YA Wednesday: Day of Fools, Month of Poets
In this edition of YA Wednesday, we have comedy, complaints, and the usual accumulation of tidbits from the world of YA.
COMEDY!
Blog every day in April…
Maureen Johnson, whose Suite Scarlett comes out in paperback May 1, is counting down by blogging every day this month.
She started off today with a very funny post about shooting a Suite Scarlett video at New York’s famed Algonquin hotel:
“…the first thing I realized was that the entire setup looked amazingly like the set of Monsterpiece Theater.
“This is like Monsterpiece Theater,” I said. But everyone else was too busy taping things to me to pay any attention to this. I had a LOT of stuff taped to me. I felt like a refrigerator.”
Johnson has recruited other authors, like John Green, to the daily bloggery (and vloggery!). Readers can add their own posts on this ning.
Advice on boys, mean girls, and whatever…
Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries) and Michele Jaffe (Bad Kitty) answer reader questions and wax girlish about the pressures of teendom.
COMPLAINTS!
Battle of the Books angst…
If you’ve been following Paul’s Kidlit Roundups, you know all about the upcoming Battle of the (Kids’) Books, School Library Journal’s kid lit answer to ToB. Author Jill Wolfson (Cold Hands, Warm Heart) got a little huffy about the contest this week on her blog:
“It’s all supposed to be fun and Oscar-ish, a real buzz builder, I suppose. But come on! Really? I’ve been storming around the house all morning, cranky as hell, muttering to the cat and saying things like:
Do we really need one more meaningless contest that winds up deciding nothing? Which is better Octavian Nothing or Disreputable History? Red or Blue? Pizza or Spaghetti? Hasn’t the Newbery already made this completely arbitrary decision once this year?
How many times do we need to hear about the same handful of books? Oh no, not yet another analysis of the joys of Graveyard Book?!”
(via Read Roger.)
Cliffhanger-osis…is there a cure?
In The Guardian, Imogen Russell Williams bemoans the plague of cliffhanger endings in YA and children’s series:
“The woeful thing is that cliffhanger-osis tends to attack good books – novels strong enough for Potter-hungry publishers to offer multiple-book deals – and so is both frustrating and unnecessary. I hate the feeling of falling-stomached betrayal I get when I reach the last page of a book and experience the ‘”freeze-frame” effect of a cliffhanger. It’s a sensation I’ll take pains to avoid in the future.”
Paperbacks vs. Hardbacks
Justine Larbalestier (How to Ditch Your Fairy) speaks about how bloggers have changed the publishing landscape and praises paperback-first publishing:
“Guess what frequently happens to books that don’t sell in hardcover? They aren’t published in paperback. They don’t get their second shot. This has happened to many wonderful books, which despite awards and glowing reviews didn’t sell, and thus the publisher decides that a paperback version is not viable. Holly Black’s first book Tithe didn’t sell well in hardcover, but sold spectacularly in paperback. What if her publisher hadn’t taken the risk?”
TIDBITS!
Colleen on Guys Lit Wire highly, highly recommends Funny How Things Change, Melissa Wyatt’s latest novel about teens in a West Virginia coal town.
On Galley Cat, Jeff Rivera (Forever My Lady) picks Dream Jordan’s Hot Girl as his YA “book of color” of the day.
And, some urgent breaking news about The Graveyard Book on Collecting Children’s Books. (thanks, Monica!)
Happy fools’ day, all.–Heidi
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