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Craft Chat Chronicles
Craft Chat Chronicles
Season 4 Episode 6: Battling Book Bans with NYT Bestseller Alan Gratz
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When crafting the perfect story climax, what's your character's greatest fear or deepest wound? According to New York Times bestselling author Alan Gratz, that's exactly what they must face in your finale. In this compelling conversation, Gratz reveals his formula for powerful endings: establish early what a character would never do, then force them to do exactly that when the stakes are highest.
But this masterclass in storytelling craft is just the beginning. Gratz takes us behind the scenes of his journey from writing varied genre fiction to creating what he calls "social thrillers" – page-turning adventures that tackle real-world issues like displacement, prejudice, and censorship. His insights on why middle-grade readers respond so powerfully to social justice themes challenge the notion that children should be sheltered from difficult topics.
"Middle schoolers care about justice," Gratz explains. "They have a heightened sense of fairness." This understanding has shaped books like "Refugee" and "Ban This Book" that give young readers windows into complex realities while encouraging empathy and critical thinking.
The conversation takes an urgent turn when discussing the alarming rise in book banning across America. As co-founder of Authors Against Book Bans (AABB), Gratz dispels the myth that banned books automatically sell better, revealing how censorship silently devastates careers, particularly for authors from marginalized communities. His call to action reminds us that defending literary freedom requires showing up – at school board meetings, in our communities, and wherever books are threatened.
Ready to craft more meaningful stories or join the fight against censorship? Gratz offers practical advice for both aspiring authors and concerned citizens. Connect with him at alangratz.com or subscribe to his newsletter to learn more about his upcoming novel "War Games" and how you can help protect the freedom to read.
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=craftchat
🎙️ Craft Chat Chronicles with J.D. Myall
Candid conversations on writing, publishing, and creative life — featuring bestselling authors, MFA students, and writers at every stage of the journey.
About J.D. Myall
J.D. Myall is the co-chair of Drexel University’s MFA Alumni Association and a publishing and library professional. She is the creator and host of Craft Chat Chronicles, where she interviews authors, agents, and industry insiders about the art and business of writing.
Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Writer’s Digest, and HuffPost. Her debut novel, Heart’s Gambit, releases with Wednesday Books/Macmillan in February 2026.
When she’s not conjuring magic, murder, and mayhem on the page, J.D. mentors emerging writers through workshops and alumni programs, fostering community among aspiring and published authors alike.
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Episode Introduction with Alan Gratz
Speaker 1Welcome to Craft Chat Chronicles , the go-to podcast for tips on crafting best-selling fiction . Here at Craft Chat Chronicles , we bring you expert interviews , insights and tips on writing , publishing and marketing . Join the conversation and embark on a new chapter in your writing journey . For workshops , show notes and more information , visit jdmyallcom . That's jdmyallcom .
Speaker 2In season four , episode six of Craft Chat Chronicles , we get chatty with New York Times bestselling author Alan Gratz . Alan talks writing craft . He talks book banning and how we can fight censorship and so much more . It's a great conversation , so I hope you enjoy it . Season 4 , episode 6 of Craft Chat Chronicles , part 2 of my conversation with Alan Gratz .
Character Wounds and Climactic Endings
Speaker 3Establish right away from your first chapters what your main character would never do . Sometimes it's a physical wound like that . Sometimes it's a mental wound , like you know . In romance stories this is I'll never love again . I've been burned , or I watched my mom get burned by a bad relationship and I will never love again . And the finale of a romance is a character finding love . So what is it that your main character swears they will not ever do ?
Speaker 3At the beginning , make them do it in the finale , and I think that's a really satisfying thing to do and can help you come up with a good ending . If you know your main character is afraid of fire , you know what the setting has got to be for that climax . It's got to be in a burning building or something , a forest fire you know out in , you know in California or Oregon or something , or , or if it's a romance to take it away from like an epic story or a violent story , I will never love anybody , ever again . And then you know how it ends they're going to fall in love in that , in that final act they're going to . They've been falling in love all through your book . They're going to accept that they have fallen in love and they're going to commit to being in love in that final act . So for me , the climax has got to pay off , something that you see very early on . I also believe that a really good story should not end where you promised you'd begin . In terms of the external plot , let me say that better .
Speaker 3In Star Wars , luke goes off to save the princess . He does that by the middle of the movie . That's not the climax of the movie . He and Ben Kenobi save Princess Leia by the middle of the movie . The thing is that when they come out , she has the plans to the Death Star and now the story shifts and because you did that , now there's something new to do . At the end she says , well , great , now that you've saved me , we need you and all these other pilots to go destroy the Death Star , and that becomes the third act .
Speaker 3So I often tell aspiring writers don't tell me from page one that the goal for your main character is to destroy the Death Star . They don't know that yet . They have goals along the way and each time they achieve those goals , their larger goal changes . The biggest goal for Luke is to become a Jedi , is to accept his destiny as a hero and to embrace the Force . And that's what happens when he blows up the Death Star . He turns off the targeting computer and he uses the force and he blows up the Death Star . And so the story is about him embracing the force , and the external stuff we've done to get there is to build him up to where he has to use it to destroy the Death Star . So I always say where he has to use it to destroy the Death Star .
Speaker 3So I always say start off with a really clear goal in chapter one , if you can , and then at each of the stages of the story , as you move along , as those things are accomplished , keep changing that goal and keep raising the stakes . And so by the end you are forcing your character to do one thing that they never thought they would do . Luke accepts himself as a hero and closes his eyes and shoots , and at the beginning he would never have thought he was capable of that , never believed he could do that . So make your character do something they would never do and raise the stakes until there's no other choice but to do it .
Tackling Hard Topics in Children's Fiction
Speaker 4I love that . I love that your novels like Refugee and Ban this Book address real world issues like displacement and censorship . What inspired you to tackle these difficult themes in your storytelling and how do you best handle that , especially in children's writing ? Like what's the best way to present hard topics ?
Speaker 3Yeah , it's hard , like what's the best way to present hard topics . It's hard , it's difficult , so why do it ? So at the beginning of my career , I wrote mysteries and sports novels and fantasy and whatever I just was in the mood to write and whatever was fun and whatever my publisher would publish . And then , in 2009 , somewhere around there , somewhere around 2009, . 2010 , scholastic approached me and asked me to work with a man named Jack Gruner to write a novel of his experiences as a Jewish prisoner during World War II in Nazi concentration camps . Jack Gruner survived 10 different Nazi concentration camps during World War II and I worked with him to tell his story and that experience really changed the trajectory of what I was trying to do as an author . I would argue that if you go back to a lot of my books , they have themes of working together . They have themes of acceptance . They have a lot of the same themes that I work with now , but I wasn't doing them deliberately . I was doing them because that's just the kind of person I am and the kind of characters and stories I want to see . After I wrote , that book was called Prisoner B3087 , the book I wrote with Jack Gruner about Jack Gruner , and that book came out and I started getting tons of fan mail from kids who were really responding to this story about a kid in the Holocaust . And look , it's not the first book about a kid in the Holocaust that's ever made a huge splash . I mean , the Diary of a Young Girl is the classic and has had young readers since it was published in the 50s , I mean . But kids are really interested in social justice issues . They are .
Speaker 3I have always argued that middle schoolers they see the world as more black and white than we do as adults . You start to say , well , religion starts to play a role and politics start to play a role and you start to try to see all the sides . You talk to a middle schooler and like I remember telling my daughter when she was young that this was in , gay marriage was just being passed in different states and we were celebrating it . We're like , hey , these people are now allowed to get married . And my daughter was like why couldn't they ? Like to her ? There was just like wait , this is a thing . Like who would say no to that ? And I think that that's the same kind of reaction that a lot of middle schoolers have . Wait , you're picking on that person , you're taking their stuff , you're throwing them in jail , you're killing those people . Why , like that's wrong .
Speaker 3I think that middle schoolers in particular have a really heightened sense of justice . I think that they know when life isn't being fair and they hate it . I mean , every one of us was a kid who's like , why did that person get a bigger piece of cake than me ? Like , like , they want everything to be fair , right , why is my sister sitting on the side of the car that's , that's cooler than my side and the son's on my side ? You know , like that's all really kid stuff . But when you , when you , when you take that and you extrapolate that to bigger things in the world , they still have those same feelings .
Speaker 3And I love that . I love that about young readers . And so you can say to them , like , look at how these people are being treated , look at how refugees are being turned away and they have nowhere to live , and they're like that's wrong . I hate that . And so what I learned was , from prisoner on , I've been writing books where , look , I don't have all the answers . I don't know how to fix the world problems . I don't know how to fix the refugee problems in the world , but what I can do is show these young readers what's going on and then let them get indignant about it and then maybe they can figure something out or change the world , but at least get them talking about it . Get them talking about it with their parents and their teachers and thinking about these things . Look , the world is very different than when you and I were kids .
Speaker 3A lot of kids today . They have been going through active shooter drills since they were in elementary school and kindergarten . They hear racist and intolerant stuff from politicians on the news every day . They may have been already walking in Black Lives Matter protests . They have refugees and they have immigrants in their classrooms right now who've come into their communities , and they have immigrants in their classrooms right now who've come into their communities . They are dealing with the real world , whether we want them to or not .
Speaker 3A lot of adults want to protect kids and shelter them . We can't I mean , we can do that as much as possible , but the real world is encroaching into their world . It used to be that kids' world was just school and home and church and the neighborhood . That was it , and now it's much bigger . They are a part of this bigger world , and so I'm trying to write books that show the kids what the world is like and then ask them what do you think we ought to do about it ? And I don't have the answers . I wish I did . I'd be out there trying to change the world , trying to implement them , but I think we got to ask the questions and a lot of kids . I grew up very sheltered . I didn't see a lot of the problems in the world because I didn't have to , they weren't affecting me , so why should I see them ? Why should I do anything about them ? So I'm trying to write books that are windows into the lives of other people around the world that maybe some of those kids haven't seen and that are mirrors for other kids .
Speaker 3One of the I hear this all the time about refugee , and that is that when teachers share it in the classroom , what tends to happen is that the kids who've been through something similar , who were refugees themselves or immigrated to the United States but went through something where they had to get to here , like a struggle to get to here , they don't talk about it before that because immigration , refugees , those are politically hot topic words and they know from their parents we just hear just don't talk about it . But when they see their classmates care about the fictional refugees in my book , when they see them get indignant about the way that they're treated and the things that have happened to them , that's when they start to open up and share their own stories . And that's amazing For refugee kids in a classroom in America to say I see my classmates caring about these fictional characters . Maybe they'll care what happened to me and they do . And it's been amazing to get these letters and these stories from teachers .
Speaker 3I've gone farther afield than your question , I think , but for me it started with Prisoner , when I was very intentional about the things I wanted to say , and now , looking like for a few books , I just kept doing it and thinking why are kids loving these books so much ? Like what am I doing right that I want to reproduce ? And I realized it wasn't just the thriller stuff . I wasn't just doing short chapters and cliffhanger chapters and characters that you root for and getting to the action , getting to the main plot before the end of chapter one , all that matters , that kept them reading . But why were they having these tremendous reactions to those books ? Beyond that , and what I realized was it was the social justice stuff that they care . Middle schoolers care , they care about justice , they want to see justice done when they see injustice , and so they were responding to it . And so I'm like , well , listen , I got a lot of other world stuff I can tell you about , we can talk about , and we can try and figure out how to figure all this out . So that's been .
Speaker 3It all clicked for me when I listened to a podcast with Jordan Peele , the writer and director of Get Out , and he described that film and all the and it fits for all the films he's done since then as social thrillers , and I was like , okay , I've been thinking of my work as thrillers but I hadn't been thinking about the social justice element that I had been putting in , just because that was important to me . Now , when
Social Justice in Middle Grade Thrillers
Speaker 3I write a book as important to me as all that stuff we talked about about writing a compelling thriller , as important as it is to write a compelling thriller to me , as all that stuff we talked about about writing a compelling thriller , as important as it is to write a compelling thriller to me , is also making sure that there is a very strong social justice element to the book , because I think my young readers are responding to both of those in equal measure .
Speaker 4That's true and for a lot of kids you know you experienced that stuff early . Like my first memory of racism , I was nine and that's the first time I was like cognizant of why it was happening . Prior to that I probably just interpreted it as I did something wrong with . This person doesn't like me . You know what I mean , right . Right , I remember during shield them from a world they're in .
Speaker 3Yeah , I remember during the . I remember right at the height of black lives matter , when , when , when , everything , when . Remember right at the height of Black Lives Matter , when everything we were in the midst of the protests and everything no-transcript said or did to you that you knew you were black , like and , and , and the stories were incredible . What's that ?
Speaker 4Can I answer that ? I was nine and I was in the fourth grade and somebody stole the troll book money and my teacher assumed cause . I was one of two black kids in the class and it had to be me .
Speaker 4She took off my shoes , she went through my book bag , she went through my pockets in front of the whole class and I didn't take it , but for the rest of the year I was labeled a thief because since an authority figure , an adult , said it , they assumed it to be true . When I was bullied all year for something I did not do , that is insane . It still makes me emotional when I think about it . Of course it should .
Speaker 3It should make you furious , like that is the kind of crap that happens all the time . And you're right , it happens to kids and there is some point where a black kid realizes for the first time , oh my God , I'm different in their eyes . Or a gay kid thinks , oh my God , I'm different in their eyes , different in their eyes and like pick , pick your non-white , non-straight minority and and and that's the first time they realize they're not part of this white majority and and it's , it's horrifying and and I want to , I want to be a part of fixing that , if I can , and I and I hope that my books are doing that . I hope that my books are One of the things I'll say , and the first book I did this with was Ban this Book .
Speaker 3Through the first half of my career , I wrote my books as default white . I did not tell you the main character's race , I only told you if a character they encountered was not white . Right , and this had just been baked into me from all the books that I'd read all my life and I realized wait a minute , why am I not explicitly saying what color my main character is ? If I'm going to say what color all the other characters are , why am I going to have my reader make the assumption that that main character is white ? And then the next logical question is why do all my main characters have to be white ? Right ? So , like , like , you start asking those questions . So in Ban this book . I point out that Amy Ann is black and I point out that her librarian is white and I describe her as a , as a big white lady and like that . That's just the way I describe her and like that's because the point of view of the main character is from a black girl , so she sees a person who's not like her . She's white and so it was really . It seems super dumb because it's , it's like , super obvious , but I think these are the kinds of things that all of us have to confront . We have to confront our own biases that are baked in , and I wasn't doing it for racist reasons , I wasn't doing it maliciously , but I was just doing it because that's the way every book I'd ever read through school treated characters , treated race , and I was like , oh gosh , we don't have to do this anymore if we're intentional about things . So every book since then , I have told you , if the main character is white . I describe them as white early on . I don't just assume , and I've seen this in book reviews . Pw , I think , has started doing book reviews where at the end of the review they will say something like main character assumed white or main character implied white . And it's really interesting because it's a subtle way for the reviewer to call out hey , you're writing this book with this basic assumption that everybody's white until you tell us that they're not . And I think it's great that they call that . It's like calling it out without really accusing them of anything , but it's like hey , I just want you to know . You didn't tell us what race this is , so we're assuming they're white and maybe think about that . And it's something that I've been thinking about since Prisoner . Prisoner and the next couple of books . I think Code of Honor came next and then Project 1065 . And kids were responding to them Gangbusters . Prisoner and the next couple of books . I think Code of Honor came next , and then Project 1065 . And kids were responding to them Gangbusters .
Speaker 3I didn't hit the New York Times list yet , but my sales were going up and I was getting more school visit invitations and kids were looking for my books because my name was on it rather than because of what the individual topic was , and I was like what am I doing right here ? And that's when I was thinking about all that stuff . And when I heard that podcast with Jordan Peele and I was like I got it . I got it . It's thrillers , but it's also talking about the stuff that's going on in the world from a social justice angle . And one thing at a time . One thing at a time in a book like there's so many things to put there out there that we could talk about . But trying to focus on one thing each time in a book as much as I can , without making it a lesson that you're being taught , and instead focusing on the thriller as the reason you keep turning the pages but then hopefully leaving kids with questions at the end of it about their larger world that they live in .
Speaker 4I love that Do you ever worry about , since you do deal with social issues , do you ever worry about being book banned or being censored yourself ?
Speaker 3Yeah , I've had a couple of my books challenged a refugee . When it came out my wife posted on Facebook like my husband's new book and one of her like . She runs a business where she sells quilt patterns and one of her customers was like well , I will never buy anything from you again . And it was like because the book's called Refugee . Like I've had events canceled . I have had like right now in Cargill County in North Carolina I used to live in North Carolina they have a Battle of the Books thing where kids can read like a dozen books and then do competitions based on trivia around the books .
Speaker 3One of my books Ban . This Book was in the Elementary Battle of the Books list and it is one of the reasons that some parents in the community came after the program and got it canceled at those schools . And I know that there is a county in Florida that has banned this book and there are other counties now that are banning it along with the same list . They just carry the list from county to county banning books . So yes , I knew from the start that when I was going to write about this stuff I was going to run into opposition . So yes , I knew from the start that when I was going to write about this stuff , I was going to run into opposition , but thankfully there are more people out there who care about these issues and want to share these books with kids than there are not , unfortunately . The people who are against social justice books or topics are very vocal and we have to stand up against them . We have to show up at school board meetings , we have to go and support our local libraries . We can't let the squeaky wheel get the grease , because they will keep squeaking and , with the political environment that we're in right now , they have a lot of authority
Fighting Book Bans and Censorship
Speaker 3and a lot of power , and we've got to keep fighting that .
Speaker 3And so , yes , I've had books banned , so much so that , well , let me back up to a couple of things . I also recognize that I am not the kind of author who is getting his books banned . The most Predominantly , the books that these book banners are coming after are written by BIPOC authors or with BIPOC main characters , or they're written about LGBTQ plus characters or by those authors . This is a war on culture , it is a war against diversity , and these folks are coming after those authors . Way more than me , I have had books banned , but as a straight white , middle-class man , I'm not their main target . They have to actually read my books to ban them For everybody else . They just look at who it is and who's on the main cover and they ban those books . So I have been a victim of that , but not nearly to the degree that many other people have been . So with that in mind , I was like what can I do about this ?
Speaker 3So a few other authors and I , earlier this year , started a group called Authors Against Book Bans , aabb , and we started recruiting authors from Kidlet . We started recruiting authors who write for adults . We started recruiting traditionally published authors for adults . We started recruiting traditionally published authors and indie published authors . Are you a translator , are you an editor ? Are you an illustrator of books for kids or graphic novels or comics ? We want you . If you're a writer , if your name is on the front of a book , we want you .
Speaker 3And what we're trying to do is set up different regions , or sometimes just individual state level groups , and dispatch our authors to speak at school board meetings , to write letters to editors , to fight back against these book bans in a unified way . Because what was happening was oh , great , awesome , thank you so much . Awesome . Thank you so much . So I'm one of the ringleaders of that and it's really important to us to try and take some of the burden off of the people who are being banned all the time , because right now , they're spending so much of their time fighting book bans that they're not writing , and that's how that's really how the voices get silenced . Not only are their books taken off the shelf , but they don't have the time to write a new book because they're fighting the bans of their old books .
Speaker 3So we're trying to spread that responsibility out and we're brand new and we're still trying to figure out what the heck we're doing and get our sea legs , but we're trying to organize as authors to say we got to fight back against this and here's how to do it . So thank you for joining and , just as a plug , we're trying to get as many people to join as possible . It's free . We send out resources and ways to talk about book bannings and ways to confront book bannings , what to do if your book is banned , how to report it and what to do about it . It's going to get worse . It's going to be worse . The next four years are going to be really super awful , and it was already bad and it's going to get a lot worse , and so the more we can . Community is resistance . We keep telling ourselves if we can come together as a community , we can fight back better .
Speaker 4Now for people who don't know what the first steps are to defend against these book bans , as they're getting worse . What advice can you give ? Like , let's say , there's a non-writer who just happens to come across this ? What steps can we give them to help ?
Speaker 3Yeah , I mean , school boards are made up of elected officials and so one of the things that if you care a lot about this , you can support a new candidate for school board or run for school board yourself . But and a lot of the school board elections people don't even vote in . A lot of these folks got in with 600 votes in a in a county where 20,000 people vote for the president and a lot of times it's because down ballot voting is tails off , especially in non-presidential election years . So paying attention to local elections , paying attention to who's on your school board , showing up at school boards and getting on the docket to speak , there have been studies by the American Library Association that say that 70% of people do not support book bans 70% of people . And that's got to cross political lines , because it seems like it's half and half in this country right now close to along political lines . So more people support the freedom to read than don't .
Speaker 3We got to mobilize those people . They have to speak up . They have to write letters to the editor . They have to speak up at their school board meetings . They have to go in and talk to the principals at their schools and say stop taking these books off the shelf . Most schools have a book review process and these steps are being skipped . They're just unilaterally removing books , like the school board is , or the state or county is passing laws that scare the schools into removing the books for fear of getting their teachers sued or thrown into jail . And we've got to . It's a minority of people who want these draconian laws and we've got to come together as a community and fight back . So the biggest thing is speaking up . It's just saying I disagree , because the longer that silent majority stays silent , then the people who are pushing these laws through will think that they're doing it with the permission and approval of everybody who isn't speaking up .
Speaker 4Very true , very true of everybody who isn't speaking up .
Speaker 3Very true , very true . Tell me a little bit about what you're working on now . Sure , so , continuing to write those social thrillers . So this book right now we're calling it War Games , which for me is a Matthew Broderick movie from the 80s , because that's when I was a kid , but most of my young readers won't know that movie at all . So we're calling the book War Games and it doesn't have anything to do with Matthew Broderick , but it is a heist story as set at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 . So this is the Olympics where Jesse Owens broke all those records . It's the Olympics where the boys in the boat story happened . That was made into a book and a film . Boat story happened that was made into a book and a film .
Speaker 3It was the Nazi Olympics that happened three years before the beginning of World War II , where the Nazis were basically sports washing . Their image and this is the social justice angle that I'm getting at is the way that people can commit human rights crimes and then smooth it over with bread and circuses , and that's what Nazi Germany was doing . And people , if you scratched beneath that surface , you could see it . But they put on this pageant , they put on this show for everybody and a lot of people came away from those Olympics saying , boy , the Germans have got it going on . All the trains run on time , there's food on the shelves , all the buildings look great , there's no homeless people on the streets , there's no trash on the streets . The Olympics went off without a hitch . What they didn't see was that they were already rounding up all those invisible people and taking them off to prison camps . Right , they were already taking property away from German Jews and from Romani , and they were arresting the gay citizens and sending them off to prison camps . And all this was happening in the background . But life was great for all the people who weren't being herded away to prisons . So they were like , well , fantastic , let's just keep turning a blind eye to this .
Speaker 3And so my story is a thriller . It's got sports action , it's got a bank heist in it , but it also has this social justice angle of we can't let ourselves be distracted by the glitz and the glamour if other people are suffering for us to have that . You know , this is me getting political , but I think a lot of the last election was people voting by their wallets and they said well , I think under this person I'm going to have a better . I think the price of eggs will come down . I think the price of milk will come down . I don't think that's going to happen , but they thought this is going to happen . And so what if we deport a whole bunch of people ? But they thought this is going to happen . And so what if we deport a whole bunch of people ? So what if all my gay neighbors can't get married anymore ? So what if , if , if , if trans people become illegal , like as long as my milk is cheaper and it's like , oh my God like that , like that's .
Speaker 4What I'm writing about is the is the blinders that people will put on for their own comfort and safety , and what's interesting about that is like the people who sow division almost get it in moments like that , Because me myself I wanted to disconnect initially . I was like if people care that little about my community why should ? I interact with anybody .
Speaker 3Right , no , no , I totally had the same , but then they win .
Speaker 4But then they win if you close yourself off or if you stop reaching .
Speaker 3I know , I know , like if you if you close down like then , then they get stronger and they totally win . I get it . We have to keep fighting back , but I was with you , like right after it happened . I was like you know what ? Screw everybody else If they can't , if , if , if they're willing to throw half of their neighbors under the bus so that they can have , you know , cheaper groceries , what am I fighting for ? Who are these people ? I don't want to be their neighbors , I don't want to .
Speaker 3But the thing is that there is a bigger picture and you pointed out that we still have one of the greatest countries on the planet . I really believe that and it's a place of opportunity for so many people and that it's worth fighting for . It's still worth fighting for , as difficult as it is sometimes , and what I'm hoping is that my books are helping raise a next generation , a new generation , who will be more empathetic and who will care about the people in their community . About to get all Mr will care about the people in their community , about to get all Mr Rogers on with people in their neighborhood , but who care about the people in their community and realize that a little bit of being uncomfortable and a little bit of insecurity is okay if it means that everybody gets the benefits of society right , that we can accept a little insecurity for everybody to be more secure than they were , or for everybody to have a place to live and be free . So I hope that that's what my books are doing .
Speaker 3I have a good buddy who lives back in Tennessee . I grew up in Tennessee and he was like hey , you're not going to know the impact of your career until like 30 years from now . I'm like what do you mean ? He's like that's when these kids are going to be adults and they're going to have positions of power and the people who read your books are going to remember those things that they read and hopefully be different people , be better people . And it meant a lot to me and I have to remember that that that's how I'm fighting is I'm I'm writing books . I'm I'm trying to write stories that change kids' minds and maybe that will help change the future . I love that .
Speaker 4Any advice for aspiring authors ?
Speaker 3Um , read a lot , um , I I've run into so many aspiring authors who have great story ideas but they're not reading what they want to write . And I run into especially a lot of kids book authors and I'll say do you name one book that's on the New York Times bestseller list for middle grade ? And they can't do it . And look , that's fine , there are plenty of books that aren't going to ever hit the New York Times bestseller list . But I think you got to know what's big and what kids are reading right then and decide do you want to write that or do you want to write something else , and be okay with that . I know a lot of people who bristle about their low sales and I'm like but look at the book you wrote . It's not a big breakout commercial book , you can't . And the book they wrote is fine , it's great , it may even win an award of some kind , but you can't expect tremendous commercial results if you don't study the market . So I would say read a lot . Read the kind of books that you want to write , to help understand how those books are written , so that your book can be a part of that like on that part of the shelf , but also so you can temper your expectations , so you can know what could potentially happen with your book . Are you writing a book that could break out ? Then look at the book . Do you want your book to break out ? Then look at the books that have broken out and study them .
Speaker 3When I started writing my fantasy novel , I picked up the Rick Riordan books and I read them one straight through and then I went back and reread them and broke them down chapter by chapter and tried to see where the story beats happened . I tried to see what he was doing with his characters . I tried to learn from somebody who was already successful . Study the work of people who are already successful . I laugh with my agent all the time .
Speaker 3I do not understand why there are not more authors doing exactly what I'm doing . Like . A lot of times kids will say what other books can I read ? And I'm like and I have a handful of authors that I point them to , but I don't know why there aren't 30 people doing what I'm doing and maybe it's just because , maybe it's because it's just what I'm most interested in and they're not , but it also could be that they're just not reading my books . I try to keep up with the Joneses and know what , uh know what they're doing , um , and always be learning that kind of thing . So , um , uh , read , read and read what you want to write . I think that's a super basic , but a lot of people skip that step because they just want to jump into the writing .
Speaker 4Love it , love it , love it . How can people connect ?
Speaker 3with you . You can find me at my website , which is alangratzcom , and I have a sub stack which you can also subscribe to that . That is an e-newsletter that will come out and tell you where I'm at and what I'm doing . Really pulled back from social media , I have , uh , I'm on Twitter and I'm on Instagram . Uh , you can put those on there , I can tell you those , but I really don't update those . I got off Twitter a long time ago , um , and Instagram just kind of feels like a time suck .
Speaker 3I've got other reasons for being off of Twitter . You can probably guess that , um , but um , so , uh , let me just say , let me just say those the website and the Substack that is on my contact page . So I think that I could probably give you an address for the Substack where we could list that , but those are the places I would prefer people find me . So , yes , it's allangratzsubstackcom , so either allangratzcom or Gratz dot . Sub stack dot com . So either Alan Gratz dot com or sub stack dot Alan Gratz dot com , and I link to that on my on my Web page .
Speaker 4Anything you want to mention that we haven't covered ?
Speaker 3No , we've done a lot of good stuff . A lot of good stuff , I will say , in terms of book banning , that one myth that we keep trying to dispel is that books that are banned see an uptake in sales . It's just not true . Yes , there are very famous examples Mouse . When Art Spiegelman's Mouse got banned , it became a New York Times bestseller again because people were buying it and sharing it and giving it to other people . That's awesome , but it doesn't happen to every book .
Speaker 3Thousands of books are getting challenged and removed from libraries across the country every year and only one or two of those make the national news and get that kind of reaction . Instead , what is happening is the people whose books are being banned . Their careers are dying because kids can't find their books , they can't read those books and librarians won't buy them to stock them , to put on them on the shelves , because they're already banned or they know they will get banned . So what we're seeing is , when your book is banned , it's a myth that that automatically equals better sales . It's the death knell for many careers .
Speaker 3It means , if you're a kid-led author , many schools won't bring you in for paid school visits , which is a huge part of the way that kid-led authors make money is being paid to visit schools and talk about their books . If your book is banned , the librarian is not going to bring you into her school to talk to the kids because they can't read your book . So they're losing the readers , they're losing the book sales , they're losing the school visit money that they used to get and ultimately , publishing is a business
Writing Advice and Author Connections
Speaker 3and publishers will stop buying the books that aren't selling . And we've made such modest gains in diversifying books , especially in kidlit , so we've just started to make some change , and now this is going to pull a whole lot of it back . So I encourage people to not assume that a banned book means great book sales for an author . Take it for what it sounds like Nobody is reading their work and that's how to kill an author's career .
Speaker 4You know what's funny ? I had this conversation with my coworker on my day job I work at a library and I was telling her . I was like this is really scary . I was like what if they were to ban my debut , right ? And then she was like , oh , did you be making so much money ? And that really is a myth that a lot of people subscribe to .
Speaker 3It's a big myth . I'll tell you right now if you're congrats on your debut book . By the way , if your debut book comes out and it gets banned , it's going to kill it . And I hate to be so negative , I don't want to scare you , but you are right . It is not unless somebody on social media or in a newspaper takes up your cause and says , hey guys , this book is amazing and it got banned and everybody should go buy 10 copies . That's great , but that almost never happens . And instead what will happen is you'll sell like 300 copies in places where the book isn't banned and then the book will quietly go away . And that's awful . That's killing authors and their careers and we have to fight that myth and that's why I bring it up here . We've already talked about a whole bunch of good book banning stuff , but we've got to dispel this myth that a banned book means making a lot of money off of it . What it means is the book nine times out of 10 , 99 times out of 100 , those books disappear .
Speaker 4That's sad , but hopefully we can make some headway and make some change .
Speaker 3What's your book and when does it come out ?
Speaker 4Heart's Gambit . It comes out in um winter of 2026 . It's about these magical time traveling black people . It was kind of billed as like the night circus meets outlander . Oh , love it .
Speaker 3Love it . Uh , is it TradPub or IndiePub ? What are you doing ?
Speaker 4TradPub .
Speaker 3It's Wednesday Books Fantastic , that's awesome .
Speaker 4I would promote it , but it doesn't sound like it's for my kids readers it's older Right , it's older kids .
Speaker 3Yeah , but yeah , let me know when it's out and I can at least share it in the newsletter or put it on social for as much as I get on there , cause I know I have a lot of adult readers , librarians and things but I'd love to share the word about it .
Speaker 4Awesome . Thank you , I'd appreciate that .
Speaker 3Yeah , of course this has been terrific . I really appreciate the interview and thanks for getting in touch .
Speaker 4Of course . Of course , like I said , like you was first upset and , like I said , wanting to disconnect , but then I was like , well , what can I do ? And then I was like I know what I'll do . I'll interview a bunch of people on book bands because we know that's coming and then start pitching them . You know what I mean . So that when it comes , when it happens , we have a pushback . You know what I mean . So I was like first I got mad , then I was like let me figure out how to get .
Speaker 3We got to talk about it . We just have to keep talking about it and you pointed it out earlier , it's a lot of people who just don't know that it's happening they're non-readers or they're just oblivious to it and because it feels like a very internal thing , only you know , like the librarians and the authors know about it until it maybe pops up in their local paper , and that's oftentimes the first time that somebody's heard about this . And that's part of the reason I wrote Ban this Book back in 2017 was to try and call kids' attention to this , and now , back then it wasn't as big a deal and now it's an epidemic . It's getting worse and we're hoping to do more stuff with AABB and in the South in particular , where a lot of this is hitting . Unfortunately , unfortunately , it's happening all over the country , but , um , the conservative states are the worst yeah , they are , so definitely let me know .
Speaker 4Like I said , I would be more than happy to help anywhere again that wraps up today's crab chat chronicles with jd mayor .
Speaker 5Thanks for joining us . If you liked the episode , please comment , subscribe and share . For show notes , writing workshops and tips , head to jdmayorcom . That's jdmayorcom . While you're there , join JD's mailing list for updates , giveaways and more .