Al Roker’s Book Club Authors Tell All and a Sneak Peak of The Jaguar Stones Book 2

We featured the lovely and talented Jon and Pamela Voelkel, authors of The Jaguar Stones Book One: Middleworld, earlier this summer shortly before they appeared on the Today Show for Al Roker’s Book Club.  Below you can read as Pamela recounts their exhilarating day in the NBC studio, then click on the link to watch the interview and find out what Al’s Book Club kids want to know about this fantastic, action-packed adventure book!

The Jaguar Stones, Book Two: The End of the World Club goes on sale this December (the cover image has just been finalized but it’s not available to post quite yet) and we have a sneak peak of the book for the first five people who post a comment below!  Book One is one of my favorite books of the year so I hope you get a chance to check out the series! 

I didn’t sleep the night before. You have no idea what you’ll be asked, so my head was buzzing with possible questions. We arrived at NBC at 9am. You walk through the plaza and everyone cranes to see if you’re famous.  Then you’re led deeper and deeper into the building by a succession of people with clipboards.  They didn’t want us to meet Al’s Book Club kids (Sabrina, Ava, Myles and Spencer) ahead of time, so it was all a bit cloak and dagger. On the way to the green room, we met Matt Lauer, Meredith Viera and Al Roker.  In my memory, they have an otherworldly shimmer like three Enterprise crewmembers who’ve just beamed up.  There was tons of food in the green room, but of course, we were too nervous to eat. My favorite part was hair and make-up.  It was thrilling to sit in front of one those long mirrors surrounded by lightbulbs – with Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire in the dressing room behind us!  The minutes ticked by… waiting with us were our 13-year old daughter Charly, our editor at Egmont, Elizabeth Law, and Virginia Anagnos from Goodman Media. Then suddenly it was time! Our producer led us down to the studio, where all was chaos.  With three minutes to go, they were still dismantling the previous set. We were mic’d up, and Al Roker materialized in front of us, exuding calm.  You looked into his eyes and knew it was going to be all right. Which was just as well as the stagehands were having big problems the Maya king costume. We tried to help, but the countdown had started 10…9…8…7… and I was still fixing the breastplate. 6…5…4… “Drop it!” yelled the director through my earpiece and I dropped it onto the table in front of me where it sat for the whole interview.  3…2…1… Action! Al asked some general questions, Sabrina asked Jon about his boy scout plane crash, Spencer asked me about skull walls, there was a question from a girl in Colorado via skype (she’d even made her own Maya pyramid background) and then back to the studio, where Myles forgot his question and it seemed like time froze.  That was the moment when I was able to look around and fully take in where we were.  Thanks to Myles, the director awarded us an extra 90 seconds of somebody else’s airtime, so we could finish the segment. The final question, from Ava, was an excellent one about sequels. Then it was over, mics off, set dismantled around us.  Matt and Meredith came in to record a breaking news item in another corner of the studio.  Somehow we lost our way and came within a split second of bumbling out in front of the news desk in our pith helmets, like explorers who took a wrong turn at the Amazon. Eventually we found the door and, with all pressure off, stayed to chat with the book club kids, meet their families, and sign their books.  Then we went back to Goodman Media in Times Square where the rest of the Egmont team was waiting for us with mimosas.   

I’m still too nervous to watch the clip myself, but here’s the link.