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An Open Letter to Bookstores Selling ARCs
Hello! As a children’s author myself, I’ve spent many a happy hour browsing for new titles on your shelves. I’m always thrilled when I find something new and exciting to read. I’m less thrilled when I pull a book off your shelf only to find that it is actually an Advanced Reader Copy. I’m sure you know that since ARCs aren’t purchased, but rather provided by the publisher, the publisher and author make no money on sales of ARCs. They are meant to be shared for reviews and publicity, not exchanged as a “used book” between customers and bookstores that may have otherwise purchased an actual copy of the book, thereby helping the author earn her fair share. Most ARCs come with a “Not For Sale” sticker on the cover or just inside the cover. One of my favorite bookstores in Seattle had a fantastic solution to their abundance of advance copies. Once a year, they would stack all of their ARCs on a display table. For each regular book a customer purchased, they were allowed to select one ARC from the table, free of charge. The “buy one get one free” promotion brought in lots of customers, more sales were generated, and no authors lost money due to ARCs being sold as opposed to books. I hope you’ll consider this option, because for the author, every sale counts! Thanks for your time, MiSchu (posted on KidLit Network) "Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else."
Today rocked because I got to announce that a story that has been in my head (in various versions) FOREVER will be published by Penguin’s Grosset & Dunlap imprint and there will be world travels and ghosts and and holographic covers (!!!) and blogging and parental issues and general tween angst. Here’s the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement: Michelle Schusterman’s THE EX-KAT FILES, about a girl who blogs her way around the world’s spookiest locations as she follows her father, host of a ghost-hunting web show, only to receive ominous warnings and discover that the show has a sinister and mysterious past that threatens them all, again to Jordan Hamessley at Grosset & Dunlap, in a three-book deal, for publication in Summer 2015, by Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agency (World excluding UK). VIRTUAL BEER FOR EVERYONE (yes the title is some X Files wordplay) The common advice to leave parents out of kids literature has always been one of my pet peeves. Adults should play a big role in the life of an 8-12 year old. You don’t want them to take over the story, of course. It’s important the main character solve his or her own problem. But I never understood the claim that kids don’t like to read stories that contain adult characters…
If I say watching a television show is a study in writing, does doing so then qualify as “work?” (More importantly, can I write off Netflix when I do my taxes?)
"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better."
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