Our Education Marketing Team and Author Andy Weir Shine at NSTA 2017 Meeting
Nearly 10,000 science educators convened in Los Angeles last week for the annual National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) meeting. Penguin Random House was a corporate sponsor, with members of our Education Marketing team and Andy Weir, author of THE MARTIAN (Crown/Broadway), shining in the spotlight. With the increasing need for educators to add more engaging, narrative non-fiction and fiction to their science classrooms, NSTA provided a great venue for Penguin Random House to market its relevant trade books to this unique and important audience.
Andy Weir flew in Wednesday night for an exclusive dinner with the NSTA President, Executive Board members, and 15 VIP teachers as well as local librarians and bloggers, in a private dining room at Wolfgang Pucks. He then delivered the Keynote address Thursday morning to a packed house of 5,000 NSTA attendees, discussing his journey to writing his mega bestseller THE MARTIAN (which was also adapted for a blockbuster movie), and the reasons why he worked with Crown to publish a special Classroom Edition of the book, which The New York Times covered in a major article (printed copies of which were distributed to attendees),
Andy also made time for a marathon series of activities and interviews, including a segment on WebsEdge TV; a visit to THE MARTIAN Activity Center created by NSTA volunteers, where you drop markers on targets set on a Martian landscape; an appearance on the Buzz Aldrin Space Federation Destination: Mars map (where he received a free T-shirt!); a conversation for PBS NewsHour; a two-hour, 300-copy book signing session; an interview with a reporter from the New York Observer; ate a Turkey sandwich lunch; and, finally, was interviewed by the Space Games Federation crew, with #SpaceCat in tow (yes, #SpaceCat is a thing, check it out!).
On the NSTA convention floor, our Education Marketing contingent, including Michael Gentile, Allan Spencer, Tim Cheng, Ryan Mita and Laura Berlinsky-Schine worked tirelessly (as did Kaiulani Kaneta and Crown’s Sarah Breivogel on their invaluable event planning efforts), with over 300 Penguin Random House titles displayed in three booths. Book categories ranged from Astronomy to Zoology, and everything in between. On Friday morning, authors Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson signed advanced reader copies of their forthcoming book, WE HAVE NO IDEA: A Guide to the Unknown Universe (Riverhead). Other title priorities included: PATIENT H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets (Random House) by Luke Dittrich; LAB GIRL: A Story of Trees, Science and Love (Vintage) by Hope Jahren (“The highlight is word-of-mouth excitement for LAB GIRL,” said Ms. Kaneta); SPACEMAN: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe (Crown Archetype) by Mike Massimino; and HEADSTRONG: 52 Women Who Changed Science and the World (Broadway) and TRAILBLAZERS: 33 Women in Science Who Changed the World (Delacorte Books for Young Readers), both by Rachel Swaby
Penguin Random House will be exhibiting once again at next year’s NSTA, to be held March 15 – 18, 2018 in Atlanta, GA