Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Corrections and clarifications
In the profile of Philip Ardagh in Author of the month, page 17 (Parents), G2, yesterday, [blogged below] we implied that Ardagh's collaboration with Paul McCartney and Geoff Dunbar, High In the Clouds, was out this month. That is not the case. It is not published until October. However, Philip Ardagh's Horrendous Habits, the latest instalment of The Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens, was published this month.
Hoodies and baddies - Health features - Times Online
They are demonised as yobs and louts in scruffy trainers but we ignore the inherent goodness of teenagers at our peril, argues bestselling author Anthony Horowitz
In a hardhitting piece from last Saturday's Times (I've only just caught up with it) Anthony Horowitz defends 'traduced' teenagers...
The piece may have been commissioned to help promote Horowitz's latest book, Raven's Gate, but it is written with real passion
Highly recommended
Scotsman.com News - Features - Harry Potter versus Willy Wonka
The Scotsman asks leading authors and children's literature experts how the works of Rowling and Dahl compare...
Recommended
Heads up everyone, there's a new blog on the block. Read Alert, a blog focusing on 'youth literature' in Australia, is maintained by the State Library of Victoria.
Very highly recommended!
Faber has sent out excited notice that it will be publishing Ricky Gervais’ MORE FLANIMALS on 10 October 2005.
MORE FLANIMALS, a sequel to last year's bestselling Christmas title, takes the study of Flanimals to a higher level, and comes complete with charts, a fold-out genealogical table, family trees, and anatomical diagrams.
Ricky Gervais says: ‘Book two is a sort of Advanced Flanimals. Things get a bit more detailed - their evolution from simple Splorn and Blobs of Gumption through Austrilo Ployb to Fud Dumpton , there’s a Flanatomy section where we see inside the Mernimbler and the Glonk, and we try to understand what makes them tick with a more in depth Flanimal behavior study. Basically I’ve made up some more nonsense for a laugh. Hope you like it.’
The first FLANIMALS has been translated into 6 languages (more to come) and was a huge hit in the States. A major deal with a Hollywood studio is currently under negotiation to bring Flanimals to the big screen. If it happens, the film will be big-budget with Ricky providing the voice for one of the characters.
A pocket-sized edition of the first FLANIMALS book is also due for publication by Faber in October in a collectable format (150x130mm) with a pvc cover.
Bag of tricks - Leading articles - Times Online
The Times, in a leader from yesterday, consider book bags are an extravagant poularising gesture. What do you think? [comment if you have stong views]
With free books already available to those who need or want them, there is something misguided about investing millions in headline grabbing “book bags” when that money could go towards ensuring that, when deprived children finally do enter the education system, schools have the resources to bring them up to speed.
Parenting: Go on, give it a try - Review - Times Online
This piece was tucked away in the Sunday Times News Review section...
Children are being urged to read six books this summer, but how do you get them to start, asks Nicolette JonesThe pressure is on for parents to get their children reading over the summer. Schools are eager, sending children home for the holidays with suggested reading lists and instructions to read “at least three books”.
And last week David Lammy, the libraries minister, launched the Summer Reading Challenge, a promotion that challenges children to read six books over the vacation...
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Good idea, shame about the selection
"this is a pedestrian list of some of the least exciting characters around" DINA RABINOVITCH
Find out what Dina Rabinovitch thinks of the Booktrust list and which titles she would far rather have seen on it...
Highly recommended
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | ?27m scheme to give free books to all under-fives
Every child up to the age of four is to get a free bag of books under a ?27m government scheme designed to promote reading. The education secretary, Ruth Kelly, will announce the initiative during a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in London tomorrow. She will outline plans to hand out 9m free books over the next three years......
The revamped Booktrust scheme, to start in the autumn, will distribute free books across three age brackets. Bookstart, for babies aged up to 12 months, will provide a bag of books, a nursery rhyme placemat and a booklet on sharing stories with young children. The Bookstart plus pack, for children aged 12 to 24 months, will comprise two books, a scribble pad and crayons and a booklist. The third, My Treasure Chest, is for three- and four-year-olds. It will have hidden compartments for small toys and include reading books, an activity book, a scribble pad and crayons to encourage writing.
Harry Potter and a day of small profit - The Herald
Rosemary Goring on the effect of the HP price-war on independent bookstores, in a piece which ends up being a meditation on indpendent smalltown bookshops in general:
On one of the few days in the publishing calendar when the endangered species of independent bookshops might have been given a terrific financial boost, they were instead reduced to masochistic price cutting in order to catch what retailers call "footfall".
Recommended
Scotsman.com News - Features - King among the kids
Julie Bertagna writes about Roald Dahl for The Scotsman:
Dahl is the godfather of the modern children's novel. If he had lived, he would have been the first Children's Laureate (his sense of self-importance would have overcome his contempt ofestablishment roles) and it felt right that the honour went to his brilliant illustrator, Quentin Blake... ...
Highly recommended
Telegraph | Arts | Sweetness and fright
"He was definitely a man of the movies," says Hunt. "I'd argue that he was quite deliberately writing scenes that were filmable. You can see this in a lot of children's book writers these days; they're not writing for the book, they're writing for the film. And I think Dahl was very well aware of that. I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't writing Matilda or The BFG for the screen, really."
S F Said's article about Dahl in the telegraph includes several such quotes from Peter Hunt.
Recommended
Parental advisory: not suitable for adults - Books - Times Online
G. P. Taylor identifes himself with Roald Dahl and defines reviewers as "adults who would like to write books but can’t"...
As adult fiction increasingly moves towards the banal demands of large chains selling the literary equivalent of soma, so it is the realm of the children’s author to deal with the more weighty matters of life, death and the reason for living. I was shocked when a recent survey declared that 60 per cent of my readers were adults with an even male-female split.
Liccy Dahl talks to Amanda Craig - Books - Times Online
“The thing about Roald was that he loved children, and wrote for them,” Roald Dahl’s widow Liccy says. “He had the mind of a child, which was why he was able to reach them. Once you’d read one chapter you longed for the next. So many children’s books then were boring for adults to read, but he always made you long to go to bed. He said that in writing for children you had to grasp them by the neck in the first sentence. He had a perfect simplicity in the construction of each sentence which is what made him so readable.”
The secret ordeal of Miranda Piker - Books - Times Online
Spiked Chocolate Factory character & chapter:
Before Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964 Roald Dahl pared down his cast of characters. Last to go was Miranda Piker and her chapter has appeared only once — in mirror script. Here, for the first time, we publish her comeuppance the right way round... ...
Pulped Fiction- The Times of India
Interesting feature - in light on Nandini Nayar's recent Opinion pieces - on state of children's literature in India:
Children's fiction is still in its nascent stages in India. But that's not the only reason for not having Potter-like success stories. "While contemporary children's fiction is still very young in India, what exists is an extension of adult fiction. It's only in the last decade or so that publishers and retailers have woken up to the potential of children's fiction. So, we can't expect an explosion like Harry Potter," says Radhika Menon, MD, Tulika Publishers. Children's author Ranjit Lall feels that fiction for kids in India stresses on morals -- that's where we go wrong... ...
Recommended
Hype after Harry - Harry Potter - Times Online
An article from last Saturday's new Books supplent in The Times, focusing on Random House's $500,000 advertising campaign and 1m first printrun for Christopher Paolini's second novel, Eldest.
Footnoted by this fascinating factifile about HP promotion:
Potter by numbers Bloomsbury has spent an estimated ?1 million to promote Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Here is where the money has gone: 632,000 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince carrier bags 177,500 cover art banner posters171,530 packets of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans (in independent retailers’ party packs)
20,000 “The wizarding hour approaches” banner posters16,700 mobiles featuring Harry and Dumbledore
15,000 Countdown Clocks
7,500 Harry dumpbins
2,022 buses advertising “Hop aboard for Harry Potter!”
2,000 spectators outside Edinburgh Castle
700 party packs for independent retailers70 cub reporters from UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa
12 cannon shots, at the stroke of midnight outside Edinburgh Castle
3 ITV programmes2 cub interviewers (one British, one Australian)
2 minutes of midnight footage beamed worldwide via satellite
Daily visitors will have noticed that updating of the Blog and main page has been a little glitchy over the past week. And there has been another hiatus in the Mail List Updates. It's all because a happy family event has stolen my attention! Still, there's been the mass media coverage of the Harry Potter launch to keep everyone amused, entertained and distracted.
Harry Potter and the art of lifting ideas - Review - Times Online
where Rowling has used traditional fairy-tale creatures, she has put her own spin on them. Fairies and sprites are not pretty, benign wish-granters but domestic pests; owls are not familiars but postmen. For every dragon and unicorn there are invented creatures like Thestrals (skeletal horses visible only to those who have seen death), Blast-Ended Skrewts (don’t ask) and, of course, the Dementors.
Amanda Craig defends Rowling's borrowing (Sunday Times)
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | A hero for our time
Feature by Natash Walter in Saturday's Guradian Review...
Recommended
Books - reviews and literary news from The Times and The Sunday Times
Amanda Craig reviewed The Invisible Friend by Louise Arnold in yesterday's Times:
Louise Arnold’s debut, The Invisible Friend, is so wise on the subject of friendship that I’d like adults to read it as well as children. Grey Arthur is a ghost — not a glorious eccentric of the kind that graces Eva Ibbotson’s novels, nor yet the scary but thespian spook of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, but one so meek and unobtrusive that he tends not to get noticed at all. Ghosts, Arnold tells us, are not dead people but inhabitants of a world that is spread “like butter sits on toast” over our own...
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Luc Besson's children's stories
So how exactly did France's most popular but least-acclaimed director come to be a bestselling children's author? Stirring his tea in a large but spartan office on the not-very-spartan rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, he is faintly surprised by the question."Why did I make Subway? Why did I do all that crazy undersea stuff in The Big Blue? Why did I go all black and nasty with Nikita?" he asks. "I don't know. Because I did. I do what I do because I want to do it, because I want to explore, go looking for things. This time it was kids."
Besson's fourth Arthur book, Arthur and the War of Two Worlds, is at the top of the French bestseller lists less than a month after its launch. The first three, starting with Arthur and the Minimoys - which has just been published in Britain - have sold more than 1m copies in more than 30 countries.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Harry Potter and the stony broke authors
The group was JK Rowling's fellow children's authors, a third of whom earn less than the national minimum wage of £8,827 a year. And yesterday they published a survey of their own, claiming that some work for about 2p an hour.
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Their survey, headed Not All of Us are Rowling in It, is released as talk of mega-million incomes was being bandied about in the build-up to Saturday's publication of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
The unkindest cut, they say, is to find that "How much do you earn?", or "Are you rich?" are now the first questions that children, even small children, ask when they do a school visit.
Scotsman.com News - Top Stories - Waterstone's expects Potter to weave his magic
Article about Waterstone's Lionboy giveaway promotion...
Telegraph | Arts | A writer's life: Frank Cottrell Boyce
Highly recommended
How To Sell 20m Childrens Books (from This Is Local London)
Jacqueline WIlson interviewed
Recommended
Bloomsbury's Harry Potter news page carries some short video promotions...
Here's two of them...
Parenting: A deeper shade of child's story - Review - Times Online
Recommended feature about Malorie Blackman
Last week Malorie Blackman became the first black British writer to have sold 1m books — something that may come as news to those who see Zadie Smith or Andrea Levy as the champions in their field... ...
Checkmate, final book in Noughts & Crosses trilogy, under half-price!
The Observer | UK News | Potter's magic spell turns boys into bookworms
The first five Potter books have now sold more than 265m copies in 200 countries and been translated into 62 languages. They contain 717,800 words - making Rowling's earnings about ?1,393 per word. Bloomsbury's plans for the Half-Blood Prince are top secret, but Scholastic, the US publisher, has announced an unprecedented first print run of 10.8m copies, a 27 per cent increase on the previous title...
The Observer | Review | The World of Books: July 10
When the current generation of Harry Potter readers has grown up, it will look back on the Harry Potter phenomenon with a mixed thrill of intense nostalgia, embarrassment and dismay. Our children's children will certainly read these books, but as curiosities, bizarre literary relics from a lost world. JK Rowling has certainly come up with some great stories. She knows in her bones that children prefer incident to character and, as a spinner of yarns, she is in a class of her own. But try reading her aloud to an eight-year-old and you quickly discover that her prose is deadly - automatic writing, over-literal description and lazy dialogue. Perhaps The Half-Blood Prince will prove me wrong, but the series so far does not hold out much hope... ...
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Harry Potter casts spell on publishing
Waterstone's said there has been a tenfold increase in the number of new children's books released every month since 2000. In a state of decline before the appearance of Harry Potter in 1997, sales of children's books excluding the young wizard have since been growing at a rate of 2% a year. "Demand for other children's authors, stimulated by interest in Harry Potter, has helped the publishing industry as a whole," Waterstone's said. "New writers are now taken more seriously, recognised more quickly, and invested in more heavily."
Scotsman.com News - Scotland - Potter works wonders for kids' literacy
New research by the Federation of Children's Book Groups (FCBG), shows that JK Rowling's storytelling has had a major impact on literacy and reading habits in the UK.Almost six out of 10 children (59%) think the books have helped them improve their reading skills. And 48% say Rowling's creation is the reason they read more... ...
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Chris Riddell on being a children's illustrator
'So why do you work for a newspaper?" a journalist once asked me when he discovered that I also worked as a children's book illustrator.
Here, in a highly recommended feature from the Guardian, Chris Riddell, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal, explains...
Books - reviews and literary news from The Times and The Sunday Times
Harry is no longer a hero in the purest sense of the word; he is now a celebrity, and that is something rather different. The books (and the films) have become Events, hardly appreciable in themselves but phenomena viewed through the mirror of the media...
Erica Wagner on Harry who, she feels, is no longer a hero but a celbrity...
See what you think.
USATODAY.com - Like magic, she's wealthy
In a USA Today article about J K Rowling:
Barry Cunningham, her first editor at Bloomsbury Publishing in London, remembers giving her "terrible advice" when they met in the 1990s. Rowling was a divorced woman without much money."She was telling me about her circumstances. I was worried she was really relying on Harry to be the future for her and her daughter," Cunningham says. "I told her she wouldn't make any money at children's books, and she should get a day job,"
North Jersey Media Group providing local news, sports & classifieds for Northern New Jersey!
Interesting piece about Alloy Entertainment:
The masterminds behind some of the most popular books for adolescent girls are a couple of thirtysomething men.... ...
Alloy Entertainment Inc., a division of marketing and advertising giant Alloy, has developed a slew of hot book series, including "Gossip Girl," "The A-List," "The Clique" and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," which was made into a hit movie.
Blogging our own interview with Marcus Sedgwick.
An immensely compelling, impressive and thought-provoking young adult novel. ACHUKA has not always been a fan of Sedgwick's writing, particularly the early novels, but we began to be converted by Cowards (non-fiction) and if all his future fiction is as good as this truly exceptional new novel our admiration will be permanent!
Check out the old-style AUTHORFILE
The Observer | Review | Barbara Ellen meets the elusive Mr Brown
I was amused to read this in Barbara Ellen's feature interview with Gordon Brown in today's Observer. To find out if Brown's son enjoyed The Gruffalo, check the final paragraph of the feature.
It seems as good a time as any to give Brown The Gruffalo for his son. Brown is extremely pleased and demands I leave my details so he can send something back. 'It's amazing how kids love books,' he says. 'You do feel that for kids who are denied books it's really unfair.' Then he tells me about a government initiative called Book Start, where young children will receive free books. He's so enthused I fight the urge to feel cross that he's dragged the subject back to politics again... ...
