Beautiful Blogger Award

Thank you, People of the Books, for nominating us for the Beautiful Blogger Award! We're honored to be recognized!

With the award come these responsibilities: we must share seven interesting facts about our company and nominate seven other blogs for the award. Here goes...

1. Kar-Ben Publishing is celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2010! We were founded in 1975.

2. Kar-Ben's first book, My Very Own Haggadah, is still in print, with over 2,000,000 copies sold!

3. Kar-Ben has received more Sydney Taylor Book Awards than any other publishing company. Our 2009 Honor Award winners are Benjamin and the Silver Goblet and Nachshon, Who Was Afraid to Swim.

3. Many Kar-Ben authors have hands-on experience in working with young readers. If you enjoy a book and want to enrich your children's or students' experience, you can invite the author to your next book event.

4. Kar-Ben Publishing, a division of Lerner Publishing Group, is – surprise! -- not headquartered on the East Coast. We’re located in the Warehouse District in downtown Minneapolis. Yes, we have 40,000+ Jews in Minnesota!

5. In addition to children's books, we also publish Jewish calendars. They come in six formats and are used in offices, schools, and organizations all over North America. Schools and organizations can also customize the calendars for use as fundraisers and promotions.

6. The first Sammy Spider title, Sammy Spider’s First Hanukkah, by Sylvia A. Rouss, illustrated by Katherine Janus Kahn, was published in 1993. That makes Sammy 17 years old! Post Bar Mitzvah, but still learning about Jewish life!

7. There is only well known Jewish holiday for which Kar-Ben has not (yet?) published a children’s book – Tisha B’Av. (If you've got a story idea or manuscript, here are our submission guidelines.)

Seven blogs we're nominating:
The Whole Megillah : A new blog about Jewish books for young readers
Ima on the Bima : An effervescent mom blogging about raising a family and being a rabbi
Homeshuling : A unique perspective about Jewish parenting, always entertaining and thought-provoking
Interfaith Family : Great resource for families, couples, and educators exploring Jewish life
Tami Lehman-Wilzig : About diverse customs and traditions in Jewish culture
The Book of Life : A podcast all about Jewish books!
Lerner Publishing Group : An inside look at the children's publishing world

Thanks again, People of the Books! It's wonderful to be recognized and tip our hat to fellow bloggers!

Word Art

A friend from college gave me a Wordle as an early Hanukkah gift. What's a Wordle? It's a tool (or toy) that creates a word cloud based on the text you put in. She used text from our Facebook pages, but you can use any sort of text you like to create a fun and unique work of art.

I made a Wordle out of text from our blog, and it's fun to see what topics are prominent: Book, Holocaust, Israel, Birds, etc. Heavily used words are in larger text, less used words are in smaller text. (Click on the image to see it better)

My Jewish Learning made Wordles out of the Ten Commandments and the Shema, which I think would be useful in a classroom setting for young children's budding vocabularies. These also make great gifts for word nerds!

After checking out our Wordle, are there any topics you'd like to see the blog cover? Feel free to leave your comments below. Any feedback is welcome! Thanks for reading.

For Kurdistan Jews, Hanukkah is a Time to Reuse & Recycle

Author Tami Lehman-Wilzig was kind enough to share with us a Hanukkah tradition from Kurdistan. Tami writes about all kinds of multicultural Jewish holiday celebrations and customs at her blog. They are a great way to integrate new traidtions into your classroom or family. Thanks, Tami!

The three “Rs” – Reduce, Reuse & Recycle – have become today’s environmental mantra. As Westerners who really have it all, we never stop to think that there are Jews who don’t need the ecology cause to practice the “Reuse” principle. Take the Jews from Kurdistan and their charming, low budget way of shedding light on Hanukkah’s oil miracle. Kurdish Jews who could not afford a Hanukkiah used eggshells as cups for wicks and oil. There was no egg on anyone’s face because they didn’t have enough money. On the contrary. Eggs were eaten either for breakfast, lunch or dinner and the cracked egg shells were saved for lighting what I call the Eggnukia, every night. Tell your students to scramble home and try out this neat Hanukkiah alternative. Every which way, it gives the correct message – they’ll learn how to reuse and at the same time not take material goods for granted. If anything, maybe it will prompt them to start accumulating their own nest egg for next year’s Hanukkah presents.

For more Hanukkah customs, check out Tami's new book Hanukkah Around the World. Get a 20% discount on your order when you shop at karben.com and use the discount code TAMI when you check out. This offer is available until January 15, 2010.

Social Media, More Specifically

A few weeks ago, I posted some thoughts about social media. We're all told social media is popular, useful, and important, but how do we actually use it??

Each morning, and multiple times a day when I'm not checking email or managing our website, I check my Twitter and Google Reader. These are essential tools in participating in the social media conversation happening all over the world, plus they make it easy for me to connect with topics and people that are related to what I do at Kar-Ben.

Google Reader is a lifesaver and time saver. Ever wonder how avid blog-readers keep track of all their favorite blogs? They subscribe to the blogs' RSS feeds, meaning they are notified whenever the blog is updated.

Here's a brilliant video about RSS feeds and what they do:



Google Reader is a tool to create your own "digest" of blogs. Go to google.com/reader and start your free account. Then add subscriptions to your favorite blogs. For example, if you'd like to be automatically notified every time we update the Kar-Ben blog, click the pull-down menu at the top right corner under "Subscribe To." Or copy and paste this URL to your Google Reader: http://karbenbooks.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. That's a link to our RSS feed. Now you can easily bookmark your favorite blogs and be notified of when they're updated. (If you're feeling confident with your Google Reader skills, consider reading this post from Chris Brogan, who is a pro at social media communications.)

Check out the links over there in the right column for blogs we like, including the Lerner Books Blog. Here's an informative post for social media users (aimed at authors but useful for people outside of the industry.)

I'm least familiar with Twitter, but I'm slowly learning how useful it can be. Users tweet short messages, updates, and links. You might think it's a waste of time, but using only 140 characters per tweet forces users to get to the point pretty fast. Links are easy to pass on from one user to another. By glimpsing at what users are talking about, I can quickly connect with organizations and people related to my main interests, including books (specifically children's), education, and Jewish organizations and people. If you're looking to see if Twitter is right for you, check out their search page. Enter in the last book you read, the city you live in, or keywords relating to a question or subject you're curious about. If you find yourself clicking user's profiles and wanting to see more of what they have to say, I'd tell you to start your own account. Especially since tomorrow is Follow Friday, a day when users traditionally recommend other users to follow. Twitter's own, "if you follow me, you might enjoy following these other users."

But you don't have to take my word for it. Also check out Jewish Publication Society's The Jewish Non-Profit Guide to Social Media Marketing and the Book of Life's Why Be Social podcast.