Sylvan Architecture, Film Studios and a Shocking Admission

All your Casey Grimes breaking news

Happy April! I thought I’d mix things up and use headlines for this one, a little like Jake McGusty does with his exposés of villainy and deceit. Here are some quick hitters from Vanderhorst HQ, also known as Lion & Co Press, also known as the heart of the Casey Grimes world…

We’re building a Sylvan garage.

When we moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, we knew we’d have to build a garage. Thousands of Casey Grimes books on pallets couldn’t go in the living room. We knew the garage would be in the woods. We knew the woods would be on a hill. We didn’t know the garage would have treeway access. But take a look.

The grade is so steep that it took a long line of dump trucks and a bulldozer to level the site. Now the downhill side of the garage will open at tree frog height. I’m still deciding how to take advantage of this, but treeways and zip lines are in the conversation.

“We shadow-banned your ads,” Facebook admits.

If you’ve been around, you may remember my post from last May where I described my FB ads for the books crashing and burning. “It feels like my account has been secretly blacklisted,” I would tell people. In return I would get that look. Oh, uh huh, how terrible, I’m sure that actually happened.

Or, if they’d read the books, the look might say: Oh, right, sabotage—what do you think this is, Sylvan Woods?

Because it is is not a thing that is supposed to happen. We know everything is on the level with Meta marketing because, duh, the whole concept is FB takes your money and promotes your products. So of course there’s no shadow-banning. That would mean they would take your money and not promote your products. It would undermine the whole thing.

Except…a little while ago my Meta Marketing Pro was calling me over and over and leaving me long voicemails. Usually I ignore these calls because the pros don’t know how to sell books. But this time—“It looks like there are restrictions on your account,” she said at one point during her two minute voicemail. “They’ve been there, hmm, at least since June of last year. We can get those taken care of.”

What? When I got in touch, my pro was not very forthcoming. She seemed to be following orders or reading a script. Which was too bad, because I had questions:

Why are there restrictions on my account? Well, it’s hard to say.

How would I know my account is restricted? Someone like me would have to tell you.

What are the consequences of restrictions? Ad performance would suffer.

Have the restrictions been lifted now? They should be taken care of!

So if you’re keeping score: Facebook placed secret restrictions on my account for reasons of their own. The shadow-ban remained in place for close to a year—who knows, maybe longer, since we’re being so casual and offhand about the whole thing—while I wasted thousands of dollars trying to rebuild my ads. Now the restrictions have been lifted. Maybe?

Because I have to take their word for it. The whole thing is, well, mostly invisible—except for my ads going up in flames, that was hard to miss. Now there’s nothing to do except test some new ads and see if they work. It feels surreal. At the same time I’m thinking, I knew it.

If my ads are *allowed* to work again, that would be huge. It would mean thousands of new readers could discover the series and we could stop scraping by on a shoestring budget over here. Feel free to say a prayer that FB would get out of the way and let us do our job. If there’s one thing Casey Grimes and I hate, it’s getting sabotaged by treacherous bureaucracies.

The series will soon be headed out to animation studios.

I was on the phone with my lit agent a couple days ago, and he told me the animated market is picking up and the time is right to start pitching Casey Grimes to various studios. Is he gonna stuff copies of the book in his suitcase and start traveling around the country? “Hello, vice president of DreamWorks, sir, thanks for meeting me. I’d like you to take a look at this book, The Mostly Invisible Boy.”

I don’t think it will go quite like that. Sounds like the first step will be for me to create a “pitch deck” for Mostly Invisible. Picture a glossy travel brochure, tempting you on an exotic vacation—but for a book. The deck is a splashy overview of a story’s characters, setting, themes and plot, used to pitch a film project. The examples I’ve seen are big on mood boards and pictures and read like hype tracks. They’re often outsourced to graphic design companies.

I’ve never created one before, so I guess it’s time to add another tool to my toolbox—which, honestly, is getting pretty crammed. But I have written loads of book queries, ads, and taglines, and I like graphic design, so this could be in my wheelhouse. (He said optimistically.) Once I create this pitch deck thing, maybe I’ll share it here.

Double-Breaking News: Not Animation, Live Action

My agent just called again, and he’s decided he wants to pitch the series as live action instead of animated. Works for me, since I originally pictured Sylvan Woods as live action in my head, and this way my kids can get a shot at the cameos they keep pestering me about. So for now, live action it is.

Which raises the obvious question: If this whole film thing were to actually work out, which actors play the main characters?

Finally…

I’m back to work on Casey #5.

Our house is still kind of a disaster after our move, but we’ve beaten the forces of chaos back far enough for me to start writing again. 26,000 words have been drafted and the first several chapters have been polished. I think I’ll share a small bit with you, why not?

For the the first time in his life, Casey had friends to make plans with, and they’d made quite a few. He was looking forward to wilderness capture the flag, exploring forgotten trails, and treetop sleepovers. Of course it wouldn’t all be action.

In his downtime he’d be sleeping in, reading fiction, and maybe doing some secret weapons practice. Or he could just sit on the back deck watching trees wave their leaves in Lesser Trick ’n’ Trap. If anyone asked what he was doing, he’d say he was catching his breath. What he’d really be doing was trying to get his mind caught up with everything that had happened. Sometimes that could take a while. And at the end of the summer he’d have a birthday party and turn thirteen.

But it didn’t take long for things to go sideways.

Hope you weren’t hoping for a plot point because that was never gonna happen. And that brings us to the end of our breaking news. If you have any photos or graphics that scream “Sylvan Woods!” and would like to send me some inspiration for the pitch deck, you should absolutely go for it. Questions and comments, always welcome. Over and out.