Crooked Timber ? ? Malcolm Saville
Blog entry about Malcolm Saville, on 'Out Of The Crooked Timber'
ACHUKA: January 2007 Archives
More Harry Horse reportage, ahead of the funeral later this week:
AS IF to emphasise the emotional distance at which Horne kept his family in his final months, they were among the last to know he was dead. The couple's deaths had already been reported in newspapers and on the internet, when, on Thursday, 11 January, two police officers finally knocked on the door of Christmas Hill. This Thursday, the family will arrive on Shetland for the funeral... ...
icNewcastle - Anne Fine joins pupils to open new library
Anne Fine offically opens a new school library... [local news report]
Scotsman.com News - Education - Banned: ice slides in the school playground
Julie Bertagan has criticised the decision by Scottish local authorities to ban ice slides in the playground:
Children's author Julie Bertagna, whose book Bungee Hero focuses on a boy overcoming his fears, said: "It's another example of too much health and safety. Too much wrapping children in cotton-wool will lead to a generation of unimaginative and fearful adults. "Children have to be allowed to take a certain number of risks and get the occasional cut or bruise. I'm a parent myself and I constantly need to fight against the urge to be over-protective. I used to make slides and used old tea trays so they would be extra slippery."
Bertagna's next major novel, Zenith, is published next month.
Kirsten Grant has asked us to clarify what Puffin mean by the term 'webraiding' as used in their plans to promote the new novel by Kevin Brooks. She tells ACHUKA, "When we use the term 'web raiding', we mean that we will be engaging opinion formers of influential blogs and web communities. We will be giving them extra tools and assets so that they can help us launch the campaign and get the word of mouth on the book going. So, the bloggers themselves will be discussing the title and adding credibility - it's not us spreading hype ourselves."
Justin Renard, in charge of the campaign, adds: "Achuka has a point with regard to the 'trendiness' of webraiding, as it has been used by a number of corporations that are seeking a quick boost to sales. But successful campaigns from the likes of the hit TV series LOST and Heroes, and the cult film Donnie Darko, are evidence that when a company or agency takes the time to contact opinion makers in key markets and give them something to really engage with, that the market will take heed. For Being specifically, we have created a website to host an online discussion that will launch in the next few weeks (about 6 weeks ahead of publication), and we feel strongly that the story is both powerful and engaging enough that readers will be glad we made this discussion space available for them.
A few key schools and reading groups have been invited to be the premiere posters on the site, so that they can expand their reading discussions beyond the walls and interact with like-minded students in other parts of the country... ...
Puffin has been careful to leave the opinion-making in the hands of the public. When the books hit shelves in March, we are hopeful that there will be enough discussion in the virtual ether to keep the debate raging onward! Kevin Brooks will also be participating in the site - popping in unexpectedly to add further ideas and comments to keep the debate going."
Top Ten Children’s Books Sold on eBay - December 2006 | Bookseller Blog
Top Ten Children’s Books Sold on eBay - December 2006
whatisrobert.co.uk - Kevin Brooks - Being
pre-order
Puffin are set to give Being, Kevin Brooks' first novel for them (published March 1st) a massive, integrated PR campaign, the details of which are detailed on the back page of proof copies, recently distributed to reviewers.
In addition to a microsite - www.whatisrobert.co.uk - there will apparently be a 'massive push on fan-fiction websites' and 'webraiding' on popular teenage blogs. This kind of promotion has its risks, particularly because the Young Adult aduience has a pretty good nose for hype. As long ago as 2004, one gaming forum poster observed:
webraiding forums was initially pretty effective when not everybody was doing it. However, it is a real low hanging fruit because you need only a handful of posters full day to clutter all the influential forums with hype. Then the challenge is for these people to create a credible personality with postings relating to other topics than the product at hand. However, these days most people I've spoken to - even the companies known to facilitate this type of activity - consider fake posting too risky. The probability of getting caught is pretty big and then the PR damage is enormous. It's not worth it.
The campaign will also be linked to the launch of an online magazine written by and for teenagers which is set to focus on Being.
Review: The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Diane Samuels finds The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett both exquisitely produced ("So delightful an artefact is the book itself") and exquisitely written:
Hartnett uses space as eloquently as she uses words. Her writing effortlessly touches on themes of great complexity without a hint of gravitas. Each character is vividly evoked with brushstrokes as light and clean as the illustrations. This is literature that bristles (sic) with images...
Review: Beatrix Potter by Linda Lear | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
A useful linear narrative, but
This is the first full-length biography that has been written of [Beatrix] Potter, so it is a shame that it should be such a dull one. Where Potter had an exquisite sense of how language works, Lear has none. Thus Potter's famous "picture letters" in which she tried out new stories are leadenly described as "often quite amusing". A minor character has "striking rather than beautiful features". For the last third of the book Lear seems to give up entirely on trying to pattern her narrative and descends instead into the kind of plodding prose associated with a "round robin" Christmas letter
says Kathryn Hughes of A Life In Nature by Linda Lear
Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce - Books - Times Online
Philippa Pearce, who died last month, produced more than 30 books, but will be most remembered for the children’s novel Tom’s Midnight Garden, which won the 1959 Carnegie Medal... ...
Margaret reynolds writes about this children's classic.
Puffin Classic
BBC audio (2 CD)
Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books: History lessons
History lessons
Is the Holocaust a fitting subject for children's books?
asks Dina Rabinovitch
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/78478.htmlThe Daily Record - NEWS - SUICIDE PACT TRAGEDY OF CHILDREN'S AUTHOR & SICK WIFE
Richard Horne, known to children's publishing as Harry Horse, was found dead at his home on Burra Isle yesterday. He had died alongside his wife in an apparent suicide pact.
More details from The Scotsman.
More details from The Herald.
Due to large numbers of bookshops asking for signed copies of Sebastian Darke, Philip Caveney (author of adult fiction) has been hard at work signing over 4,000 copies of the just-released hardback of his first children's book....
Philip tells ACHUKA how, three days after he'd made the biggest deal of his life, he received a rejection letter from an agent telling him that the book had no chance of publication.
Read the mini-interview...
Continue reading You Betcha!.
Reading Rockets : Reading Comprehension & Language Arts Teaching Strategies for Kids
Between our new blogs and our upcoming webcasts you're bound to start the new year off with a reading bang! It's all here on Reading Rockets...
The website Reading Rockets has introduced some new features for 2007. It already has a useful library of podcast author interviews.
The Anholts' website was redesigned and relaunched at the end of 2006 and includes this Blog by Laurence.
The paperback edition of "Slawter" (featuring a cool glow-in-the-dark cover) officially goes on sale in the UK and Ireland on January 3rd...
Darren Shan reports, in the latest edition of Shanville Monthly. He also tells us that later in January his UK publishers are re-decorating 120 telephone boxes around the London area to look like this:
ACHUKA now has its own wikipedia!
Those of you familiar with the Wikipedia.org will know what to find - an online encyclopaedia compiled by its users.
I've started things off with a few entries from our old Profiles section (a listing of titles and reviews that proved too unwieldy to maintain). I'll continue copying these entries across as opportunities arise, but really ACHUKAwiki is down to YOU.
We have another major site innovation to announce in the next few days. And, who knows, 2007 may even herald in that long-awaited second podcast ;))
Happy New Year to everyone. And special regards to all the authors and illustrators who regularly login to ACHUKA - now you can watch the ACHUKAwiki to see if someone's started an entry about you, or even put in the info yourself.
The regular eLetter updates will begin again shortly, in a somewhat sleeker format, more friendly for reading by handhelds and mobile phones (a clue here to our next announcement).
