New England SCBWI
Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators

In February, Publishers Weekly carried this unhappy announcement:

Bookstore sales fell 2.9% in 2006, to $16.12 billion, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The figures reflect the poor holiday sales reported by many booksellers, with December sales tumbling 8.8%, to $1.99 billion. For the entire retail segment, sales rose 6% in the year.

In other words, Americans are still buying things. We're just not buying so many books, at least through the bookstores that the Census Bureau tracks.

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Today’s New York Times has two articles on the controversy over Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and how it came to echo the books of bestselling YA novelist Megan McCafferty.

There’s a front-page profile of Alloy Entertainment, the book packager formerly known as 17th Street Productions, and how it has created many of today’s teen “chick lit” bestsellers. And there’s an interview with Viswanathan in which she agrees that she must have remembered McCafferty’s sentences.

Together the articles inadvertently offer an answer to one of the biggest mysteries of this affair.

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David Zucker, co-creator of Airplane! and auteur behind Scary Movie 4, provided Entertainment Weekly with a glossary and rules that he and his comedic colleagues have developed over the years. Many are specific to moviemaking, but some apply to writing comic prose, and in some cases to all kinds of storytelling.

Namely...

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An interesting bit of news from Publishing News’s dispatch on the Bologna Book Fair: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief may be a sensation in Australia and doing well (with a concerted marketing push) here in the US, but has yet to find a British publisher.

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In early April, Publishers Weekly reported on upcoming fantasy novels for children and young adults that publishers planned to promote strongly. Three indications of trends in this field stood out for me.

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Last fall, the New York Times Entertainment section ran a curious article on film rights to the Encyclopedia Brown series. The website Defamer.com offered its Tinseltown take on the story, which remains available.

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