Tracking them down

Anyone who is anywhere on the radar of publishing right now knows that the industry is taking its lumps with the rest of the economy. This has been particularly frustrating for those of us who spend time marketing their artwork (or writing) to publishers. Editors and art directors have been moving around and being let go at an alarming rate. Trying to keep up with this so that I can send out my own postcard mailers has been quite the internet scavenger hunt. Last night I finally pieced enough together to revise my own contact list and get January's cards in the mail..... only a month behind.

If you are doing the same thing, here's a list of rocks I turned over to find out who has gone where:
I started at Harold Underdown's Purple Crayon website.
Then I moved to Children's Book Biz News. This is Anastasia Suen's very informative blog, you do have to search the archives a bit, but on it I found this nugget from Publisher's Weekley: Where They can Be Reached Now.
I couldn't forget CWIM editor Alice Pope's blog
and I scanned back through my weekly PW Children's Bookshelf e-mails and checked Galley Cat. Now I'm waiting anxiously for the SCBWI Newsletter to see what the Publisher's corner says. I bet they could do a whole special edition of Publisher's Corner this time.

I also did a fair amount of Googling people's names just to see what I could come up with, and managed to find a few folks that way. As a parallel story to this I have been looking into buying a mailing list as just another place to get some contact names. Never let it be said that at any point in my career have I not done due dilegence in researching a potential market or marketing tool. So my research into lists led me to this conclusion: Not very many illustrators have bought mailing lists, but a whole bunch of 'em are interested in it. Just about everyone I talked to too who hadn't bought a list asked me to share what I found out. Well I'm still in the process of getting some list answers but when I do I will post it here.