Today's Great Find

I found my gem of the day at Grumpy Old Bookman's site. He's plugging Buy A Friend A Book Week, which happens to be this week. BAFABW occurs four times a year, January, April, July and October. Buy a friend a book for no good reason!

Author Cynthia Leitich Smith is blogging today about Linda Sue Park's new picture book, Bee-Bim Bop. She also has a nice list of picture book recommendations. It is Buy A Friend A Book Week--why not pick up one of Cyn's recommendations for a little friend?

If you're a published author or illustrator, you should also check out another site Cynthia recommends today--AuthorSchholGig.com. It looks like a great resource for schools that are trying to plan author visits. (And, so you don't think I'm just copying Cyn's blog for the sake of copying, just know that I put things here so I won't LOSE them! I think this is an important site, so I want to be able to find this scoop again!)

I think I'll do a whole post on writing contests soon. Here's a link from KidMagWriters.com. Have you ever wondered about those people who win the Highlights contests? I always say I'm going to enter and never get around to it. Here's where two recent winners got their inspiration. The W.I.N.ners have been announced for the Write it Now contest. Lots of names from the cw-biz Yahoo group! Congrats!

Anastasia Suen has a post today about chicklet lit. What's interesting to me about this is the Atlanta Journal article states, "The trick is learning how to pry this age group away from the Internet and video games. A 2004 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts showed that readership of novels, plays or poems among 18-to-24-year-olds had plummeted 28 percent since 1982."

Obvious, right? The article goes on to list books packaged by Alloy Entertainment as popular chicklet lit books. (According to Anastasia's prior post on Alloy, they "produce" the books and the publisher "publishes" it.) Not getting the connection yet? Take a look at their site. They have managed to totally integrate their brand into the lives of their target audience. Teens can even request a catalog: "To get the hottest trends in fashion, makeup, accessories, and more delivered right to your doorstep, just tell us a little about yourself then drop your stats in the form below! Yup, it's that simple." The site is full of things that teen chicks love--and there's book and movie news too.

Read the article about Alloy. Literary snobs may not approve. It's basically the same thing as how the hot boy bands are "created" based upon research that "experts" have mined from teen culture. There's a reason these books are popular...and are making sales...they've managed to connect with the audience and they are multi-media in nature, integrated in the customers' lives.

Then, there's this little link at the bottom so that other people who want to successfully market to teens can do so too.