December 22, 2008
Ye Olde Blog wherein Sally Apokedak opines
November 12, 2008
This blog is supposed to be about children’s publishing.
And that means it’s about hard times right now.
The good news is that, according to Chip MacGregor, children’s titles are on an upswing, with YA fiction selling well. Oh. Yes. YA fiction selling well.
Still, What’s-her-name, the cat person, or the rat person (who is she? the Editorial Ass person…I can’t remember what other people call her, oh yeah, Moon Rat–what does a rat have to do with an ass?) anyway, Moon Rat at Editorial Ass tells us all to buy books. Now don’t just gloss over that. Go and read her post. Because she did a very good job of convincing us to buy books. She gave lots of suggestions of when and where and what to buy. And there’s no question that if we want to keep having books to buy tomorrow we need to buy some of the books on sale today.
Buy children’s books. Buy picture books. The kids are never too young. You think, “Why spend sixteen dollars on a book that the kid is going to slobber on, chew up, and/or scribble over sooner or later?”
Here’s why: Picture books are worlds full of sight and sound. The colors and the words train children to love poetry and music and motion. The messages are usually good, too. But picture books are so much more than solitary excursions into art and moral lessons.
Picture book time is “me and Mom snuggle time” and in a flash it’s gone forever.
Don’t let it go without a fight. Pet therapy is a big thing in nursing homes. But did you know that baby therapy is just as big? Adults love holding babies. Snuggling with small children is as relaxing as petting a dog. And reading and laughing and sharing a moment of discovery with a tot is relaxing and inspiring, and it makes you feel good all over. It’s one of the best things you can do for yourself.
Yourself!
Not to mention your kid.
McDonald’s used to have an ad when I was younger that went, “You deserve a break today, so get up and get away, to McDonald’s.”
And I know that when I had two toddlers, Happy Meals and the ball pit were wonderful things. It’s nice to let the kids play in that big play pen, while you read some big people books.
In tough times, though, if you have to choose between a few Happy Meals on the one hand and one beautifully told and illustrated picture book on the other…
Hmm.
Ball pit full of other kids’ germs…or…Mom’s lap and Mom’s voice?
Soda and hamburgers and hyper kids…or…snuggle time?
What to do, what to do?
Lap time. There’s nothing in the world that can compare with it. 
April 25, 2008
I haven’t had time to enter these into my sidebar yet, but I wanted to direct you to some wonderful blogs by, for, or about children’s book writers and children’s book readers.
Never Jam Today
This gal’s a children’s librarian, she’s brilliant, and her blog is full of short book reviews.I.N.K. Interesting Nonfiction for Kids
Full of facts. ha haMiss Erin
She’s a Shannon Hale fan, so ya gotta love her.Young Readers
Some wonderful reviews for the PB crowd.Bookwyrm Chrysalis
A gorgeous site by yet another young person–this gives me hope for a bright future–if you love fantasy go visit the Bookwyrm Chrysalis and find great books to read.ShelfTalker: A Children’s Bookseller’s Blog
On Publisher’s WeeklyBlogzone
check out her March 2008 archives if you want to write a picture book.Editorial Anonymous
She’s kind of the Miss Snark of the Children’s writing world. I enjoy her!
categories: Around the Blogosphere, Reading, Reviews, Writing for Children
tags: Children' Books, Editorial Anonymous, Fantasy, mg, YA
tags: Children' Books, Editorial Anonymous, Fantasy, mg, YA
March 15, 2006
Speaking about what boys like to read, I just came across a press release on The Series of Unfortunate Events books.
I read the first Unfortunate book and started out thinking it was very cute. By the end I thought it was tiresome, at best.
The author reminds me of my father, or my husband, or my son– Oh, wait! It must be a guy thing. I don’t know about the men in your lives but the ones in mine will go with the same gag forever. They start when they’re two. They make you laugh once and then have to keep repeating the stunt in a desperate bid for attention. It starts off kind of cute but by the time they’re thirty or so, it’s mostly just pathetic.
But even my sorry son, who loves to try to make me laugh by employing the same old, tired tricks, got bored with the Snicket books after six volumes. (I’d already bought the whole flippin’ set. Talk about unfortunate events!)
What do my son and I know, though? Snicket’s books “have inexplicably already spent more than 700 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide.”
Man, playing that same old gag really paid off for this guy. Yikes!
And the movie grossed “more than $100 million in a matter of weeks.” (The movie was good, though. It actually had a plot and didn’t make the children look like idiots the way the first book did.)
What is it that boys like about the books, though? Why did my own son stay with them for six volumes? The only thing I could think of is that the titles and covers appealed to his love of all things dark and gruesome.
So I asked him, “Hey, what did you like about those Lemony Snicket book?”
And he answered, “I like the guy’s name. And I like them because you say he’s not a good writer.”
My bratty son. He’s not lying either. OK so I have to come up with plan. Hmmm. I’m going to have start bad-mouthing those missionary books I’ve been wanting my son to read. heh heh
But, you see, that hadn’t entered the equation so far. What is it that boys like to read? Not things that tell them how stuff works, and not books full of action and adventure, and not books with plenty of conflict. No. Boys like to read books their mothers hate. OK it’s not a scientific study . . . and yet . . . I think it’s as good a theory as any of the others we’ve heard.
March 14, 2006
In the Slate article I linked to yesterday, there was a link to guysread.com. It’s an interesting site–snazzy, even. It has a neat search engine. You put in a topic or author or title and it pulls up books to match.
When I posted yesterday, I wasn’t aware that Jen, over at Jen Robinson’s Book Page, had a post and a discussion on this very same article last week. Check it out.
Becky commented on yesterday’s post, that boys like to identify with winners. She said especially boys like to see underdogs win. That reminds me of some books that I loved as a kid. They are poor fare, but back when they were first published (1860′s and 70′s) they were very popular with young boys. And a hundred years later I was eating them up. Sure, they were all pretty much the same story–poor, good boy walks true and is rewarded with riches at the end–but then so were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy books all the same and I loved those as well.
Anyone able to guess who the author of these rags to riches books were?
For bonus points, what church was he ordained in and why was he booted out?
category: Reading
tags:
tags:
Recent Comments
Subscribe to Updates
-
