STEM

STEM Author Spotlight: Alison Pearce Stevens

I’m delighted to be highlighting some awesome middle grade STEM/STEAM authors on the blog!

The first up is Alison Pearce Stevens. Her new book, Animal Climate Heroes released March 5th. I’ve read the book and it is PERFECT for curious kids.

Here’s a bit more info:

Animal Climate Heroes book

 

Animal Climate Heroes by Alison Pearce Stevens (Author), Jason Ford (Illustrator)

           Godwin Books, March 5, 2024.   BUY it HERE 

 

Summary: In our left corner we have the meanest villain that’s ever existed. Responsible for rising seas and loss of biodiversity, it’s climate change ready to wreak havoc on the Earth. But in our right corner? We have four superheroes ready to save the day!
Forest elephants protect our forests by trampling trees.
Whales boost ocean health with their massive poo-nados.
Sea otters defend kelp forests from purple invaders.
And echidnas bury tons of soil to stop climate change.

But we can’t leave them in this fight alone. We need to protect our heroes who, in return, defend our planet. Get ready to learn all about these four legged, and two-flippered, creatures and how YOU can be a climate hero too!

 

Reviews:

“Along with explaining sometimes complex ecological cycles and patterns in easy-to-understand terms, the author highlights the role of microbes in decomposition, extolling the benefits of composting and leaving autumn leaves on the ground; she even describes the eco-devastation wrought by artificial lawn fertilizers and free-roaming cats. Ford’s engagingly informal ink-and-wash portraits and diagrams generally come with helpful captions and labels.”―Booklist

“Animal Climate Heroes is a captivating exploration of the Earth’s unsung champions in the battle against climate change. In this riveting narrative, author Alison Pearce Stevens introduces readers to four remarkable creatures who stand as mighty defenders of our planet’s delicate ecosystems. Each chapter is masterfully woven together through scientific insight with engaging storytelling, making complex ecological concepts accessible and intriguing for young readers. Not only will readers walk away informed, but they will also be inspired to take action to help safeguard our planet! Animal Climate Heroes truly promises to be an indispensable resource for curious minds eager to make a difference in the world outside their doorstep.”― Melissa Cristina Marquez, author of Mother of Sharks and Wild Survival

“Fun and fascinating! Animal Climate Heroes gives readers an inspiring look at what earth’s creatures are doing to help fight climate change, but also gives us a compelling reminder of just how amazing our planet really is―and why we ought to protect it. This book belongs on every animal lover’s shelf!”―Jess Keating, bestselling author, scientist, & nature artist

 

Alison, thanks for answering a few questions about your book and your writing.

JAS: This is such an intriguing way to approach climate change, how did you come up with it?

APS: During the Covid shutdown, I watched a lot of webinars, and during one of them, the presenter said that her favorite fact was that sea otters help fight climate change. I had also seen an article about the role of great whales in climate, and I knew it was a great angle for a book.

JAS: Can you give us a short explanation of how you relate climate change to animals?

APS: The key is to remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Animals don’t do this! But many animals, including the four featured in the book, help boost photosynthesis in trees, plants, and algae. (For anyone who hasn’t thought about photosynthesis in years, plants use the process to combine carbon dioxide and water to make food.) Exactly how the animals boost photosynthesis in their local plants or algae varies by animal and ecosystem, and the book goes into more detail about each one. The gist of it is that these animals are helping photosynthesizers get what they need to grow, whether that’s nutrients, space, or water, and that helps remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.


JAS: Can you give us a sneak peek of one or two of the animals that you highlight?

APS: Absolutely. Sea otters are helping to protect kelp forests. Kelp can literally grow up to two feet a day, and it sucks lots of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make that happen. Forest elephants tend their forest like gardeners, planting seeds, dropping plenty of fertilizer, and pulling weedy trees. This reduces competition for the massive tree species, so they get enough water and nutrients to flourish. The bigger the tree, the more carbon it stores. Elephants are absolutely essential to maintaining tropical forests in Africa.

JAS: What do you want young readers to get out of your book?

APS: Two things: I want every reader to understand how incredibly important nature is to us. It’s not just about climate (even though that’s all we hear about in the news), it’s about protecting all kinds of natural systems. We need them as much as they need us. And I want everyone to feel empowered to take steps to reduce their impact on the planet. Yes, industries play a huge role in this, but each and every one of us can reduce our personal impact, as well. By taking some of the steps I recommend in the book, people can tread more lightly on Earth and help sway industries to make more sustainable decisions.

JAS: Can you list a few actions that everyone can take to reduce climate change?

APS: Ride a bike instead of driving—or at least turn off the engine instead of idling. Rethink your lawn care practices if you own a home or talk to your landlord about how the property is maintained if you rent and there are green spaces. Most fertilizers are products of the oil industry and applied excessively; they wash downstream along with herbicides and other pesticides. When they reach the ocean, they harm marine life (and there’s good evidence they’re harming us, too). Lawnmowers and leaf blowers release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, so making changes to lawn care practices can go a long way. Even replacing a showerhead with one that’s EPA Water Sense certified can cut your carbon footprint and reduce the amount of water you use. All of those changes save you money, to boot.

JAS: Do you have any tips for writers who want to break into nonfiction children’s books?

APS: Be persistent and work on your craft—attend conferences, workshops and webinars to really learn how successful authors create their stories. And get to know other people in the kidlit community. It’s incredibly supportive, and many of my writing opportunities arose from events I attended and the connections I made while I was there.

JAS: What are you working on now?

APS: I am planning a second research trip for THE WILD MILE. This MG NF will be part of Holiday House’s Books for a Better Earth collection. It features efforts to rewild cities—to re-create lost habitat in an effort to bring wildlife back into the concrete jungle. THE WILD MILE will look at these efforts in general and specifically highlight the Wild Mile project in downtown Chicago.

 

Thanks so much for joining us, Alison. You can learn more about Alison below. 

Alison Pearce Stevens Headshot

Bio: Alison Pearce Stevens has been chased by a trumpeter swan, bitten by a bronze-winged duck, and served as a climbing wall for geckos and baby bats. She used to be a beekeeper and still thinks pollinators are some of the coolest things on the planet. Once upon a time, she was Dr. Stevens, science professor, until life took her overseas, at which point she started writing about science and nature for kids, because she’s an educator at heart and had to find new ways to share cool things with the world’s most curious people.

Alison writes lots of fun nonfiction: articles, picture books, and middle grade books. All of her work is inspired by a love of science and nature. She a regular contributor to Science News Explores, Highlights for Children, ASK, and other kids’ magazines, and has co-authored four books for National Geographic Kids. Rhinos in Nebraska: The Amazing Discovery of the Ashfall Fossil Beds (2021) and Animal Climate Heroes! (2024) were both Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections. Rhinos also won three Nebraska Book Awards. Detective Dogs are on the Case will release in September 2024.

Book #5561: A Case Study

On July 13, 2022, at 6:46 PM ET, Otto the Poolboy minted a tokenized book.

A tokenized book can be thought of either as an NFT linked to literary content or as a book with blockchain-enhanced features. In the Summer of 2022, the NFT market was on the decline and has since been declared dead, so this case study will take a book-centric approach.

In Web3 publishing, books are “minted” from a smart-contract that serves as a metaphorical printing press. The smart-contract allows an author or publisher to define the conditions under which book-linked tokens can be minted, transferred, or burned. When the proper conditions are met, the minting process forges the first link in a chain of provenance that will follow a tokenized book throughout its lifetime on a ledger that can’t be retroactively changed.

The book Otto minted was token #5561 in what would ultimately become an edition of 14,889 token-gated copies of Bored & Dangerous by Neil Strauss, published by Tally Labs on the Ethereum blockchain.

Web3 publishing smart-contracts can be programmed to release their books in phases, each applying a separate set of rules for a set period of time. Minting rights can be limited to the holders of a mint pass as a way to reward to early supporters, or may be limited to specific wallet holders on an allow-list that includes contest winners.

Otto minted Book #5561 during Bored & Dangerous’s raucous pre-public mint phase, when minting was only available to select insiders, including members of the Jenkins the Valet’s Writers Room, contest winners, and licensors of character IP. Although this phase of the mint was closed to the public, copies started popping up on secondary marketplaces at an initial floor price of around 0.23 ETH (US ~$250) apiece.

Valuation will be a major topic in the unfolding story of Book #5561. Tokenized books, like all things that can be owned, have a value governed by the rules supply and demand. The ultimate purchase price is whatever amount a buyer and seller can agree upon.

Because tokenized book transactions are accounted for on a blockchain, sellers and prospective buyers have equal access to market listings, bids, historical sales, and other data points useful in setting a fair market price. The floor price of a collection is one of these data points, representing the lowest-cost entry point into an edition at any given moment.

The floor price also helps determine the market cap of a collection, which is found by multiplying the floor price by the total number of items in the collection. Market cap is a useful shorthand measure by which the value of entire collections can be compared or tracked over time.

With a floor price of 0.23 ETH, the Bored & Dangerous book collection would have had an initial market cap of around $3.7 million as the full print-run of books was minted.

Another consideration of value for some Web3 books is the presence of a desirable trait. Some Web3 book traits provide metadata about a book’s author, genre, language, publishing date, and other useful information. Other traits may identify variant covers, alternate content, or randomly assigned features with varying levels of rarity.

The cover of each Bored & Dangerous book is an animation of a spinning book against an illustrated background set to one of three music loops determined by a trait. Around 5% of the books minted with the “Jenkins the Vallet” trait and its associated loop, around 20% of the books minted with the “Great Ape Society” trait and loop, and the remaining 75% of the books minted with the “Money Train” trait and loop.

As a “Great Ape Society” variant, Book #5561 could command a premium from a subset of collectors who valued that trait above the collection’s general floor price.

On July 20, 2022, at 10:25AM ET, Otto the Poolboy sold Book #5561 to a user named More Than Ever for 0.579 ETH (US ~$880).

Through the balance of July and into August of 2022, the Bored & Dangerous book collection experienced a steady rise in its floor price amidst heavy trading. Thousands of ETH, representing millions of US Dollars, changed hands. At its peak, the floor price exceeded the ETH equivalent of $1000 per book, with the Bored & Dangerous book collection achieving a market cap of around $15 million, establishing a record for tokenized book collections.

As a Web3 author, I watched these jaw-dropping sales with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, this level of hype and exclusivity wasn’t part of the book future I had been working toward for most of the previous year. My interest was, and still is, in advancing the development and adoption of next-generation publishing. As a practical matter, having to pay four figures to access a novel would price nearly all readers out of the market.

On the other hand, I was glad for the attention Bored & Dangerous was bringing to the nascent Web3 book market. Although blockchain tokens can be linked to all kinds of digitized content, NFTs had become conflated with JEPGs in the public imagination. Tokenized books, representing a greater technical challenge to create, had gotten a later start and were still relegated to an obscure niche.

The Bored & Dangerous book release represented a new hope for the future of Web3 publishing, a rising tide that could lift other book projects and platforms. The success of Bored & Dangerous brought us closer to a world where collectors’ editions might provide a living wage to authors while subsidizing free or nearly free mass-market editions for readers.

The technology that had tokenized Bored & Dangerous books had also tokenized the platform of their creation. Before minting books, TallyLabs had minted shares of a studio. Four tiers of access tokens granted governance votes, royalties, and early minting rights, and token-gated access to Jenkins the Valet’s Writers Room.

Jenkins was an Ape mascot who served as the debut book’s main character. If Tally Labs had aspirations to become a Web3 Disney, Jenkins was to be their Mickey Mouse.

When I first heard about the Jenkins and his Writers Room, entry-level valet tickets had a floor price of a couple hundred dollars apiece. I’d passed on that opportunity, and watched from outside as the project snowballed. Tally Labs secured millions of dollars in VC funds, talent representation for Jenkins, and a top-tier agency to shop film rights around Hollywood. During pre-release development of Bored & Dangerous, which took the best part of a year, the floor price of a valet ticket rose into the thousands of dollars.

Tally Labs built a community around their writer’s open studio, where members could provide input and peek in on the drafting process. To tell the story of Jenkins, Tally Labs had enlisted ten-time New York Times bestselling author Neil Strauss. Although not known as a novelist, Strauss had already become a legend in the Web3 publishing world for the 2021 release of Survive All Apocalypses, also known as LIT Project One, which was held in high esteem by prominent collectors. No other author had stronger publishing credentials combined with such a demonstrated commitment to Web3 publishing.

In addition to securing Strauss as an author, Tally Labs had licensed some of Jenkins the Valet’s fellow characters from the iconic Bored Ape Yacht Club. The Web3 twist was that this intellectual property wasn’t licensed from that project’s creator, but from individual holders who had been granted rights to any characters derived from the unique images they held. The process ensured a book that leveraged one of the most widely recognized brands in the NFT space while securing the active participation of BAYC community members.

I’m one of those people who see Bored Apes as irredeemably ugly and cartoonish, but tastes are subjective and many people seem to enjoy the collection’s simian aesthetic. A talented enough author could definitely craft even this lot into a stable of compelling characters. Was Neil Strass a talented enough author? The book was gated, accessible only to token-holders, so only they could know for sure.

Aside from its fiscal performance, iconic branding, and presumptive literary merits, the Bored & Dangerous collection also represented a historic advance in technical innovation. Its smart-contract provided holders with a choice between keeping their books or irrevocably “burning” them to buy into the next project in the Tally Labs pipeline, Azurbala, which would license original characters called Azurians for an upcoming multimedia franchise.

Although a “book burning” evokes hateful events in history, burning is the common term for a transaction that takes blockchain tokens out of circulation, making these book burnings a demonstration of self-sacrifice rather than one of censorship. Passage to Azurbala required an act of faith, permanently destroying a finished work of exceptional value in order to receive a stake in an unfinished and untested project that was being built from the ground up.

Each Bored & Dangerous token provided a gateway to the finished novel, but could now be traded for what lay behind Door Number 2, a second gateway to what might someday become a massive franchise.

Most holders opted for Door Number 2. During the burn period, the number of ownable Bored & Dangerous books fell from 14,889 to just 5,225. This not only provided momentum for the next project but, with all other market forces held constant, constrained supply and sustained demand should have sent the value of Bored & Dangerous on an upward spiral into the stratosphere.

Except that the surrounding crypto climate was already in decline, rocked by scams, scandals, and regulatory uncertainty. The NFT market was already slipping by the Summer of ’22, and was heading for a prolonged crash. Overall trading volumes, floor prices, and enthusiasm across the Web3 space fell by orders of magnitude as a stubborn bear market stretched from late 2022 into 2023.

On January 22, 2023, at 10:19AM ET, a user named MacxD bought Book #5561 for 0.11 ETH (US ~$175).

As values trend downward in a bear market, a collection’s floor price may experience a race to the bottom. Holders who want to jettison their assets undercut other listings and the floor shifts from being a cost of entry to a salvage value for sellers.

Buyers become increasingly discerning, bargain-hunting in major collections while letting minor collections languish. If a collection has no buyers for an extended period of time, market listings will expire until none are left, giving the collection an effective floor price of zero.

A September 2023 report by research group dappGambl found that of 73,257 NFT collections identified by the authors, 95% had become essentially worthless. Even among the top 8,850 NFT projects tracked by CoinMarketCap, the functional equivalent of an NFT market index, 18% had a floor price of zero.

In many corners of the media, NFTs were officially declared dead, but things may not actually be as bleak as they may appear.

For example, the NFT crash had at least one silver lining for tokenized books. As the overall NFT market declined, Bored & Dangerous values plunged into a range that ordinary folks would consider reasonable for a book that’s actually meant to be read and enjoyed for its content.

On September 25, 2023, at 11:25PM ET, I bought Book #5561 for 0.013 ETH (US ~$20).

I’m thrilled to have picked Book #5561 off the floor for the price of an ordinary hardcover. Since then, the floor price in Ethereum has slipped even further and may very well drop to zero in the near future. But whatever its price and whatever its literary merits, this book’s place in literary history makes it a treasure.

Bored & Dangerous could only ever have been written and published in a very narrow window of time that it uniquely embodies.

The recent floor price for the Bored & Dangerous collection has been hovering around 0.01 ETH (US ~$18).

Tally Labs’s Azurbala project seems to have gone into hibernation, despite the development of a next-generation writers room. Out of 9,656 copies of Bored & Dangerous that were burned to become Azur Roots, only 5,196 have so far been minted into Azurians that might yet become characters in an upcoming project.

A second-hand Azurian can currently be had for about $27, a price that’s up from a month ago, but which may also drop to zero.

Despite the death of NFTs, the tools and platforms that underlie blockchain technology have continued to evolve toward lower transaction fees, better security, more regulation, and environmental sustainability. New book formats are still being developed with the potential to benefit authors and their reader communities.

That story is still being written.

Science Writing is not JUST for Nonfiction Books

Humorous ones:
Butt or Face?: A Hilarious Animal Guessing Game Book for Kids
by Kari Lavelle (Sourcebooks)
Butt or Face bookInformative ones:
Bubonic Panic: When Plague Invaded America by Gail Jarrow (Calkins Creek)
Bubonic Plague
Science books with poetry:
Water Is Water: A Book About the Water Cycle by Miranda Paul (Roaring Brook Press)
Water is Water
Fun, activity-filled books:
The Secret Science of Sports  by Jennifer Swanson
The Secret Science of Sports Book

But how many of you actually think of fiction books when I say “science”? You should! Science is finding its way into many different fiction books these days. It’s a great thing, especially for us science lovers out there. And why not? Science is exciting, interesting, and innovative. It can add depth, intrigue, mystery, and even action-adventure to your fiction manuscript. Those all sound like good traits to put in a book, don’t they? Science in fiction invites readers to ask questions and perhaps to even go out on their own and do research to learn more about a topic. It can help explain a difficult topic or even introduce the reader to a brand-new technology. The best part is that there is a well-rounded storyline to go with it.

Fiction books with science in them are earning top awards, too. Check out a few of these favorites:

The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer L. Holm (Yearling)
The Fourteenth GoldfishSpace Case (Moon Base Alpha) by Stuart Gibbs (Simon and Schuster BFYR)
Space Case

These are just a couple examples of fiction books that are out there with science in them.

And let me also say that you don’t need a degree in science to write a book about science. Just be sure that you do your research, and do it well. But sometimes not knowing having a science background can make it easier for you to relate to your author. You might even think about science in a different way.

So, go ahead and try it!

SCIENCE ROCKS!