Books are Popping Out All Over!

October 4

 Junior Literary Guild Selection 

Horn Book— "an authentically childlike perspective"

  Kirkus— A a deft examination of 

the pressures of income inequlity

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PW star "dramatic and genuine"   

WSJ— "a valient struggle with temptation"

SLJ— "Starts a convrersation about right and wrong"

Betsy Bird— "This picture book . . . finally! 

  October 11

 October 11

 

 BOARD      +        BOOK

 BOARD      +        BOOK

 BOARD      +        BOOK

 BOARD      +        BOOK

 BOARD      +        BOOK

 BOARD      +        BOOK

Wow, listen: PEN granted us membership! However stringent its appraisal (anyone know?), we are boasting and toasting no matter. STNY salutes PEN's ardor and mission.Read PW's 5-17 Shelf Awareness on Monday's PEN GALA— at the Natural History museum, the Natural History museum!* 

Our Chicago BEA was extra productive last week (without our NYC competition congesting the place). We like to complain that the autograph lines disrupt a good meandering, but we like mixing with Authors, not only booksellers

Here's a special bulletin: STNY will reopen SUBMISSIONS This summer! Notice how we grant ourselves a 90-day window to do it.

*Here we reveal ourselves (as did PW), blithely omitting in New York City. 

Hachette Head on Amazon, E-Books, Bookstores

Arnaud Nourry, Chairman and CEO of Hachette Livre discusses last year's impasse with Amazon and the future for print and e-books

We welcome Mr. Nourry's perspective. We need his candor directed to e-book EARNINGS: What is the breakdown? For retailers, publishers, and authors. The conversation still circles PRICING, just like five years ago. Publishers virtually admitted that author royalties subsidized their investments building infrastructure for the new business. E-opearations are now established and running. Can we start talking about the author's value and livelihood?

STORYTELLERS! Let's Review

Q  Why do you read a story?                               A  To find out what's going to happen. 

We read to see how a conflict will be resolved.
Conflict creates story. Without conflict, no story. This #1 Fundamental bears chewing over.
Therefore
It is critical to track the ebb and flow of conflict in your story. If you can't, you have a problem. Your story might lag, side-track, lack focus, wobble, crash and burn. Whatever, without clearly delineating conflict and resolution, your story cannot gel with full force, if it can at all.
Therefore
If you chart your plot, make Conflict your very first column. Authors might consider location or action or relationships as more important to keep straight. They are not, not until your story is organized into a plot where conflict bounces up and down, start to concluding resolution.

Now, any questions?

And Those Foreign Editions

They just keep on a-coming! This is Ryan Gebhart's 2014 debut (Candlewick, Joan Powers, editor). 

The declining Euro, of course, means it is advantageous to use U.S. currency when negotiating money terms.

Have We Carried On . . .

. . . about the outstanding launch of Ame Dyckman's WOLFIE THE BUNNY, illustrated by growingly beloved Zach OHora (Little, Brown, with Alvina Ling and Bethany Strout editing)  No? Get a load of this!

☆ Horn Book

☆ Publisher's Weekly

☆ Booklist

☆ School Library Journal

What's more, look what New York Media Works wrote about last week's 90-Second Newbery Film Festival at the New York Public Library

Ame Dyckman and Zachariah OHora’s 

“Wolfie the Bunny” steals the show!
(Of course the Newbery is not one of the awards we are hoping for, but still....)

AND

It was an Amazon Editor's Pick

AND

No less a personage than NYPL's Betsy Bird called it "the most charming picutrebook published so far this year" in ye ol' Huffington Post.
AND
Look for reviews this Sunday in The New York Times, U.S.A.Today, and The Chicago Tribune

IN SUM

Ready the confetti! We have a hit!

The Schneider Family Book Award!

THREE CHEERS 

W I N N E R !

MLK

Maybe because of police racism these past months— rather, attention to police racism these past months, today we are especially appreciative of Martin Luther King, a great American.

2 0 1 5

H A P P Y    N E  W   Y E A R 

to our peeps and pals!

Let's kick butt!— except not today. Today let's to acknowledge the greatness of MARTIN LUTHER KING. 

What We Want, Writers....

Although STNY remains closed to unsolicited submissions, we do consider work by authors personally recommended by our writer pals and editors. The personally is important because it means we trust the source (whom we implore to aim high).

Big drag, we know, but thus tis.

We select manuscripts and authors for originality, excellence, and the strength to engage the present publishing establishment.

We want writers to appreciate today's book landscape against the busy media background. We want

• Quick pacing
• Vivid images
• Bold storytelling

As to content, here are random present interests

• Malice, whether in murder or menace, in realistic urban or rural settings
• Complex villains with credible psychologies
• Poverty represented as a matter-of-fact background character in a story not about poverty
• Unsentimental characters who are not self-pitying
• Realistic stories that go deep into a character's day-to-day life inside non-European countries
• Non-fiction that posits a worldwide story

Our advice: do not pull your punches, these are not subtle times.

Pacific Coast Children's Writers Workshop

We and the virtually perfect Melanie Donovan of Knopf  (virtually perfect only because otherwise it would sound weird) joined a group of writers a couple weeks back in a beach-y condo complex on  what was said to be the beach— personally, we could scarcely look out the window.

Under review were novels and partial novels with subjects like the Russian Revolution, gay dads, suicide, savant talent, summer romance, a Fae, crime, a mermaid, time travel— perhaps 60% contemporary realism and 40% fantasy constituted our own collection. (No devil worship or gang violence, surprisingly.)

From our point of view, the workshop was a success: we requested a goodly number of manuscripts we and Melanie worked on. The all-important, all-determining revisions are underway. We are eager (not anxious, as it is misused) to see what results. Keep your eyes glued here to follow the story.

Our RED MAPLE AWARD Nominee

LOOK WHERE ZOMBOY IS GOING!

To claim The RED MAPLE AWARD!*

This is part of Canada's largest reader's choice award program— 250,000+ readers, a full ten percent of that country's population.

*This is us hoping. The winner will be announced..., be announced..., hmm... let's see..., in...  in... May. May?! The anticipation will be killing us, slowly. Look here for updates....

YALSA's A-Nominating!

THREE CHEERS for STNY's 

TWO 2014 ENTRANTS!

                  

Our Entry in the Xmas Books Sweepstakes!

SET 

YOUR

CLOCKS!

The sequel 

October 14! 

Last year, it was a Monstrous Parody of  Madeline, namely Frankenstein, BUT this year Illustrious Rick Walton and super funny Nathan Hale are coming at you with 

   a   h o l l y - j o l l y   m o n s t e r   f e s t !    

Be warned: you will laugh your head off. which is a plot point. Oh, you say? Didn't know? Well!  Better catch-up on your reading.

Attention Must be Paid!

Here we see 

the very hammy Ame Dyckman with seemingly reasonable Zach O'Hara at the Princeton Book Fair last Saturday. Ostensibly, Ame was signing BOY + BOT

(Knopf) and TEA PARTY RULES (Viking). Zach, we presume, signed his own creations, which therefore could not but be exceptional. Alas! As was widely reported, the two ungovernables were caught pitching one of their upcoming titles from Little, Brown. WOLFIE THE BUNNY is getting unusual pre-pub attention. But it cannot be ordered yet! Where's the royalty in that, we ask you?

Award Reward

GAIL GILES GIRLS LIKE US made the National Book Award long list. Hoooray! Ten titles. The short list, called the finalists, will be announced Oct 15. Five titles. The winner will be announced at the Nov 19 award dinner.

Hey, Look! Back in Print!

This super cool 1982, jazz-inflected recording of HONEY, I LOVE, poems by Eloise Greenfield was re-released! Jazz man Byron Morris serves up the grooves. Let's do a happy dance! HONEY, I LOVE is a classic. Harper has kept it in print T-H-I-R-T-Y  E-I-G-H-T  Y-E-A-R-S ! (You don't hear that everyday.) 

The recording comes from SHOUT! PRODUCTIONS, which is— guess where: J A P A N! A shout-out to SHOUT! PRODUCTIONS for bringing a beloved music-poetry mash-up, to a new generation. Arigato!

AND WE QUOTE

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs"  — ON WRITING, STEPHEN KING

Pen/Steven Kroll Picture Book Writing Award

And we're talking the SHORT LIST, too! (A very strong list this year.) The winner will be announced July 30. Naturally, the suspense is killing us.

The Simples Love the NYTimes!

Meet T HE   S I  M P L E S 

in this Sunday's NYT!