It's finally July. I've been waiting for what feels like forever for it to be July, just so I can say, "My book comes out next month." It's a small thing, conversationally, but a giant thing in the context of the past couple of years.

It's been a very, very long road to July. I wrote "Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail" in January of 2013, sold The Gift of Failure in March, handed in the manuscript on October 31, concussed myself on November 1, took nearly four months off to recover, then revised the book over 2014. The manuscript was accepted in October, I received a box of galleys in the last hours of 2014, and recorded the audiobook in April.

The last big milestone circled in red on my calendar is the book release on August 11 - or at least it was until today. Thanks to Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and She Knows Media, I get to look forward to one more milestone before August 11.

I am thrilled to announce that The Gift of Failure will be available for sale and signing in an exclusive pre-release event on July 16-18 at BlogHer 2015: Experts Among Us in New York City.

I owe so much to the women I've met and worked with as a result of BlogHer, and I can't think of a more appropriate place to launch The Gift of Failure.

If you would like to attend BlogHer and have not registered, there are still spots available here. It's going to be so much fun, and the lineup of speakers is fantastic this year: Gwenyth Paltrow, Christy Turlington Burns, and more inspiring, amazing speakers than I can list.

In other news, my book tour schedule is still evolving, but what I know about as of today is listed here. I've been knocking down deadlines right and left for articles and interviews that will run around my publication date, and working on a couple of new projects I'm really excited about.

Last month, I was asked to join the Amazon Studios Thought Leader Board and am consulting on a new series for kids called The Stinky and Dirty Show. It's based on picture books by Jim and Kate McMullan and follows the adventures of Stinky the dump truck and Dirty the digger as they try, and fail, and try again, to solve all sorts of problems through resilience, resourcefulness, and the creative use of trash. I'm thrilled to be a part of a production team that includes Dr. Alice Wilder, children's programming Grande Dame (and mastermind behind Blue's Clues), and Tara Sorensen, Head of Kids Programming at Amazon Studios.

These days, I tend to carry around a couple of scripts and a red pen, and I spend a lot of my time in the hammock or lawn chair reviewing the first season of the show with an eye to the research on resilience and resourcefulness. It's a pretty great way to spend the summer.

The first episode of The Stinky and Dirty Show is available here if you'd like to watch. Amazon Studios invites anyone to submit scripts or videos, then creates fully produced pilots of selected shows. They then crowd-source those pilots to Amazon customers, who decide via reviews which shows get the green light for full seasons. The Stinky and Dirty Show got a couple of thousand five-star reviews, so we are off to the races, so to speak. I love the show, and hope others will, too.

If you are going to be at BlogHer, please come find me, either at my session on July 17th (Next Generation: Breaking Stereotypes and Building Self-Esteem) or at the book sale and signing (time TBA, but a bookseller will have Gift of Failure books available on-site during the entire conference). I will have a gift and a custom bookplate for everyone who purchases a book during BlogHer.

If you can't be at BlogHer to snag a pre-release copy of The Gift of Failure, I'd appreciate it so much if you would pre-order it at any one of the retailers linked here, or at your local independent bookseller. Help yourself to the free excerpt of the book, and if you like it, talk it up! Tell people! As some of you may know, pre-publication sales figures are a big part of what drives marketing, demand, and first printing numbers, so pretty, pretty, please, pre-order your copy today!

Thank you for being a part of this loooong journey, and for supporting me and my writing along the way,

Jess

Something Wonderful This Way Comes