Kidlitcon 2012: The Bloggers Take Manhattan

This past weekend was one of my favorite weekends of the whole year. It was KidlitCon, in which bloggers gather to talk about books, blogging, and the intersection of the two. There's also many hijinx and some drinking of alcoholic beverages.

Every year, a different city is selected and different bloggers organize it, making each KidlitCon a unique experience. This year, it was New York City, and it was put together by Betsy Bird of A Fuse #8 Production and Monica Edinger of Educating Alice.

On Friday, we were treated to publisher previews, which were apparently Monica's brainchild, as well as her blood, sweat, and tears. No word on the proportion of tears to blood and sweat. I attended the Simon and Schuster preview in the morning, and the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt one in the afternoon. I heard about a lot of exciting books coming up, and got a few advanced reader copies to take home. More valuable than that, however, was meeting publisher peeps and talking with them.

At Simon and Schuster, we got the chance to see the research and art that goes into one of Megan McCarthy's appealing nonfiction picture books. She shared with us some of the things she had to do in order to get the pictures and info she needed for her next opus, coming out Summer of 2013. (Hint: illicit photography was involved.)

At the Houghton Mifflin, we discussed Common Core and how books can be used in the classroom. For those of you not in the know, Common Core is the newest thing in education circles. Basically, it's an upgraded set of standards for teachers to plan their lessons by. Of particular interest is that it emphasizes nonfiction reading in language arts, which means librarians get to haul out all the incredibly awesome nonfiction on our shelves. We also briefly chatted about e-galleys vs print ARCs. I was interested to hear that they limit their e-galley distribution just as they do their print galleys, and they were interested to hear that I actually prefer e-galleys.

By the bye, I've since heard from others that they prefer print, so now I'm interested in the topic. How many of you like e-galleys better, print ARCs better, or don't really care as long as you get to read a good book? I may actually do a blog post. Craziness, I know.

On Friday night, the bloggers en masse descended on a midtown restaurant, decimated their sushi bar (Actual quote from a blogger who would prefer to remain anonymous [me]: "Oh, I'll try this one, it's pink!"), and heard Grace Lin speak about her journey from art school to children's-book-illustration. I hear tell that she came into the city with a very small baby and a very large Sasquatch (also in attendance) just to talk to us, and I can't help but feel flattered. We also got the chance to purchase Starry River of the Sky a few days before it was officially on the shelves. If you think we were all over that, you would be right.

Next time: How All The Bloggers astonished Maureen Johnson, and this particular one creeped her out a little bit.

I'll Take Squicky Article Titles for 100, Alex

Apparently, Alloy Wants to Own Teenage Girls. Don't they know that's illegal in four out of five civilized countries?

In case you're unfamiliar with the company, Alloy is the media empire that's behind such book series as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Gossip Girl, and lots more outside of books. According to this article, it's their stated intention to grab the teenage girls of America and get all the money they can out of them.

I would launch into a good ol' railing post, except that I've read a lot of Alloy's produced books, and . . . um . . . a lot of them are pretty good. Even more of them (ahem GOSSIP GIRL ahem) are, like, waaaay addictive! Whatever their reasons for doing it, at least they're paying attention to the quality of the product.

Still, this makes me feel all squicky. Weigh in!

Sign of the Times

If ever you needed visual proof of the rising profile of YA, have a look at the "Deals" column in Publisher's Weekly for this week. Half the deals mentioned are for YA series, with a couple of MG novels thrown into one deal. Pretty snazzy.

And hey, more Lisa McMann! Always a good thing.

Thanks to a tweet from @lisa_mcmann.

Series Questions

So I've been cogitating on series lately. The reason for this cogitation (which should only be attempted by a trained professional, with spotters) is that I'm reading the second-latest in a long-running series that I won't name because really the question is not about that series, it's about series qua series, and I've descended into pretentious Latin that I may not in fact be using correctly, oh god, help me.

*slap!*

Ahem. I promise, no more sentences like that.

So what kicked off all this babbling was that I started the book and went, "Oh, more of this stuff." And then I went, "Uhoh." Because the main character is genuinely a lot of fun and spunky to the max and all that, but I was like, "Really, kid? Again? Do you ever learn? Like, ever?"

I've noticed this with other series, too, especially the ones that get up to about four or five books with no end in sight. I'd argue (and some may argue with me) that the Harry Potter series actually escaped this. Yeah, there was a certain formula. Important elements always included Voldemort, DADA teacher, infirmary visits (god, that kid got banged up), Ron and Hermione, Dumbledore, and often Quidditch. It was a Harry Potter book, so you knew all this was going to happen. But Rowling kept raising the stakes and Harry kept encountering situations and choices that pushed him out of his comfort zone, and ours. Can you imagine first-year Harry doing what seventh-year Harry did? Not me.

It may be the Harry Potter thing, it may be the Will of the Almighty Dollar, but series seem to be longer-running than ever lately. And they're thick books. It's not just the Magic Treehouse model anymore, a whole row of 100-pagers that you can skip through. What this means is that, more than ever, I'm getting the Oh This Again feeling. I'm a completist, so it takes quite a bit to stop me reading the rest of the series, but I'm starting to re-think that.

At what point does a series lose the pull, that Oooh, What's S/He Going to Do Now and become More of the Same? What has an author done that has pulled it out for you?

Reviewers, Amateur and Otherwise

A few weeks back, Betsy Bird posted a piece at Fuse #8 about the Amazon VINE program, which offers free books to members in return for reviews. She discussed certain things that unsettled her about the program, the titles were offered to participants, and the reviews generated. A lot of people who are part of the program stopped by and weighed in.

Now, Amazon VINE and similar programs are being discussed on other blogs. I'll leave that to them. Myself, I wanted to take note of a certain tone that seemed to run through the comments.

One of Betsy's initial concerns was about--well, let her say it.

You see, on the children's literature side of things, the people submitting reviews are often getting products for kids that require a subtle hand. And when they find that the book they're reading isn't Goodnight Moon Redux, they can get negative. Not critically constructive. Not helpful in their feedback about what does and does not work. Just mad.

This I agree with, and I took note of the response, which boiled down to: "We're (or they're) not professionals. You shouldn't hold us (them) to professional standards."

So what are professional standards? I'll guess that they mean reviews like you find in the New York Times, or Kirkus, or any other number of publications that compensate their reviewers. (Even at print journals, not all reviewers are paid in cold hard direct deposits, which was one of the things swirling around the FTC stuff last month.) You generally expect--nay, demand--that these reviews are fair and balanced. Sometimes they're analytical on a story level, sometimes they make considered recommendations of appropriate audience.

But in all cases, they step back from the book. Whether or not they're getting paid in money, books, or even the thrill of having their name in print, they're writing their review from a different position than somebody just reacting to the book.

This argument about professional standards gets at something that the kidlitosphere chews on every so often. We do this for the love of it, and we do this as ourselves. I'm not writing for Kirkus in exchange for $$, I'm writing for Confessions of a Bibliovore . . . just 'cuz. Do independence and volunteer basis give us carte blanche to write one-line reviews? Of course not. Because we do this for the love of it, and we know people read our blogs, we try to step back just as the professionals do, and produce thoughtful, balanced reviews that aren't knee-jerk first reactions. We all have our own style--I'll be the first to admit that my weird jokes wouldn't make it in Kirkus, for instance. But there's a wide spectrum of quality between review journals and "This book sucked, don't buy it. Love, me."

So much for bloggers. What about Viners, or LibraryThing Early Reviewers, or any of the other programs out there? As the name posits, they are early reviewers. They're the first ones to dole out the rating, and the ones who are most likely to influence what other people think. No, they're not getting paid, except in the chance to read a book for free before everybody else. But their position of being the first reviewers, and ones who are highlighted when others decide whether to read the book or not, should affect the review. Not positively or negatively, but the style. Why did you hate it? Why did you love it? Why did you want to whack that girl upside the head with the Clue Bat?

In the interest of transparency, I should note that I'm part of the LibraryThing Early Reviews program, through which I get about one book a month. I'm not the best at reviewing those and usually only post them at LT. Having written this post, I'm feeling kind of guilty about that and resolving to do better.

I want to add that I'm not trying to bash on Viners or LT Early Reviewers, or anything like that. It's difficult to write a review, even for a book you loved (or hated!) It's work. While I hear that Viners are experienced Amazon reviewers, it still takes a lot of time and thought to do a well-rounded review, and it's probably tempting to jot down the first thoughts in order to fulfill the requirements of the program. But I also think that people should be aware not only of their own opinions, but of the audience that will be reading their reviews and the context in which they will be read.

Finally I'd like to say that, no, nobody gets paid for blogging or early reviewing. At best we get free books, which are more of an experience than an object. But--cereal boxes and sporting gear endorsements aside--the only thing that Olympians get is a trip to a different country, and maybe a lump of metal on a ribbon.

YA, MG, and Blurry Borders

Back in August, the blog MiG Writers assembled a number of opinions about YA, MG, and what makes them different. They discuss such distinctions as the age of the protagonist, the wordcount of the novel, and the focus of the story itself. There are a lot of differing opinions gathered in one place. For instance, the definitive wordcount of YA novels is given as anywhere from 40k to "oh, heck, these days anything goes." Check out the post for more thought-provoking contradictions. There is a wind-up at the end of the article that seeks to distill and resolve it all.

The article is aimed at writers, but I think it's also interesting for librarians, teachers, and kidlit lovers in general.

It is a blurry line, as anyone who's ever had to decide where to put that could-be-MG, could-be-YA novel. Some libraries have even gone to an additional "tween" distinction--stuff too YA for the MGs but too MG for the YAs. And of course, kids themselves rarely stick to one section. It's Harriet the Spy one day, then maybe some Princess Diaries tomorrow.

As regular readers know, I'm on the Round 2 SFF panel for the Cybils. Now this one's unusual in that we'll be judging both MG and YA novels, and giving the Cybil to one in each category. It's not our job to decide which is which--that's already been hashed out by the most excellent adminstrators. But I'm keeping this discussion in mind as I look forward to judging after the first of the year.

How do you decide if the book in your hands is YA or MG?

Twittered by Greg Pincus of The Happy Accident.

The Next Big Thing Has Feathers

Some time back, a blogger posted the question, what's the Next Big Thing? We're tired of vampires, so who gets the next ride on the hot-topic carousel? We said it would be werewolves, mummies, and zombies. Well, we got a little of each (though I'm still waiting for the swoony romantic novel with the bandage problems), but now it seems that angels are next on the list. An editor ponders the appeal over at PW:

“The young books like [Sharon Creech's The Unfinished Angel] are using angels to suggest the world can be a better place,” said Kate Jackson, editor-in-chief of HarperCollins Children's Books. In YA books, however, she believes angels “are a symbol of forbidden love. What's more forbidden than having a romance with someone who's not human?”

Not to mention he's got a really powerful boss.

I joke, but there do seem to be some swoony possibilities in angels. About ten years ago, there was a little explosion of angels in romance novels. At the time, I couldn't fathom it, but now it makes sense. There's the fearsome goodness, for one. There's the hint of superpowers. There's the feeling that your love interest has a higher calling, and is involved in Big Things. Hopefully for the story, this means that you get mixed up in Big Things too. (Of course, all that's upended when the angel in question is fallen, and that's even more fun.) And anybody's who's seen Mischa Collins as the angel Castiel on the TV show "Supernatural" (you're welcome) knows that being angelic doesn't mean you're all fair and pasty and go around strumming the harp all day.

Will the vampires turn to dust? (Ha, see what I did there?) I'm sure all those trends from the first paragraph will hang on for awhile, especially as the New Moon adaptation comes out this fall. And of course, there is the caveat to every trend--a really good book, even if it's waaaay out there, is going to find its readers.

Myself, I'm hoping that the upcoming angel books will also be books that ask questions about faith, religion, and morality without being so heavy you could tie them to the feet of your worst enemy and toss them in the East River. What would you most like to see in the upcoming angel books?

Swapping, Mooching, and Buying

Put on your crash helmets, pumpkins, here's another rambling post about the contents of my brain.

I'm a member of both PaperbackSwap.com and BookMooch.com (Hello, fellow Swappers and Moochers!). About twenty percent of my books are obtained in this way. The remaining eighty percent are library copies. (Every so often an ARC sneaks in there, but not so much anymore.)

Recently, the owner of BookMooch.com posted this on their blog: Mooch Before You Buy. In short, he proposes this: authors to post copies of their books on BookMooch, Moochers to do what they do best. If they don't like the book, just pass it on. If they liked it, give a little donation to the author. The size of the donation would depend on the amount they liked the book.

This is somewhat similar to LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, although that one trafficks in reviews and ARCs instead. It's also not that different from publishers and authors sending books to bloggers, although with both those the book-givers are aiming for publicity rather than straight-up dollars and cents. But doesn't it boil down to the same thing in the end? Hmmm.

Authors reading, would you do this? Non-authors reading, do you think that authors doing this would improve their overall sales?

Pants on Fire

The latest kerfuffle in the kidlitosphere centers around Justine Larbalestier's novel, Liar. Or more accurately, around the cover. Have a gander at the cover to your right.

Now read the description of the main character that the author herself gives on her blog:

Micah is black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.

Now look at the cover again. Erm . . . that's what you might call a fundamental disconnect.

There have been kerfuffles before, but this time even PW caught wind of it. They went asking around and got this shriek-worthy quote:

“The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar,” said Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers, who worked on Liar. “Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?”

In a word? YES. There are unreliable narrators and then there's just a big ol' mess where nothing hangs together. What makes unreliable narrators so tricky for readers is that there's truth and lies all mixed together. If you make it all lies, then, well, let Justine tell you:

One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

She goes on to position this misstep in a long history of white-washing covers and ghettoizing black fiction because "black fiction doesn't sell," and just why that perception doesn't hang together.

If you want to explore this even deeper, check out Jen Robinson's roundup or this post at BoingBoing, more particularly the comments. There's one comment that examines and deconstructs all those prior like a debate captain at a kindergarten roundup.

Summer and Scholastic

So Scholastic is doing some nice stuff for summer--stuff like giveaways, author chats, even reading for the world record. The web site is pretty kid-appealing, too--at least, I think so, although admittedly I've been out of the target demographic for awhile now. If you've got bored kidkins in the house, give it a try.

Coming Attractions from Harlequin Teen

So remember how awhile back, I had a post about the new Harlequin Teen line, and there were actual, like, comments from Trisha of the YAYAYAs, and I replied, and it was just like a real blog?

Well, pretend you do.

Anyway, Trisha has posted this link to a meet-the-editor and a rundown of what's coming up from the Harlequin Teen line. It seems to be pretty heavy on the girl-oriented supernatural, or at least the article leads off that way. Some authors are new to me, some I know from their adult novels. They all look like books that I'd pick up and take a second look at in B&N, but also books that I would go, "Harlequin? Really?" and examine the spine closely just in case it peels off. I guess we'll see how they sell.

Points to Harlequin for jacket design though--the two covers they show don't have any kind of "line design" feel about them. I kind of wondered if they would have a specific Harlequin Teen cover style. Harlequin/Silhouette are the queens of distinctive cover styles on their series romances, and that works really, really well for those, but it wouldn't have for the eclectic, teen-oriented brand they seem to be aiming for with HT. So I'm glad they gave that a miss. Good show, art department.

All else aside, that Soul Screamers series looks friggin' awesome.

Tweens on E-Readers

EarlyWord found this one. I've done a lot of babbling over at KTLA about e-picture books and some on here about eARCs, but this is just the kind of thing we should hear before we start talking about doing away with all the treekilling. In a column at YPulse entitled, Checking the Pulse: Tweens and Books, this question was mentioned:

"if someone bought you an eReader like the Amazon Kindle would you read books on it?" 64% responded "what's an eReader?"

And this is not an illiterate population either. The reading habits of the tweens surveyed (defined in the article as ages 8-15) warmed the cockles of my withered and blackened little librarian's heart. Makes me wonder if ebooks are really the tsunami of the future or just an additional medium that will take its place alongside paper books and audiobooks.

Ann Rinaldi Defends Historical Fiction

From PW, natch: In Defense of Historical Fiction by Ann Rinaldi.

We've been hearing that "kids don't read historical" for years, and yet the historical keeps on chuggin'. Rinaldi talks about why.

Young people write to me daily to tell me they have grown up with my books, that my books got them through some of the worst times of their lives, that when they visited historical places with their parents they already knew everything there was to know about them, that when they studied history in school they found out it was no longer boring. That they now understood about their country. And finally that, reading my books, they had had fun and enjoyment and not realized they were learning. And wow, did that neat stuff really happen? And when is the next one coming out?

You tell 'em, Ann.

PW on Multi-platform Books

You kids today. In my time, we had to read books by hand. Using our fingers to turn the pages. Video? Audio? Pah! We made video and audio in our heads! Sometimes we got a stuffed animal with the book, and ya know what? We were happy! You're just spoiled, the lot of you. Get off my dang lawn!

All old-fartness aside, there does seem to be a rise in the number of books that have multimedia components--not merely tie-ins, but necessary elements to understanding and following the story.

Scholastic's 39 Clues series was in the nature of an experiment, but it's an experiment that a number of other publishers are trying as well. Check out this story on multimedia publishing over at Publisher's Weekly for more.

What think'st thou? Of course, it's all about the almighty dollar, but are publishers pandering to increasingly fleeting juvenile attention, or are they capitalizing on the new literacy?

Amazon Epic Fail

Most of you have probably heard about this one already. I woke up to a flurry of Twitters about it.

Amazon.com, in all its wisdom, has decided to strip the sales ranks of books they consider to contain "adult" situations. What does this mean, other than that the authors suddenly have one less thing to obsess over?

Amazon's search results, lists of top sellers, and even suggested books (the "others have bought . . ." thing you get on a particular book's page) are produced using sales ranks. So a book with no sales rank effectively has no power on Amazon, a website that has made seventy-six-squillion dollars (conservative estimate) by spoiling you for choice the minute you express a preference in books, movies, and everything else they sell.

I went poking around and found a list (apparently still being added to) of books that have had their Amazon sales ranks stripped due to containing adult content.

Among those listed are the lesbian-moms classic Heather Has Two Mommies, Alex Sanchez's Rainbow trilogy (Boys, High, and Road) and Linas Alsenas's Gay America (which I happen to know for a fact contains no explicit content). Where's the "adult" in this equation?

This isn't applying across the board yet. Many of Sanchez's other books (most of which have gay characters if not outright romance) still retain their sales ranks. But it's probably only a matter of time.

Some heterotica has made the list (a dubious distinction) but it's overwhelmingly populated by GLBT titles. Which means? "Adult," in this case, is mainly code for "stuff about those nasty gays and lesbians."

You know what happens when a company like Amazon does this? A teen web surfer, trying to find books which reflect his or her experience, hears, "You're alone. You're a freak. Your sexual orientation, or that of your friend/mom/cousin/next door neighbor, is something you should keep behind closed doors, because everybody else is too grossed out by it. Here, have a book about healthy, normal, heterosexual kids who never, ever, ever think about someone of the same sex THAT way. Euuwwwwww. Does your mother know you're making this search?"

I've been an Amazon Associate for awhile now, linking from my reviews and monthly reading roundups. Mainly it's a way to show the covers and give more info about the book because I've made so little in kickbacks that I've never even gotten a check from them. But I know they have made money from me. If you know of a way I can break the huge number of links I've made from my blog to Amazon, let me know in the comments.

For the world's most pervasive book seller to censor in this way, directly targeting the GLBT population, is nothing short of disgusting. Fix this, Amazon.

Young Sherlock Holmes Books

It doesn't have anything to do with the movie from the 80's, by the way.

Apparently the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle has approved the writing of a 3-book YA series about Sherlock Holmes' youth.

The books will begin in the 1860s with the fourteen-year-old Sherlock sent to spend the summer with eccentric relatives as his soldier father heads for India. Sherlock is drawn into a sinister international plot with a brilliantly imagined villain at its heart.

While I got this bit off a British website, it did say world rights, so I have hopes we'll see them over here about the same time. They're tentatively scheduled for next spring.

See, I Told You Guys I Had This Article

Found this one (of course) in PW: Books for Film in Bologna. It's a little piece on the preponderance of filmy types at the recent children's book fair in Bologna. Now, besides the fact that it was, y'know, in Italy, there was good reason for their all-expenses-paid trip:

“Kids' and YA publishing have strong footholds in the top Hollywood films” these days, said Gotham Group manager and producer Eddie Gamarra. And it seems to make increasing sense for studios to pursue children's books: looking at the top 10 grossing films of 2008, Gamarra said, “all of them were family movies.”

Why would that be? Read on . . .

[K]ids' books may lend themselves more easily to the medium, said Pender-Coplan. For one thing, “they travel in a way that adult books might not.” Stumbling blocks for adult books—whether a book is '“too American,” for example—are less relevant to children's books, which tend to mine universal themes.

I always thought that the relative length of a children's book also had something to do with it, meaning less to cut. But of course, now somebody's gonna beat me with a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and call me wrong.

Harlequin Teens

I've been meaning to post this little snippet for awhile now, so when PW ran a story, it was just the kick in the pants I needed.

The publisher Harlequin, best known for their romance novels, is hoping to slice themselves a piece of the YA pie (mmm, pie) with a new line aimed at teens. I would be inclined to snark, but two things stop me: one, that I read a lot of romance myself and that would just be hypocritical, and two, that the ladies from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books would hunt me down and gut me. I'm scared of the smart bitches, y'all.

While the Harlequin Teen line does seem to be focusing on the girls, they don't seem to be (as one would expect) solely teen romances. Instead, the line is going for

a spectrum of genres including fantasy, contemporary, historical, science fiction and—no surprise—romance.

They're also hoping to get market info directly from the girls via a website that asks for direct input. We'll see how that works out.

They have actually done YA before, with Kimani Tru, a not-totally-romance offshoot of their African-American romance line. Kimani Tru hasn't set the world on fire, but from what I've seen of their titles, they've done an all-right job appealing to teen girls.

So what do you think? Are they going to get a nice big piece of the pie, with whipped cream on top? Or just the icky, dry pieces of crust?

ARCs at Shelf Space

Liz Burns of A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy has an article up at Shelf Space about ARCs, or Advance Reader Copies, the book blogger's favorite perk (okay, well, mine). She talks to various people involved in publishing about the practice and uncovers some facts, like the real difference between a galley and an ARC.

"[Galleys] are for hot, hot, hot books where the publisher wants to generate buzz," Farrey says. "They're meant to get people talking about the book itself, not necessarily to generate reviews (although that does happen too)." With the recent cutbacks in publishing, Farrey speculates that we will start seeing fewer galleys and more ARCs; and that they will be done digitally, via PDF.

I'd heard about the PDF thing recently. While I've always been a fan of the paper copies that I can lug around in my purse and thwack impertinent patrons with, I have to admit that the idea of e-ARCS (EARCs? Now I'm just getting silly) is more palatable than I thought.

I have an iPod Touch with a free e-reader called Stanza on it. I don't have a lot of books on it (yet) but it's super-handy for grocery store lines and the like. I've even found myself curled up on the couch hunched over my Touch, heedless of time passing, just like with a paper copy. It's lighter and the experience is much the same once you get used to nudging a screen with your thumb instead of turning a page.

Less thwackable though.

The other positive about e-ARCs is that they aren't as environmentally wasteful. While I often give my used ARCs away to kids at my library, I even more often find myself staring at a stack of ARCs that nobody was interested in, steeling myself to toss them in the trash. It's less painful to just delete a file.

What do you guys think? Is this the wave of the future for ARCs, or just for utter techies like me?