My Book is Officially Out Now!

“Climate: Our Changing World now sold wherever books are sold, and probably other places, too.”

<<<<A Note>>>>

Hello! My name is Andy Sima.

If you are a parent, teacher, librarian, naturalist, public educator, or anyone else 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 is now available wherever books are sold, including Albert Whitman, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop.org, or in print at your local bookstore (maybe; results may vary).

For more information on this book, please visit www.andysima.com for FREE educational resources and teacher’s tools such as a classroom experiment, guided questions, and additional information like a selected bibliography.

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.

Please note that www.owlmanandy.com (this website!) is the personal blog of Andy Sima, and has a suggested age rating of 13+ due to foul language and the content of some fictional stories. I try to put content warnings up where applicable, but reader discretion is still advised.

<<<<Thank You>>>>

Little bit shorter of a preface this time, huh? Since my author website is finally up (and pretty snazzy too, if I do say so myself), I don’t feel as pressured to put the whole big disclaimer in front of this blog. Hopefully anyone looking for the climate book will be directed to my professional website instead, and won’t even know this page exists. But you never know! I don’t get how the algorithms work; I don’t even know how to spell the word. Is it algorithm or algorhythm? Is there a difference? Yeah, I guess. Does it matter? Probably not! Words are made up anyway!

But it’s true; my book is officially out now! As of June 22nd, 2023, Climate: Our Changing World by Andy Sima and illustrated by Jenny Miriam is officially on store shelves. Or, at least, store websites. I have yet to see it in a store out in the wild, but it’s only been a couple days and I haven’t been to any stores yet. So I’m sure it’ll be around soon! Hopefully! But even if it’s not on store shelves, you can buy it now from any of those websites I listed up above! I don’t get a commission if you buy from me with the links here, but I do get a cut (8%, actually) of the royalties from every book purchased. So if you want to buy them, you would, in fact, be directly supporting me. And who doesn’t want to do that? Here, I’ll even list them again here, for your convenience: Albert Whitman, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop.org.

And if I know you well enough, I’ll even sign the book for you! Heck, I’ll sign it for you even if I don’t know you! In fact, that’s what I did all this last weekend at the American Library Association’s annual conference, conveniently taking place in Chicago this year. It was a whole book-themed weekend these last few days, as my publisher, Albert Whitman & Company, treated me and a handful of other 2023 release authors to some time and events at the ALA conference. So let me tell you about that, both because it’s fun to talk about and a neat thing that I got to do and because it’s free marketing on my end! I get to tell you about stuff I did (which I already do anyway) and I get to promote my book (which they paid me to write) at the same time? This is an excellent blog post. Solving two problems with one solution.

So my book promotional weekend actually started off with a lunch in downtown Chicago on Friday, set up (and paid for!) by Albert Whitman. I got to tell you, it was pretty dang nice to be treated to lunch by a big fancy company and told that they’re hosting this lunch in celebration of me. That was a really neat feeling. Well, not, you know, me specifically, but me and the other authors who are celebrating at 2023 book release, but still! We were the guests on honor. They took us downtown to the Sky-Line Club, right on Michigan Avenue and 24 floors up, bought us drinks, schmoozed us over with fancy talk about stories and writing, and then we got to choose whatever we wanted for lunch. For free. Free! To me, anyway. Oh, that’s a high I’m gonna be chasing for years, I think.

As great as the lunch was (and the food was excellent), though, I think the best part of the whole thing was actually getting to meet the other authors and meet the people behind the emails that I’ve been communicating with for months on end to get this book finished. It was great to put faces to names, and meet a whole bunch of genuinely kind and thoughtful people who all seem to really care about children’s books and writing in general. I’ll be the first to admit that this book was not easy to write; the process of getting this book into the world has been one of intense ups and downs. And I do mean really intense downs. There were some abysmally low points in this process. But the feeling of seeing the book first-hand, of holding it, and meeting the people who helped make it possible on the top of a building on Michigan Avenue was definitely an intense peak.

And I got to see my friend/mentor Gillian King-Cargile, who’s also publishing a book with Albert Whitman about the science behind vaccines! And I made friends with Amber Morrell, also an Albert Whitman author with a debut YA novel about butterflies and light necromancy(!!!) out this year! You should also buy both of their books. I had a great time chatting with them at lunch and then, later that day, going to the Field Museum with them. But perhaps even cooler (or less cool depending on who you are; dinosaurs are hard to beat) was the fact that we all got to go to that American Library Association conference that I mentioned and be exhibitors there. I think that’s really cool, because the ALA conference is a huge trade conference for libraries, booksellers, schools, tech companies, NASA (for some reason?), and more to come together and show off what they’ve got for the upcoming here. There’s publishers with their newest catalog of books, there’s tech people offering the newest computer software to help with library science and management, there’s guest speakers and author signings and people talking about the future of writing and libraries and where we are as a country, it’s just overall a great place to be if you want to either a) promote your book or b) find new books for your library. Guess which one I was doing?

If you guessed A, you’d be correct. A peak that was even higher than that fancy lunch was going to the ALA conference the next day, Saturday, and doing a proper book signing event. I signed books for people, like a real author! They sat me down at a table, pulled out like thirty copies of my book (in hardcover!), gave me a sharpie, showed me a line of people, and said, “Ok, go crazy.” Gillian and I did a signing together since both of our books (Climate and Vaccines) are part of Albert Whitman’s Science in Action series, so we got to sign books at the table and hand them to people as they walked by. Although “walked by” might give you the wrong idea; these people lined up for us. Like a proper line! We signed and gave away all the books! Every single one! Admittedly, we gave them away for free, which probably made a difference in the length of the line, but that’s typically at ALA! People are just throwing free books at you the entire time. When in Rome, baby.

It was really, really cool to sit there and barely have a chance to talk to people because the line was genuinely too long. We got rid of every book that they had on that table, and I signed every single one of them. Well, the ones of mine, anyway. I mean, my handwriting is notoriously bad, and my signature even worse, so it wouldn’t be hard to forge it or anything, but still! I signed them, and people were excited to get copies of these books for their kids/grandkids/nieces/nephews/library patrons/students/etc. I even personalized some of them, and said, like, “To Lily,” or “To Steven,” or “To Monroe Public Library,” or whatever the kids’ names were. I don’t know, there were a lot of people. This has got to be good publicity.

Other than that, I got to wander around the ALA conference for a bit, stood in line for other book signings and got books from authors I had admittedly also never heard of, and chatted with other people in the publishing field. I did get a copy of Gillian and Amber’s books, too. This was at McCormick place, mind you, so this was a big deal. This is the big deal. Some of the guest speakers included Amanda Gorman and Judy Blume, and we took up the whole convention floor of the west(?) building at McCormick, and there were probably hundreds of booths. I barely got to see everything because I kept getting distracted by it all. Oh, that book looks cool! What’s this company doing? Why is NASA here? And NOAA? Who are these people that have no affiliation with either yet are still promoting the solar eclipse? Let’s see what the comic book artists are doing! Oh no that isn’t free at all, I can’t pay for that. Is that a giant scanner? Are they scanning maps? Wait hold on I need to go see this. It just goes on and on, and you get the idea. Just seeing tons of people excited about books and libraries and reading and writing was quite refreshing. Even if it’s the tiniest bit frightening (maybe more than a tiny bit) that, holy moly, that’s a lot of books.

I know that I don’t need credentials or a book deal to be considered a “writer;” just write the thing and you’re a writer. And I know that I don’t need to sell well or be nationally renowned to be an “author;” 15% of books sell fewer than twelve copies or something like that. But getting taken out to lunch, celebrating with other authors, going to the conference, and signing books for people, it sure made me feel like a real author. It was special. It was exciting. I signed books! Books that I had written! People took them home! Even if this isn’t exactly the book that sixth-grade me imagined would be my debut (he would have guessed The Time Keepers, which was just multiverse fan fiction about my lunch table friends), or even the one twenty-one-year-old me was pinning hopes on (ahem) I can still say that I’m a real author. And no one can take that away from me. Including me, who is the most likely culprit.

And even beyond that, regardless of how well this book sells, or how I feel about it (or its quality of writing) now (or ten years down the line), I still believe that it’s an important book, and I’m proud that it’s out in the world. It’s a message that I’m excited to share with children (and their adults!) everywhere, about the problems facing the world today and what young people can do to work against and within these problems. Finding creative solutions is how we’re going to adapt to the climate crisis, because the crisis isn’t going anywhere. It’s here to stay. Learning to live in a world with deep uncertainties about the future is our new reality, and we’re going to have to get used to it. And especially for our children, who are going to inherit and someday lead this world of uncertainties, it’s more important than ever that they come to grips with climate change and climate science early. If I can help even one kid better understand climate change, or inspire a classroom to take action in their community, then this book has been a success.

And I’m also excited that I get to share the free educational resources I developed for this book, using my interpretive knowledge. If you or someone you know is interested in buying books on climate change for your library or school, consider buying this one! Usually you can buy copies in bulk, too, for a classroom setting. Especially now that the book is out! It’s been three(?) long years in the making, but it’s finally here, in full color and in physical print. You can buy it. I can sign it. I have a book, and it’s out now, and I’m very, very happy about that. I hope that you’ll consider buying a copy of it and, one day, keeping an eye out for my next one. As always, stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

*By the way, if you want to read my acknowledgments and thanks about the book (and see if you made enough of an impact on my life to get your name in there, haha just kidding please don’t take it personally if you aren’t there I literally could not list everyone but I am afraid of leaving anyone out), you can click here and scroll to the very bottom!*