Carolrhoda Books Blog

The Lists

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:25:00 +0000

Congratulations to Steve Brezenoff and Ashley Hope Pérez.

Steve’s Brooklyn, Burning showed up Best Fiction for Young Adults and the Rainbow List Top Ten at ALA Midwinter.

Ashley’s What Can’t Wait also earned a spot on Best Fiction for Young Adults.

Carolrhoda Lab is a very proud imprint today.

A tradition we don’t need

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:25:00 +0000

I don’t watch any of the morning shows, and I never have, so I don’t miss this tradition and maybe I’m not comprehending something crucial here (but I doubt it).

So, explain to me how writers and publishing professionals telling the Today Show that it must have the Newbery and Caldecott winners on the program doesn’t make us look like the most irritating newbie manuscript submitter. You know the kind, the one whose manuscript is not a good fit for the publisher and who won’t take no for an answer. Is this not slightly embarrassing?

I find this second year of post ALAYMA Today-Show indignation even more irritating than it was last year because it’s threatening to become a tradition.

One of the things I love about the ALA awards is that they are so much a product of their committees’ hard and very serious work. We call them our Oscars, but they’re really nothing like the Oscars—and thank God for that. Can you imagine the rage in Hollywood if the best picture nominations went like the CSK for illustration this year or the Caldecott last year, with only one honor and one winner? Or better still, if best actor was like the Schneider, where the committee declined to pick a winner for children’s books? And even when I find it personally frustrating in the short term, I love that the Printz and the Newbery are nearly impossible to handicap these days. Meanwhile, the Oscars nominated nine movies for best picture this year, all usual suspects included, and if they could find a way to do more, they would.

The bottom line is the ALA awards have an integrity that is not well served by this sort of pleading.

2008, the year of the image

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:22:00 +0000

Three significant things happened for me in 2008: My son was born; I began working at Carolrhoda; and I got serious about photography. All three are actually quite related.

I wanted this job for lots of reasons, but one of them was so that I could make books that my son would be interested in now. I wanted to learn about photography because the first photos I took of my son after he was born were frustrating to me (I can’t quite bring myself to write disappointing, because they are of my son). And as a texty person jumping into the world of visual story telling, I felt like photography would be a way to engage that part of my brain so that I could communicate with illustrators in some way the resembles how I communicate with writers.

Photography has paid more dividends than that, though. There’s a world of adult visual storytelling through photos that’s been at least as beneficial to how I approach text. A few photo books leap to mind as being just as inspiring for my inner prose artist as my inner visual artist:

Bruce Davidson’s Brooklyn Gang
Roy Decarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life
Robert Frank’s The Americans
The whole Vivian Maier story

When I’m stuck for something to say about a text, I now find myself turning to photography to reboot my imagination.

Prose people, tell me, what worldless things fuel your imaginations?

Problems Chip Hilton never had…

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:08:00 +0000

“If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won't be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.”

I remember when my father let me take all of his old Chip Hilton novels home to Michigan from his boyhood bedroom in Omaha, Nebraska. I remember reading them alongside Matt Christopher and various other sports novels of generations past (their datedness never struck me).

Sports fiction like this has been a part of kidlit for a very long time, of course, and franchises like Chip Hilton and Matt Christopher seem to be as immortal as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Indeed, in looking for familiar covers to the chip Hilton books on the web, I discovered that Chip was still a three-sport varsity athlete in new editions of the stories.

There is clearly something eternal about sports stories for kids, but I also think there’s something very important going on in the world of youth sports, and I really hope that books keep pace. I’ve written about this before, but it really hit home when I read this Grantland article by Jonah Lehrer about football from which comes the quote above. If you’re interest in sports and writing for children, I urge you to read it.

Trifurcation

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Read this.

I have said before, and I now feel more confident in saying it again: electronic picture books prove just how high tech paper picture books actually are and the conversion from print to digital is way trickier for picture books than for just about any other form. I think Shatzkin’s excellent overview is just more evidence.

Removing the paper element from a novel (“immersive reading” in Shatzkin parlance) does nothing or next to nothing to the content. The same cannot be said of picture books, where the constraints of paper bookmaking are built into the tradition of picture book creation. No novelist drafts for a trim size. Picture book artists most definitely sketch for an aspect ratio, if not a specific trim size. Form and content are damned near inseparable.

I am not in any way saying that there is no place in the world for electronic picture books. I am, however, saying that the transition to digital for picture books is going to look different and it might not even be a transition.

Poetry Friday

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:11:00 +0000

From “Sonic”:
… We kept breeding. They kept coming. More and more mice, more droppings, and then—cutting through the silken silence of the laboratory morning, clear as the glass window through which I saw my lover for the last time before he left me, as he left me, old as the oldest ova in my grandmother’s ovary, timid as a naked face, timid as a slipping-away tail, a hole, one tiny left turd—one sang.

-Beth Brezenoff

The whole thing is here.

Poetry Friday

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:39:00 +0000

I haven’t done one of these in forever, but Carrie Mesrobian sent me this extraordinary poem by Michael Hettich, more suitable to the opposite side of the year, but moving none the less.

This girl I hardly knew, taller than I was
and skinny, who made us boys
puff ourselves up and show off how far
we could throw rocks, or how many times
we could skip stones across the choppy water;
this awkward kid I’d never really spoken to
asked me one afternoon to swim across the lake with her.
We were sitting on the dock. It was chilly, but I said
I would do it, though the other side was hazy — almost
out of sight — and it would take us until dark
to make it there and back. So we dove in and started off…

Read the rest at The Sun Magazine.

I’m telling you…

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:30:00 +0000

…if we all insist on YA first and that the subgenres are just playthings any author can use as the mood suits her, we could have something like this.

NPR classical music commentator Fred Child on a cluster of genre eschewing, classically trained musicians in Brooklyn:

“You know, this really points to the fact that these musicians don't draw distinctions anymore between what used to be very sharply delineated genres: classical, pop, rock, jazz, folk. It's just music to these musicians, and they draw on whatever feels right for the moment, whatever feels right for the piece.”

It is, dare I say it, positively utopian.

Musing on YA and Apple and a headshot by my three-year-old son

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:03:00 +0000

All over at Hunger Mountain. Go read.

Is it just me?

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:39:00 +0000

Or is it getting a little listy in here?
Congratulations are in order for Steve Brezenoff and Carla Killough McClafferty. Steve’s Brooklyn, Burning made Kirkus’ Best of 2011 list and Carla’s The Many Faces of George Washington nabbed a spot on SLJ’s best-of sheet. Tutti bravi.

And it's not just Carolrhoda. My sister imprints are all listed up too. The Ferret's a Foot is a best graphic novel of 2011 for SLJ, and The Case of the Vanishing Golden Frogs landed on Booklist's best 2011 nonfic. Congratulations to Graphic Universe and Millbrook Press!

Stellar

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:34:00 +0000

To say I was happy to see a star next to the very first review for Blythe Woolston’s sophomore novel, Catch & Release, is an understatement. It’s always goose-bump inducing when a reviewer’s enthusiasm matches my own:

“…. This is not a romance, but a tale of two people thrown together after their world has been turned upside down. Each is unique, vividly complicated and true. Engaging writing and characters lift this above the typical clichéd story of disabled teen. Heartbreakingly honest.”
-Kirkus

This is not an easy novel. As a parent and a mild hypochondriac, the text itself was a little terrifying to read. But as an editor and the one who writes the first draft of the flap copy, summarizing this book was enormously challenging. A first draft of flap began this way:

“Survival is a funny thing. Take Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—MRSA to its friends. Humans hurl antibiotics by gallon at Staphylococcus. But a few survive—the strong ones. And they move their stories on down the road.”

A third of the way into the flap copy, and the only character I’ve introduced is lethal bacteria strain with an unpronounceable name. Ten drafts later, I seriously considered simply reproducing this helpful diagram Blythe sent while she was revising:

Don’t worry, when you see the book in person, you’ll see that we managed something more conventional and helpful (and, unsurprisingly, with more of Blythe’s words than any of ours).

Other aspects of the jacket and packaging were easier. Owners of The Freak Observer know designer Danielle Carnito likes to be a little creative with the foil stamping on the cover under the jacket—and, in this case, with the color of that cover (it’s the the only flesh-eating bacteria road novel with a pink cover and 1/26th of an alphabet picture book text hiding under the jacket).

Lordy, do I love this novel.

Information Not Decoration

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:50:00 +0000

After yesterday’s Twitter storm on ms prep, I thought I’d go over some of my routine and give a few thoughts on why aspects of it ought to become part of yours.

JV-level Manuscript Prep

These are the things you do that save an editor a couple minutes and require next to no technical skill.

First thing you need to do is reveal the formatting—meaning all the para marks (¶), spaces, tabs, and breaks. This is crtl-shift-8 (sorry, can’t remember if it’s the same in Mac). In the most recent Word, the button is here, on the far right of the paragraph box on the Home tab of the ribbon:

Now, you can see what you’re working on. Let’s get started.

1. Eliminate two spaces after a period or other terminal punctuation. Lots of writers are hardwired for this typewriter vestige, and I’m not going to go into why it’s unnecessary. Just trust me, it is. (Unless your editor explicitly tells you it’s necessary, but if you’re writing novels, I’d bet dollars to donuts that one-space will be the right call.) If breaking the habit in process wrecks your flow, then don’t worry about it while you’re drafting. Just find and replace when you’re done. The quickest way to get to find and replace in Word is to control/command F (depending on the version of Word, the button could be in several places on the screen. It’s on the far right of the Home tab of the ribbon in the most recent for Windows).

In the most recent Word for Windows, ctrl-f gets you:

As you can see, clicking on the drop down gets you to the more advanced find options. Hit replace to get:

In the lower left, hit more to get:

This is, as they say, where the magic happens. Killing your two-spaces is as simple as typing two spaces in the find-what field (literally, hit the spacebar twice—don’t worry that nothing seems to be there) and typing one space in the replace-with field. Hit replace all. You’ll get:

Don’t stop yet,though. Repeat the whole procedure. (Why? Well, if you’re perfectly consistent in your two-spacing, you’ll make no replacements on this second pass, but you’d be surprised how few are perfectly consistent.) Here’s what I got with the same manuscript on the second pass:

Keep going until you make no replacements.

This is basic junior varsity prep. Simple, right? Now, if you want to be one of those JVs whom the varsity coaches have their eyes on, you can …

2. Fix all the places where you used hard returns (hit the enter key, in other words) to create vertical spacing or breaks.

Why is this bad? Because it all has to come out eventually and your goal in the manuscript should be to convey your work and nothing else—information, not decoration. For example, let’s say you like to make the beginnings of your chapters look like the beginnings of chapters in a typeset book, so you start them halfway or more down the page by hitting enter a bunch of times:

And of course you throw an extra vertical space below the chapter number or title because that looks right too. (Suffice it to say, if you revealed the formatting on the InDesign document for a finished book with the same design outcome, you would not see a string of hard returns.)

Slightly more pernicious is using a bunch of hard returns to get a new page, like so:

This is basically the same problem when it comes to turning the manuscript into a book. You’ve added extraneous non-information for the purpose of decoration, and it will all have to come out. There are lots of ways to fix this, but the JV way (assuming you’ve got a novel with lots of chapters) is to go chapter by chapter (you can use find and search for the word “chapter.” For the varsity aspirant, you can enter “^p^p” in the find field (without the quotes. And ^ is shift-6). This will find every instance of two hard returns in a row (places where you hit enter twice).

For JV- and even varsity-level ms prep, I recommend not trying to do any sort of automatic replace at this step. Just find and fix manually. It’s too easy to wreak havoc with an unintended replace. It’s also a good way to go through the manuscript from a different perspective. I often notice more important editorial things when I’m doing this sort of near-mindless ms prep.

For the two circumstances I mentioned, the JV fixes are:

a. Start your chapters at the tops of pages. If this bothers you while you’re working, do it last.

b. Start new pages by inserting a page break at the end of the chapter. You can find page break under Insert in any version of Word I can think of. Ctrl-Return is the keyboard shortcut (aside to Microsoft. Why the hell do you say the shortcut is “Ctrl+Return” when on the keyboard that you manufacture, the key is labeled “Enter”?):

For some, double hard returns also appear when you make a break within a chapter:

As long as you’re consistent, this is OK, but my preference would be for something visible and unique to mark those sorts of breaks—even if the final book will only use space. For example:

This is a very easy find and replace for the designer. It’s impossible to miss at a glance, and—most critically--it can’t get hidden if it falls on page break. Your intent will be crystal clear to all who work on the book. Again, information, not decoration.

3. If there were a step three, it would be about the tab key, but Word tries to outsmart you with tabs, so this is generally less of a problem—or if it is, it’s harder for me to generalize about, so I’ll kick it down the road to a varsity post.

Why?

Isn’t all this an editor’s job? To an extent, yes, it is the editor’s job. But it’s also the editor’s job to make sure your words convey meaning, but you would never abdicate that role entirely just because the editor is going to do it also. You spellcheck and you sweat grammar. I check spelling and worry about grammar too. Duplication of effort is part of the deal.

More critically, a great many things authors do to their manuscripts are wasting their time as well as ours. Making the text “look right” on the page by adding spaces, returns, and tabs is a waste of your time, especially for an editor like me who will almost certainly never read your manuscript on a physical page. The decorative non-information you add to your manuscript doesn’t improve my reading experience, and eventually it all has to be deleted by me or by an already overworked designer or production editor. Why put it in?

Every person who works on a book seeks to add value according to their skills, and all off those people, author included, have a limited amount of time in which to add that value. Production editors and designers have skills that can make a page unspeakably beautiful in subtle but important ways. They also have heavy workloads and limited time. Don’t waste any of that time.

But!

I can’t close without saying that I’m almost completely blind to this stuff when I’m considering a new manuscript. If I love a book, I will pursue it even if the author wrote it in Claris Works and hit return every time she got near the end of a line (no, I’m not kidding).

Proud to be her editor

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:25:00 +0000

Listen Ellen at the Boston Book Festival.

Mucking things up

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:45:00 +0000

So there was this USA Today article about self-publishing, and, as expected, it said all the things you expect a mainstream paper to say when covering this issue—which is to say not much of use to anyone actually doing the work of making books. There was this priceless paragraph on editors though:

Another reason: There's no editor to muck things up. Don't get me wrong: Nothing beats a good editor. I've had excellent editors. (And I'm not just saying that because they might be reading this.) But even the best editor can send an author off on a really-not-good tangent. There's nothing worse than having your editor say something to the effect of: "What if, instead of a lawyer racked by guilt for defending a murderer, the heroine is a shape-shifting dolphin falling in love with a werewolf? In Arizona." Go ahead and laugh, but I guarantee there are authors out there vigorously nodding. Having complete control over your own story is as irresistible as a highlander in a Janet Chapman novel.

Now of course, I wonder if I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. I thought I was supposed to buy manuscripts, nurture their potential, and eventually guide them into becoming books that are the best expressions of the author’s vision (and establishing that I understand and buy into that vision happens before anyone starts editing).

My mistake.

Here’s how clueless I was about how to be an editor. The screen capture below shows the version history of Meagan Spooner’s Skylark, a book we’ve been revising* since June (note that it took two screen caps to get all of the files).

The book will come out next fall, and—*spoiler alert*—there are no dolphins.

I’ll do better next time.

*And Meg is an extraordinary reviser, so think of this list of revisions as the evidence of an extraordinary dinner party—empty bottles of wine, the gnawed carcasses of exotic birds and beasts, rinds of fine aged cheeses, etc.—rather than the failed, crumpled, and discarded first pages of some frustrated scribbler.

Thinking about sex

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:26:00 +0000

“Let's tell it how it is, and how it could be / How it was, and of course, how it should be….”

I’m thinking about sex, sexuality, and sexual taboos in YA in advance of this. Thinking about sex, made me think about this post from Ashley Hope Pérez. So my question is, how sex-positive is YA in general?*

(This is going to get explicit-ish.)

Do girls get to enjoy sex in YA novels without dramatic consequences? (Don’t misunderstand. Sex is, I believe, almost always consequential somehow and not just for teens, but that doesn’t mean the consequences are necessarily part of the story at hand.) I can think of examples of guys of all sexual orientations getting off in YA novels without the other shoe dropping or an After-School-Special breaking out. I have a harder time thinking of girls in similar circumstances.

Teens can drink, smoke, and do any number of recreational drugs in YA novels without dramatic in-book consequences (and this is, I believe, appropriate). But can a teenage girl enjoy sex in a YA novel without getting pregnant, having her reputation ruined, etc.?

Nabokov famously said there were at least three taboos in American literature as far as publishers were concerned. Lolita covered the first. “The two others are: A Negro-White Marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at age 106.”

Is it taboo for a teenage girl to have a happy orgasm without a yeah-but moment thirty pages later in a YA novel? Examples? (Maybe there are tons and I’m just slow-witted today.)

*I’m not interested in debating whether YA should be sex-positive. That’s not the point.

If you’re in town…

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:55:00 +0000

Should be very interesting. The two teenage panelists are very smart readers. The adults will try to keep up.

You are under no obligation to …

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:32:00 +0000

…do any of the following in picture book nonfiction:

1. Begin at the beginning.

2. End at the ending.

3. Cover everything in the middle.

I’m not being facetious here. Comprehensive coverage of any subject (particularly a biography) is not a wise goal for a 32- to 38-page picture book. It’s not possible, and you’ll invariable cut corners on good storytelling if you do, so don’t.

There. You’re free now. Go tell stories with facts.

Here’s to the crazy ones.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:34:00 +0000

I don’t have a personal remembrance of Steve Jobs, but I have, in the course of my computing life, owned a non-trivial number of Apple products (the SE/30 on the right is the first computer we ever had). You may count me among those who believe there is something great about what Apple creates (but please don’t call me a fanboy; I’ve never lined up for anything).

I’m also fascinated by Jobs because I love stories, and Jobs’ whole life is a good story, one that’s being retold ad infinitum right about now. In reading some of these remembrances, it’s striking to see that Steve Jobs was recognizably Steve Jobs at least as early as junior high school, when he introduced himself to William Hewlett, cofounder of HP:

When he was in eighth grade, Steve Jobs decided to build a frequency counter for a school project and needed parts. Someone suggested that he call Bill Hewlett. Finding a William Hewlett in the telephone book, the 12-year-old Jobs called and asked, "Is this the Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard?" "Yes," said Bill. Jobs made his request. Bill spent some time talking to him about his project. Several days later, Jobs went to HP and picked up a bag full of parts that Bill had put together for him.

Subsequently, Jobs landed a summer job at HP. He later went on to co-found Apple Computer. [via hp.com]

In hindsight, that’s quite a moment (maybe Bill Hewlett gave electronics components to kids everyday, but I kind of doubt it). And I bet there were dozens of interesting moments in the adolescence of Steve Jobs in the decade between meeting Hewlett and founding Apple.

These kinds of entrepreneurship stories are part of American mythology. Jobs isn’t alone. Henry Ford was repairing watches at 15. Edison was running a business selling candy and newspapers on trains. And on and on. This is why it’s odd to me that this stock character in American mythology isn’t really present in young adult lit (comment if you can correct me). It’s clear that these people really get interesting in their teen years.

Is the problem that the arcs of their lives don’t reach anything like a peak in their adolescent years? Is it that their adolescences seem remarkable only in retrospect? Maybe, but I’m not convinced. YA isn’t about peaks; it’s about the interesting struggles of interesting people in the midst of a transition common to us all.

So, I’m open to novels with main characters who personify this spirit. YA or older middle-grade. No biographies, no thinly-veiled novelizations of biographies. No books that extend into adulthood. Standard genre rules apply. Offer ends 11/7/11. Void where prohibited. Submission directions can be found here.

And, as a special treat, here’s an old (2001) bio of Jobs from Carolrhoda’s sister imprint, Twenty-First Century Books. Wonder what happened to that author….

Nothing to see here

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:34:00 +0000

Well, not much, at least.

Instead, go read Brian Farrey’s blog post for today.

“Remember when you were told to just ignore a bully and they’d go away? That’s a lie. It’s always been a lie. Today, they bully you even when you’re dead.”

Go buy A.S. King’s Everybody Sees the Ants so it can sandblast the Eddie Haskell “awe shucks” Americana bully out of your brain.

Help Steve

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:45:00 +0000

He’s got a good thing going. Free copy of any Carolrhoda Lab titles to ten randomly selected participants.

Believe or imagine

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:13:00 +0000

"Imagine me, reader; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me."

-Nabokov (I know, I know, you’re all shocked.)

The word "believe" and its derivatives come up a lot when readers and reviewers evaluate fiction--especially realistic fiction. I certainly have used it, and I probably will slip up and do so fifteen minutes after I post this. But I think it's an imprecise and unfortunate word choice in almost any case. "I just didn't believe the story" and "It was full of unbelievable characters" are decent examples of post-last-page dismissals. You can think of others, I imagine.

Now think about the word "believe." How does belief relate to pleasure? How does it relate to transcendent aesthetic bliss? (These are the goals of fiction. Keep your eye on anyone who mentions other goals first.) Does the need to exercise your capacity for belief lead you to read novels? I believe in gravity and evolution. I believe that I will ride my bike home in a couple hours on a near-perfect September afternoon. These beliefs alone give me no pleasure or pain. They are simply things I think are true. Whether I believe in Humbert Humbert or hobbits or Harriet the Spy is even less interesting. Believing in fictional characters doesn't make them true. There is no squirt of dopamine in the nether regions of my brain.

Now, let's consider the word "imagine" as an alternate course in the same thought process. I don't know about you, but do take pleasure in imagining the workings of evolution, gravity, and my ride home. Even more important (and here's where the dopamine fountain comes in), I find a great deal of aesthetic bliss in imagining fictional characters. The act of imagining is, after all, the key act in all fiction. Belief simply doesn't matter. Whether you're talking about swords-and-dragons fantasy or urban, "realistic" fiction or murder mysteries, the contract readers have with authors of fiction concerns the imaginable not the believable.

I don't need an author to tell me there are people living on the streets of Brooklyn engaged in activities I have a hard time imagining. I do, however, need an author to help me imagine people living on the streets of Brooklyn doing things I have a hard time believing. And in the end,when the book is over, if I imagined those characters and those things and those streets, then it is irrelevant whether I believe them. In fact, it’s probably better if I imagined it thoroughly but still have a hard time believing. Belief wrings no joy from the page. Imagination will leave you needing new trousers.

Now, sometimes a reader simply swaps the two words. (I hope this is the mistake I make in fifteen minutes.) One reader might say she could “imagine” the character no more than she could “believe” in the character, because the author fails to uphold his end of the bargain. This swap is an error of semantics. Other times, though, I believe a reader misses the point of fiction entirely--especially realistic fiction--when he mixes up the two. The character was real while the reader was imagining her, but then he stopped imagining her and started looking to the real world for evidence, where he found none. This is an error of judgment and of effort--the equivalent of blowing out the fire to find out what was casting the shadows on the cave wall. For me, the main difference between these two cases is who has broken the contract.

All this I believe.

Back-to-School Book Giveaway

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsay Matvick) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:56:00 +0000

Fall is definitely in the air here in Minnesota! The air is a little crisper, the days are getting shorter, and class is in session for all of those happy students. In honor of going back-to-school we want to give you free copies of Back-to-School Rules and Fall Mixed Up!

To win a copy of both books just leave a comment below describing your favorite fall or back-to-school memory. For an extra chance to win, simply Tweet the following line: "RT to win copies of Back-to-School Rules and Fall Mixed Up from @Lernerbooks! www.lernerbooks.blogspot.com #freebooks." Winners will be announced on the blog and on Twitter next Wednesday, September 14.

Good luck!

You Will Call Me Drog Book Trailer and Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Lindsay Matvick) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:58:00 +0000

Watch this book trailer if you dare! We're so excited about You Will Call Me Drog by Sue Cowing that we want to give you a FREE BOOK! All you need to do is post the You Will Call Me Drog book trailer on your website or blog and leave a link in the comments section below before Wednesday, September 7.

If you don't have a blog, you can simply "like" the book trailer on YouTube and then Tweet "Watch this book trailer if you dare! I can't wait to read YOU WILL CALL ME DROG from @LernerBooks http://bit.ly/nJf41d #contest." Winners will be announced here on the blog on Thursday, September 8.

Make sure to check out the great discussion guide and free downloads for You Will Call Me Drog by clicking here.

Here are what a few of our favorite authors are saying about You Will Call Me Drog:

"Drog gives new meaning to the phrase 'hand-puppet' as he attaches his ancient self to a bewildered boy in this inventive tale of puppetry and empowerment." --Richard Peck

"I could come up with a boatload of glitzy stuff to say about You Will Call Me Drog. Truly, it would be a pleasure. But I'm going to keep it simple. I loved this book because it engaged my emotions. And that's why I read, to be moved, to be touched. This book doesn't need glitz. It stands on its own. Loved it." --Graham Salisbury, author of Under the Blood-Red Sun

"What a great book! Drog is the anti-Pinocchio of middle school. He tells the truth! But reader beware: DROG is hard to put down. A laugh out loud story about a sassy puppet and the boy who gloved him. (Sorry, Drog made me do it!!) Kudos, Sue Cowing. You pulled it off!" --John H. Ritter, author of The Boy Who Saved Baseball

"Strange, Creepy, Amazing! Parker's life is a blend of everyday reality and complete, unexplainable weirdness. All he wants is to find a way to be himself. " --Kathleen Duey, National Book Award finalist

Good luck!

You will submit to me.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Karre) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:17:00 +0000

It's been too long since I've called for submissions, so here goes.

Until the end of September, I will be accepting electronic submissions of YA novels with the following exceptions (based not on prejudice so much as on what I've got brewing in the lab already):

1. I'm not considering dysto/post-apocolypto books.

2. If your book can be sung to the tune of a song by The Police, please make sure it's not “Don't Stand So Close to Me.”

3. If your books is more than 60,000 words, please don't send it.

4. Unlike that little kid in the movie, I don't read dead people. No narrators from beyond the grave.

5. If you have superpowers, I have kryptonite. Stay away.

6. I don't do high fantasy. Here there be no dragons.

That's it. Otherwise, just follow the directions here to send your book. Don't fuss over the query; fuss over the first page. I look forward to seeing your books!

Note: Let me say again, I have no problem per se with the books that I've disqualified above. In most cases, I'm disqualifying what I already have. Lab is small. I don't generally do lots of books in the same subgenre.

Songs of Summer Contest Winners!

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Dingmann) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 19:56:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who entered our contest!

Congratulations to Angel, Cherie, Alice, @CaraghMOBrien, @FLBoyzmom, @JoannaMarple, and @TinaLynn510! You've all won a signed copy of Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff! I'll be contacting you shortly with more details.

When I walked out of my apartment this morning, the air felt like fall. And at least one college student I know is back in class starting today! No time to waste... I'm off to enjoy some of your summer song suggestions while I still can!