking for information on Climate: Our Changing World, by Andy Sima and illustrated by Jenny Miriam (Albert Whitman; 2023), click here for the book’s publisher page! This book is a great educational tool for teaching climate change to middle grades children, typically grades 3rd to 8th. I should know; I wrote it!

The book will publish on June 22nd, 2023.

You can also visit www.andysima.com for more ways to buy the book, free educational tools such as possible lesson plans and guided questions, and additional information like a selected bibliography. (If the website isn’t up when you click on this link, it’s coming soon, I promise!)

For something more immediate, I also highly recommend Vaccines: Change the World by Gillian King-Cargile and illustrated by Sandie Sonke (Albert Whitman; 2022) as another great educational tool and a fun book for middle grades readers.

If you are a literary agent, are with a publishing house, or are a fellow author/content creator looking to collaborate, business inquiries can be sent www.andysima.com or to this email.

If you are a child/young adult and found this webpage because you’re reading my book, that’s awesome! Thanks for reading! However, please visit my other website and close this tab, or have an adult help you find more information. Most of this blog has a recommended age rating of at least 13+.

This website (www.owlmanandy.com) is the personal, weekly blog of me, the author Andy Sima. It has very little to do with Climate: Our Changing World, or anything else of much professional or educational value. Feel free to visit, but know that this website does contain foul language and hosts fiction stories that, at times, may contain violence, sexual content, and/or frightening imagery. Material outside of this post may not be suitable for all audiences.

<<<<Thank You>>>>

If you are one of my regular readers, including but not limited to my parents, grandparents, friends, family, the strange man in my mother’s garage, Cheyenne’s Dad’s Friend Matt, five-time Grammy Award-winner Alfred Matthew Yankovic (one can dream), or I’ve just really piqued your interest, read on for a fun life update about the very book I’ve just described! It’s been a long time in the making!

Now for your regularly-scheduled subtitle (you didn’t think I forgot, did you?): “Waiting Paid Off, It Seems”

Alright, wow! That was a lot to get through, I’m sure! Thanks for sticking around! I don’t usually try to preface and qualify my posts this heavily, but if you’re truly a regular reader, then you know that I ought to try and cover all my bases with some of the weird stuff that goes on in this blog. Geese the size of rhinos and “AI” “Art” are only the tip of the iceberg. But! Anyway! If you remember me talking about a big announcement for several months, well, this is the big announcement.

What you read up there in my very long disclaimer is true! I am now officially the author of a book! Like a full-color, illustrated, professionally bound and published, revised six times and fact-checked by a professional, financed by a well-known publishing house, whole book. Published by Albert Whitman & Co. (of Boxcar Children fame), my book, Climate: Our Changing World, is a non-fiction middle grades book about the science of climate change and what young people can do to fix it. In almost two hundred pages, I cover the differences between climate and weather, paleoclimates, the sources of modern climate change, fossil fuels and energy usage, agriculture, plastics, pollution inspirational individuals, case studies from around the world (including highlighting indigenous experiences with climate change), and most importantly, the central message that it takes organized, systemic change to make a real difference in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

I’m proud to say that this book tells kids they can do more than just clean up beaches or reduce their carbon footprint; individual actions are present in the text, but it’s the collective action that kids should know about now more than ever. It’s a subject that I know a lot about, that I care a lot about, that I think is going to be the defining feature of this century (and probably beyond) and I’m so excited to be able to share this knowledge of climate change and collective action with children in grades three through eight. Better yet, I’m so excited to be able to share a book that looks this good with the world; thanks to the art of Jenny Miriam, the text comes alive in a way that words just don’t do justice. All the images throughout this post are all directly from the book itself (courtesy of Jenny and Albert Whitman, of course) I’m really, really happy with the way the book looks. And on June 22nd of 2023, release day, I will have a physical copy of it in my hands. I am incredibly proud of this accomplishment. I’ve finally made it.

I had to resist the urge to add “well, sort of” at the end of that last paragraph. If you know me, you know that I’m a fiction writer by trade. But it’s still a real book! This is the real deal; I really can say I’m a published author! I think I’m just having a hard time internalizing it. I mean, I’ve written non-fiction before, for class and stuff, and I’ve been pretty successful in non-fiction environmental writing, but fiction is what I write the most of. So I’m sure it may come as a surprise to many of you that I, the person who wrote thirty chapters of scary vampire castle book, am now being published with a non-fiction science book for kids. But this is all part of the process; my goal is and always has been that I want to change the world with my writing, with my stories. This book is a pretty major step in that direction, and I’m really happy with that. It will be, I hope, the first step of many. Even if I am going to graduate school for landscape ecology for the next two years. I’ll still be a published author there, too!

It even got a review in Kirkus, which is kind of crazy. Kirkus, for those unfamiliar, is a trade publication/book reviewer/news organization (?) that tries to review as many books as it can. It’s a go-to resource for booksellers and buyers alike to find trustworthy information on what they ought to read. And there’s a review for my book with my name on it in there now! It’s very exciting. The review says that the book is “A broad overview of the causes and consequences of the latest onset of climate change… he gives young readers easily graspable starting points for understanding both the problem and what to do about it. He also properly asserts the interconnectedness of rising worldwide temperatures and challenges like air pollution, deforestation, waste plastics in the ocean, and the destructive practices of what he calls “Aggravated Agriculture” and highlights the significant roles of several Indigenous populations in maintaining sustainable environments…. provocative enough to prompt concern…and, likely, active responses.” Hey, I’ll take it.

There aren’t really any other reviews for it out yet because, well, the book isn’t out yet, and I still have to do some legwork in sending advanced readership copies to some people who I think might have good things to say about it. But I’m hoping that once it comes out I’ll get to slap a few other positive review on the cover, too! The audience for this book is kids, of course. It’s written for kids, it has illustrations for kids, but the kids aren’t going to be buying the book. The purchasing audience of this book is, of course, teachers, parents, and librarians, mostly, so I’m hoping that I can win them over to see what we’ve got here. Because this is a book that I think would supplement really well some earth science experiments or science field trips, where a classroom has a couple of copies of the book and kids can read the chapter on agriculture before going on a field trip to an urban farm or something like that. Or a local library has a copy of it and they can pack it together with other environmental books for Earth Day. These are the ways I really hope that this book is used, besides just when kids read it.

As a matter of fact, I’m actually allowed to post selections from the book ahead of time! So if you’re interested in reading some of what I have to say (or if you just want to see what a full page of the thing would look like), then get a load of this:

Hey, that’s pretty good! This is actually a two-page spread, really. Let’s make it a four-page spread:

Two for the price of none is a pretty good deal, but you can get all of the pages in physical formate (that’s, like, a hundred times more pages than this) for the price of just one book if you preorder my book now! Yes, this post is both a life announcement and an advertisement! I’ve been saying it for years, but now you really can do it: Buy My Book!

Like I said, this has been a long time coming. Technically, I’ve been at liberty to talk about it for a while. It’s not like I signed an NDA or anything, but I did want to wait a bit because it’s good to kind of have the marketing start to roll out closer to release date. But I’ve been working on this project for, well, gosh, nearly two years now. It kind of started in the summer of 2021, when I was in touch with my friend/mentor Gillian, who was actually working on a book for Albert Whitman at the time. That book turned into the very excellent Vaccines book I mentioned way back up at the top of this article, and I highly recommend you check that one out too. But at the time, her editor was asking her if she wanted to do a second book with them on climate change, but she very graciously sent them my way instead. Albert Whitman reached out to me, I got in touch with the person who became my editor, and I sent them a rough outline of how I’d structure the book and a short writing sample that would, eventually, become some of the first couple pages of the text. They liked it and offered me a contract. Talk about right place, right time, right people, huh?

From there, I worked on the book for the fall and winter of 2021 into 2022. Into the spring of 2022 was a very intensive revision and fact-checking process, in which the text underwent at least four separate revisions to make it readable, enjoyable, and most importantly, verifiable. Then once my editor got the (mostly) final copy, all I had to do was wait. The actual writing process, from first word to finished manuscript, took around nine months or so, all things considered, but it was a long nine months. I spent my days going to my job as a seasonal naturalist, teaching kids about lake bugs and building fires, and then I’d come home and write text to teach kids about fossil fuels and enacting change. It was a lot of work. I write a lot, yes. I’ve written a novel before. Technically, I’ve written novels, plural, if you count Spectral Crown, all the short stories, the three stage/screenplays I’ve finished, and the unreadable 200,000-word draft of a science-fiction time-travel multiverse epic that now, a decade after I finished it, feels very much like an early concept for Rick and Morty, but written by a very polite middle-schooler. I know what 40,000 words looks like, is what I’m saying. And I’ve written under a deadline before, for grade school and high school and university and, in some ways, my entire life has been writing under a deadline, you know? But knowing all that, I still didn’t expect how difficult this project was. In a very real way, writing this book was the most difficult writing project I’ve ever done. It probably will hold that spot for a while, and I’m ok with that.

It was a good difficult, of course, the kind that really gave me perspective on the writing process and the revision process and what it means to work with both an editor and for a publisher. There were hangups on both my end and theirs; parts of the text didn’t quite come together as I had hoped, but I figured it out; I knew a lot of the material, yes, but I had to research as I went, too, making sure that my data was up to date. One of the hardest decisions in the text, actually, came down to figuring out what my tolerance for messy numbers was; writing the book in 2022, we all knew that it was going to take at least another nine months, probably more, before it would be published, and there was a very real possibility that some of the things I could include would be outdated by the time it was finalized, especially since another IPCC synthesis report came out in 2023. Climate change is moving faster than science can keep up with it. But I do believe we found a way to make it work, with numbers that should still be relatively consistent for the book’s relevant lifespan. With all of this, I came out of that frenzied nine months with a lot of lessons learned and a manuscript that was pretty much ready to be published. I hope to, one day, go into greater detail on all the things I learned as a part of that process. Because there were a lot. But I also hope for that story to be a full little essay that I can publish on my other, more professional, soon-to-be-in-existence author portfolio website, www.andysima.com. Which, if you’re reading this post as it’s published, still isn’t up yet. But it’ll get there.

Oh, and that’s a good last thought: another reason I did want to preface this post so much is because, at least in the meantime, this blog post may be the only significant non-sales web presence that my book has until I finally finish my actual, professional webpage (www.andysima.com, that is). No clue when it’ll be done; hopefully before the book releases in June, but we’ll see! Let’s be real here; this blog is not the best look for an aspiring author/young professional, both from an aesthetic perspective and from a, uh, content perspective. Graphic design is not my passion, though I’m glad that I get to share my stories and Spectral Crown here and whatnot! I’m proud of most of my work on here. Most of it. But I still don’t want a potential employer/publisher to come across, say, me crying over Mario for five thousand words as their first impression. Let’s have them go to a more controlled space, hmm?

But that’s pretty much the whole story and the whole life update, anyway. I’ve been teasing this announcement for months, though if you know me well enough to read this blog, I’m sure I’ve already told you this all before. I’m publishing a book! It’s coming out this summer! It’s about climate change and it’s for middle grades readers and it’s gonna be great! I’m so happy that I get to share this with the world, and I hope that you are, too. I’ve always been a writer; anyone who writes is a writer. But I’m now a published writer, on a new level than I was before. And that, truly, is a very exciting life update for me.

Thank you all for your support, especially, of course, Gillian, who has supported me in the publishing world long before this book and has continued to support me long after. Thank you to my parents, mom and dad, and teachers, especially my second-grade teacher and all my incredible middle school and high school English and science teachers, and friends, like Cheyenne, who had to sit through my unhinged ramblings about forest surveys and Brazilian satellite systems and always gave impeccable advice, and my family, and everyone who has always encouraged my writing and told me that I had things worth saying. I can never quite say thank you enough, but I hope to get close, someday. I’ll have a full acknowledgements page on the fancy new author website, too, so don’t you worry about that. You’ll all get name recognition enough. Oh, and thank you, too, to Randy. You know what you did.

If you’re all the way down here and missed the links up at the top, you can support me and this book by pre-ordering or buying it (depending on when you’re reading this) through one of the affiliate websites listed on the Albert Whitman publisher’s page. Or you can buy it in stores where books are sold, after it’s published on June 22nd, 2023!

I’m hoping to have some publicity events for this book over this summer, possibly including a low-key author signing at the American Library Association’s conference in Chicago, as well as speaking at my grade school and hometown library. Keep on the lookout for more information about events in the coming months!