Switching over

It's official. My imprint, Carolrhoda, has a blog, so that's where I'll be. Please come visit.

carolrhoda.blogspot.com

Alice Pope Interviews Me

Check it out.

More Mondays like these please!

Last Monday, Maggie Stiefvater's Lament nabbed a starred review in PW. This Monday, a book whose success I'm inheriting, Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman with illustration by Ofra Amit hit on the CBS Early Show, and The Dust of 100 Dogs, a book whose success I now watch as spectator, landed an awesome, nuanced review on Jen Robinson's Book Page.

Excuse me while I go buy a lottery ticket.

Painful but necessary reading

If you're a new author, this will not necessarily be a fun blog post to read, but you should anyway. Wiley marketing director Andrew Wheeler muses on "skips." A lot of what he says about SFF applies neatly to YA. [Via Galleycat]

A Good Thing

Marshall Cavendish Children's Books is launching a "classics" line, mining the out-of-print backlist and reissuing titles with new covers and "Classics" branding. The "classics" part is whatever-able in my opinion, but that aside, I'm really encouraged to see YA in particular gain some perspective by adding strong voices from the past to the conversation. Really, the only reason many of these books were OP was that their packaging got stale. Fix the covers, and the writing can find a whole new audience. (Speaking of covers, it would be a brave and clever publisher who included the original cover on the inside of the reissues. I think that would be fascinating.)

The death of explicitly "for teen" publications

[Warning: amateur media analysis follows.]

TeenPeople and ElleTeen are long gone and now CosmoGirl is joining them in that great big glossy magazine rack in the sky. 

What to make of this? There are more teens in the US than at any other time and they control an enormous share of discretionary income and exercise terrific influence over media. So why are their magazines closing? I think the answer is simple. Our magazines are now their magazines. The teen versions are redundant. Why bother with the kiddie version when you can have the adult one? It's not so much that they've failed with the teen audience but that the teen audience is too important a factor for companies to address exclusively with subsidiary brands.

The Times on teens of the times.

The Sunday Styles section has an interesting piece on teens and consumerism in this maybe-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket economy. The article is explicitly interesting, but I also think the article reeks of the fascinating observer's paradox endemic to all reporting about teenagers. For example:

After class, one girl said: “We are so being bribed. I’m bad at math but if I get an A, my father will give me a designer bag.”

And yet, she added shyly: “I love the gifts but I’d really like to spend time with him. But my parents are working harder than ever and they’re so worried. I don’t want to force him to spend time with me. I can be a real earache.”

I'm not sensing insincerity here so much as an awareness of audience and the role she's supposed to play. It all seems a little too perfect.