January 10, 2014
It was madness, but of the fun kind, when agents and editors offered their PITMAD or pitch madness contest on Twitter the other day. All we writers had to do was pitch our book ideas in 140 characters or less and add the hashtag #pitmad. If your Tweet was favorited...
October 24, 2013
I've wanted to read Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park since last year when I bought it for my daughter. The buzz around the book was intriguing, and while I'm not one to follow trends for trends-sake, I do take seriously reviews of books in the category in which I like...
October 2, 2013
Recently a literary agent’s assistant relayed to me how would-be authors sometimes treat assistants—and how potentially harmful to the author’s career that can be. The author had queried the agent, this assistant’s boss, via email, and wrote that she was sure his assistant was very nice, but she only wanted...
July 26, 2013
I just finished reading another amazing book for kids, Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan, written for middle grade readers. (Middle grade is considered to be for ages 10 and up or grades 5 and up.) This is the story of Willow Chance, a genius and misfit who loses...
June 6, 2013
Several years ago I interviewed Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and so many other wonderful books. He had just started his campaign to get boys—universally known among librarians, parents and educators as reluctant readers—to read more books. He launched the site, http://www.guysread.com/...
April 25, 2013
I recently attended the NYC Teen Author Festival at the New York Public Library where new and established YA authors talked about their genre. One of the topics was understanding what influences teens. If you know that, then you can create believable characters, conflicts and settings that teen readers will...
