Author Online!—the Web site of children’s author Aaron Shepard—has become a valued source of fresh, vibrant, meaningful books, stories, and scripts for publishers and other content acquirers worldwide. These acquirers have included Random House, the College Board, Barron’s Educational Series, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Harcourt Education UK, Korea Froebel, and many more. (See below for a full list.)
Most of Aaron’s works are retellings of folktales, classic literature, and sacred stories, from around the world and through the ages. These retellings are marked by Aaron’s thorough research, respect for sources, and storytelling skills, which have together brought him honors from the American Library Association, the National Council for the Social Studies, the American Folklore Society, the New York Public Library, and the Bank Street College of Education.
Besides his many children’s books from publishers large and small, Aaron’s work appears regularly in Cricket and Australia’s School Magazine. It is also viewed extensively on his Web site, which has welcomed over four million teachers, librarians, and others.
In general, a fee is required for your use of Aaron’s work if you intend to make money from it, and sometimes even if you’re not. However, many permissions are freely given, usually in the small print of the pieces themselves. For school or library use of scripts, see Reader’s Theater Editions. For storyteller permissions, see Gifts of Story.
For picture book publication rights outside the U.S., Canada, or the U.K., the minimum fee asked by Aaron for the text alone is $1,000 USD after any tax withholding, paid in advance of signing, in US funds. For those rights, royalties are not requested. Payment can be made by check, or by PayPal for faster response time. Aaron is looking for foreign publishers who can issue his picture books in quality hardcover, not just in paperback.
Prime areas of this site for finding content include:
About Aaron’s Kid Books—comprehensive info, including foreign rights contacts and downloadable sample copies
Aaron’s World of Stories—stories with text only, ready for any use
Aaron’s RT Page—reader’s theater scripts
Looking for something special? See Aaron’s Indexes to find books, stories, and scripts by title, age, genre, theme, place, time, ethnic group, religion, mythology, holiday, or activity. Or you can just search Aaron.
For email notice of new books, stories, and scripts, subscribe to Aaron’s Update.
If you are interested in reprinting, reposting, or otherwise using works on Aaron’s Web site—and if permission is not granted on the piece itself—please contact Aaron with details. In most cases he controls the rights, but otherwise he will let you know who to contact.
Aaron regrets he no longer allows use of his work in educational testing or related materials. If you’d like to know why, see his article “This Is Not a Test.”
Aaron also does not generally license his work for professional television production. If you’d like to know why, see his article “A Yes-to-Reading, No-to-TV Manifesto.”
He also does not grant rights to use rewritten or abridged versions of his work. Texts must be complete and intact, with no more than normal copyediting.
If you’re an author or freelance anthologist, please note that Aaron cannot grant firm rights to his work before you sign with a publisher.
For those who need it, here is a checklist of what Aaron typically will have to know to consider your request.
- Your name, company, and full contact info, including Web site address
- The publisher or producer (if it isn’t you)
- The title of the work by Aaron you want to use
- The format of the work by Aaron—story, script, picture book, etc.
- The rights you request
- How and where you would use the work
- How and where you would sell or offer it
- When it would appear
- How many copies you would expect to produce or sell, or the size of your audience
- How much you would charge for purchase or use
- If for a collection, the total number of works to be included
- If for a collection, the overall projected size (e.g. in page numbers or minutes)
- A typical fee you would pay for acquiring such work (optional)
- If you’re outside the U.S., the fee percentage you must withhold for tax purposes
- How and where you discovered the work by Aaron
Unless otherwise arranged, payment of any fee is expected within 30 days of agreement, in USD.
For print publication, Aaron can supply most works as Word files on request. However, all works on this site are already formatted with printer typography—“curly” quotes, real dashes, and such—so they can instead simply be saved to your computer and imported directly into your production software without further typographic conversion. (For email distribution, on the other hand, you should first convert to “plain text” or “ASCII.”)
Here are acquirers of material through this site. All are U.S. unless noted.
Allyn & Bacon
Arabic for All, U.K.
The Art Institute of Pittsburgh
Barron’s Educational Series
British Broadcasting Corporation
CARE
Centre for Justpeace in Asia
The College Board
Dane Publishing House, Philippines
Grupo Santillana Puerto Rico
Harcourt Education, U.K.
Harcourt Educational Measurement
Journeys in Film
Korea Froebel, Korea
LILLIT, Norway
McDougal Littell
Orient Longman, India
Oxford University Press, India
Pearson Custom Publishing
Pearson Education Canada
Pearson Education India
Peoples Publishing Group
Phoenix Learning Resources
Playbooks, Inc.
Port Discovery Museum
Posnayko (“Badger”), Ukraine
Rakas, Australia
Random House
Red Dog Records, New Zealand
SIRS Publishing
Spirit Play (Unitarian)
Teacher Created Materials
TheatreworksUSA
Vivendi Universal, France