After a brief reorganizational hiatus, we’re back and better than ever!  We’ve added a new component to our publishing company: Full Color Flyer and Promotional Printing!

We figured, if we already have a fantastic machine that we trust to reproduce our artists’ work in great color and detail, why couldn’t it do other stuff too?!!!

Those of you who have held our customizable kids books in your hands know how awesome those full color pages look (unless you got the coloring book, in which case I’m sure the crayon is even better!).  To have Kinkos print a fully saturated page like that, it would cost you $.49 per page!   If you’re distributing hundreds of flyers door to door, that can add up quick.   MJM Books can cut that price by more than half.

We’re on the lookout for anyone we can save bundles of money.  If you know of anyone who likes quality and loves money, tell them to CLICK HERE.

People like:

Real Estate Agents

Contractors/Landscapers

Restaurants

Bands

Night Clubs

Churches

Hotels/Bread and Breakfasts

Astronauts

We’re excited to be back online and hope that our new printing service will help us grow even faster and keep adding new titles to our expanding collection of heartwarming and unique keepsake children’s books.  Check out our new Short Run Printing Store to see how much you could be saving!!!

I just returned from an engagement with Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre, playing Leonardo DaVinci in their production of “Flight of the Lawnchair Man”. It was a great time spent with a really fun cast and the end result was well appreciated by the Cedar Rapidians. For them, it was a celebration of hometown composer Rob Nassif and writer Peter Ullian.

For the cast, it was a energetic, silly show about a guy who hasn’t made much of his life and decides to tie a bunch of balloons to a lawnchair and fly away. If you’re saying to yourself, “So it’s like that Pixar movie UP”, you’re not the only one to make that connection, but Rob Nassif will be the first to tell you that Lawnchair Man was written first!

Nassif, however, didn’t create his ballooner from scratch either. Larry Walters, or “Lawnchair Larry” made his helium powered flight in 1982. When asked by a reporter why he did it, he replied, “A man can’t just sit around.” In my opinion, it would have been much funnier if there were a question mark at the end, making it a rhetorical question.

Nassif added his own “why” at the close of the musical: “Why do we explore the air? Because it isn’t there!”

I knew I had heard that somewhere before too…

Which brings me to my point.  We can’t all be the first or only ones to do something like fly a lawnchair, write a story about balloon flight, or make customizable children’s books, but we can put our personal stamp on those themes and make them ours. This is the genius behind memes like Downfall, where the original spawns thousands of offshoots, each different from the next. 

This goes for life and not just art or internet memes.  Being original isn’t about being the first or the only, it’s about being uniquely YOU.

Tired of reading the same books over and over?  Making story time even more fun is easier than you think with story time flash cards.  A little while ago, I made a new deck of CLUE cards to accommodate an extra player to join Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, and the gang: The Detective.  I realized that when you cut poster board into uniform rectangles and attach printed photos to them with a gluestick, you have a “Real” looking deck of whatever you please.

Students make flash cards all the time to help learn math, languages, and just about any other subject.  They are easy to make and best of all, though they stay the same, they recombine to be different every time!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 1 poster board
• 1 glue stick
• Scissors
• Any group of images (use old magazines or print images from the internet)

Cut the poster board into uniform rectangles, trace a deck of cards if you like.  Paste the images onto one side and allow to dry.  Shuffle and “Deal”.

Dealing means to try to connect the cards into one story. Here is my story:

There once was a pair of men named Tony and Ynot.  Tony always did things forwards and Ynot always did things backwards.

One day a traveling circus arrived in Tony and Ynot’s town by boat.  They were excited to start their next show.

Unfortunately, the devil met Tony on his way to see the circus and offered him a little box.  Tony was scared and ran away.

He ran away but the devil changed into a little man and followed him everywhere he went on a donkey.  All Tony wanted was to go to the Circus.

Ynot decided that he wanted to go too and got in his upside down boat (Ynot did everything backwards) and made sure that his wife rode outside the boat (Ynot did everything backwards).

The circus performers started to unpack their unicycles and juggling pins.

Tony gave Ynot a piggy back ride to the circus because, well, Ynot does everything backwards.

The end.

It’s not a great story, but it makes story time into a game and I promise you I had fun.  Your child can even get in on telling the story by describing what’s on the card.  If you make a good enough deck, your children can entertain themselves with it on long car rides.  Give it a try, you may find that you (and your children) have a better knack for making up stories than you realized.

Despite enthusiastic support for the “Monsters in T-Shirts” campaign, we have decided that the best way to announce the launch of our new coloring book is to give away free, printable coloring book downloads to all our fans and friends.

This free coloring book might come in handy next time your grandchild is over and needs something to do that doesn’t involve “pony rides” and/or loud screaming…

Our newest artist, Emily Schnieder, did a superb job with this book and we are so proud to add it to our collection of customized kids books and are delighted to share it with all of you.  Just click on the picture below and it should open up the PDF in a new browser window. The black and white images are 8.5 by 11, specifically designed for easy printing on your home printer and paper.

Remember, this is just our prototype character, Olivia, and she’s been compressed for easier downloading.  If you want to insert your own child’s name (we have boy versions, too) into this or any of our high-resolution, professionally bound books… well, you know where to find us!

Aside from the launch of our awesome new customizable coloring book, the boys at MJM Books all have very important duties to attend to… preparing for the arrival of our babies! That’s right, all three of our wives are “knocked up” and only Matt knows what he’s doing… kind of.

For Mike and me, this is our first and we are beginning the long process of feathering our nests and coming up with a list of baby names.

As an author, I’ve don’t agonize over my characters names. If I decide I like one better down the line, Microsoft Word has a great feature called “Find and Replace” which will find every instance of “Jerry” in your novel and change it to “Johnny”. There isn’t such flexibility with naming your child. Within hours or even minutes of birth, a name is written on the birth certificate and the name is fixed for life.

Books with terrifying names like How to Name Baby Without Handicapping It for Life certainly don’t help to take the pressure off.

How do you choose a baby name? Do you buy one of those books at the supermarket and go through the whole thing with highlighter and a sharpie? Do you research your genealogy and find a name suitable for your family tradition? Do you just throw out names to your spouse as they come to you and see which one “rings”. Or do you take the Homer Simpson approach and eliminate any name that can be rhymed comically (ironically ending up with Bartholomew)?

Being scientifically minded, I’ve been doing some research into the names given to children. I discovered something that I had been subconsciously aware of was backed up with statistics. Not only are boy names less varied than girl names (the top twenty boy’s names are given to a higher percentage of boys than the top twenty girls names) but they are also more “stable”, meaning that the list of top 20 boys names changes less frequently than the top 20 for girls.

This means that girl’s names are more susceptible to “fashion” while boys’ names remain more rooted in tradition. This is why when my wife proposes a trendy boy name like “Aden” because it sounds cool, I reply, “But what does it mean?” “Where does that name come from?” And when she proposes a girl name like “Ava”, I am less opposed. I guess I’m not the feminist I thought I was.

There are so many things to consider when choosing a name:

Have I ever met someone with this name that I didn’t like? Ex-girlfriends and boyfriends are O-U-T.

If someone in my family or circle of friends has that name already, will they be honored? More honored than they deserve, perhaps?

Does my favorite name fit with my last name? Shame upon the parents of Harry Harrison and William McWilliams…

What historical and etymological context does the name have? “You were named after a brutal dictator…. we were going for a ‘strong’ name.”

Will people be able to pronounce the name? Will the child be unable to spell it until third grade? If you want people to pronounce Anastasia “Ah-nah-stah-zi-ah”, you’d better just choose another name.

Unfortunately, my quest to achieve better baby naming through science is at yet incomplete, I hope to keep at it and arrive at the PERFECT NAME, or at the very least, one that will not “Handicap them for Life”!

It’s an exciting time here at MJM Books…  we have added another customizable kids’ book to our catalogue.  It’s a coloring book entitled I’m An Artist and even if we do say so ourselves, it’s super-special-awesome.   Check out the preview if you dare.

Our problem is: how do we let people know how super-special-awesome it is?  You, faithful reader, know how super-special-awesome we are so we’re asking you for ideas.  How should we get the word out?  There are no bad ideas, throw them out in the comment section or let us know what you think of the ideas we already have come up with.

Idea 1: Create giant t-shirts and give them to every city-smashing monster we know.  Every time the news cameras capture another attack, free advertising!

Idea 2: Use a botnet of zombie computers (see, this site is educational) to hack people’s computers, then upload the I’m an Artistl cover as their new wallpaper.

Idea 3: Select a fortune 500 web company, lets say Ebay.com.  Become elected chairman of the board: pay each player $50. Then as chairman, insist that the company change its name to www.you-should-shop-at-mjmbooks-instead.com.

Idea 4:  Use lasers to write logo on moon… permanently.

Idea 5: Hold a contest asking for video testimonials from satisfied readers and putting those testimonials on late night TV.

Idea 6:  Send free printable PDFs of our new book with a small and cute MJM books watermark to every blogger we know and have them offer them to their readers.

Idea 7: Destroy the competition.

We’re pretty sure the last one is going to work…

If you can’t get little Johnny or Suzy into the library with a cattle prod, you just might be able to coax them into a comic book store.  In fact, I’m pretty sure you won’t have much trouble at all.  It’s a simple fact that some kids like the pictures more than they like words.  So you think, they may not be using their higher brain functions and imagination as much but at least they are reading SOMETHING, right?

Wrong.

Sure, comics give you pictures to look at, relieving you of some of the responsibility of imagination, but where comics come alive is IN BETWEEN the panels.  Comics require the reader to “fill in the blank” of continuity to get from panel to panel.  Comics are not for idle brains.

Comic books can be extremely “literary”, which is one of the reasons why the word “graphic novel” is being used more and more.  The series interconnections that make up the “Marvel Universe” probably contain more text than all the Twilight, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings series combined).  Comic series can build epic imaginary worlds and histories that only deepen the mind’s reservoir of experience.  Also, comics aren’t just for superheroes anymore, you can find comics on just about anything, from romance, to detective noir, to space-exploring mouse adventure.

So if little Johnny or Suzy wants to read a comic instead of that childhood tome that was so dear to you, don’t fret.  Their brains won’t melt… and you can read their comics when they’re done.  Come on, join the comics party.  Look how much fun we’re having!

Now we get philosophical…

Now that we’ve met our hero, lets find out what “makes him tick”.

Did you know that Jeff is supposed to be writing one blog post per day? Did you know that’s really hard? Did you also know that it’s possible to write a bunch of really short posts all on the same day and schedule them to publish themselves on delay? Did you know that Jeff likes comics?

Tada!