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Children's Holiday Roundup: Strong Ending to a Flat Year
Neither torrential rains in Southern California nor snows in the Midwest dampened shoppers this holiday season, particularly those looking for children's books. Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, N.C., saw a steady increase in sales for the entire month of December. But "the last week was giant," says general manager Linda Barrett-Knopp. "Every day was the equivalent of three or four days during the year. It was great."
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B&N Targets Bullying
January is No Name-Calling Month at Barnes & Noble, which is partnering with Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network on a series of anti-bullying storytimes and panels in its stores and videos with authors ranging from Laurie Halse Anderson to Hilary Duff at barnesandnoble.com. "Bringing awareness to the seriousness and severity of name-calling, teasing, bullying and cyber bullying is very important to Barnes & Noble," says v-p of children's books Mary Amicucci.
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B&N Introduces Nook Kids for iPad
Barnes & Noble has introduced a Nook kids for iPad application. The app makes B&N's digital catalog of children's content--which includes 100 new interactive kids' books--available on the e-reading device.
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Scholastic's New Line of iPad Apps Targets Preschoolers
Scholastic has introduced a new line of iPad apps called Touch & Tilt. The line launches with three apps, I Love You Through and Through; The Magic School Bus: Oceans; and Go, Clifford, Go! The apps are targeted at children ages two and up and were developed in-house.
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Skyhorse Acquires Sports Publishing Assets; Launches Children's Imprint
Following two other acquisitions this year, Skyhorse Publishing has just closed a third deal, buying Sports Publishing. Sports Publishing went bankrupt in 2008 and Skyhorse's acquisition, which does not include any of Sports Publishing's liabilities, will add books by, among others, Michael Phelps and Dick Vitale to its backlist. The company also announced that it will launch a children's book imprint next fall. The new imprint, set for fall 2011, is called Sky Pony Press.
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Points of Sale: Tips for Children’s Booksellers
This column grew from first-hand experience that many of the best bookselling ideas come from other booksellers. Each tip offers an inventive way to solve problems that you may not have even been aware of in your store, like getting more mileage out of writing contests and giving old spinner racks another spin with different books.
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The Week in Children's Apps: December 23, 2010
This week we take a look at more new apps from publishers. There's a varied range, from originals to spin-offs of classic children's books, and subjects cover science, vocabulary, and more.
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Licensing: The Year in Review
As 2011 approaches, we asked a range of editors and executives with responsibility for licensed publishing about this year's trends. The consensus: there were no real blockbuster properties this year, but several licensed lines performed well.
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Kids Can Press Grows a Graphic Novel Line
Kids Can Press has been publishing children's books since 1973 and launched its first graphic novels in 2008: Claire and the Bakery Thief, a fantasy tale, and No Girls Allowed, an anthology of true stories about women who disguised themselves as men. Since then, they have built up a diverse line of graphic novels offering everything from historically based works to fantasy, adventure and mysteries.
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The Week in Children's Apps: December 16, 2010
The app field is heating up in children’s books, with a critical mass of titles coming to the market. This week we spotlight four releases, from Random House, Ruckus Media, HMH/Oceanside Media, and Greenwillow/Curious Puppy.
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Facing Challenges, First Book Keeps on Giving
It's a story of hundreds of books, thousands of books, millions and billions of books--or, at least, 80 million of them. This week literacy group First Book announced that it had delivered that many titles to underprivileged kids in its 18-year existence.
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Emerging Technologies Debated in France
The Salon du livre et de la presse jeunesse is an annual children's book fair for both publishers and young readers held just outside of Paris in Montreuil, this year from December 1–6. It is, of course, a haven of book perusal, book buying, and author and illustrator signings. However, a conference that occurred on the last day of the fair delved into that precarious territory beyond the pages: new media.
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Don't Write the Obit For Picture Books Yet
Children's book publishers are still reeling from the New York Times front-page story back in October called "Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children." Was the venerable newspaper right?
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Figment Looks to Attract Young Writers
Founded by New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear and former New Yorker managing editor Jacob Lewis, Figment.com is an online writing community aimed at attracting a membership of young people, ranging from kids to teens and older, to post, share and comment on each other's original writing. Launched this week, the site is also teaming with YA author Blake Nelson, author of the well-received 1994 adult novel Girl, who is serializing Dream School, a long unpublished YA sequel to Girl, on the Figment site.
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Children’s Books in an iPad Age: A ‘PW’ Webinar
More than 250 people tuned in Tuesday afternoon for Publishers Weekly’s first webinar conducted in partnership with Digital Book World. Entitled "Children's Publishing in the Digital Age," the webcast focused on the whirlwind of technological advances in children's publishing, touching on everything from apps (both original and book-based) and digital marketing to the threat devices like the iPad might pose to picture books.
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An App Studio On Fulton Street
Seated in the conference room of his lower Manhattan office/production studio, Nicholas Callaway, chairman and CEO of Callaway Digital Arts, talked about the future of publishing and of his publishing house.
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Coming of Age at ALAN 2010
Many of today's young adult authors remember their own coming-of-age years clearly – and they are writing to make the lives of today's teens better. That was the message coming out of last week's Assembly on Literature for Adolescents workshop held November 22 and 23 in Orlando, Fla. as part of the National Council of Teachers of English annual convention.
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New Poetry Prize in Canada Focuses on Recitation
Last week, Canada's unofficial patron of poetry, Scott Griffin, unveiled a new effort to bring more poetry into the minds and everyday lives of Canadians. The founder of the $200,000 Griffin Poetry Prize launched a high school poetry recitation competition that is beginning as a pilot project in 12 Ontario high schools. It is intended to extend to Quebec schools next year and across the country after that.
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Bookstore Turns Kids and Parents into Self-Publishers
At the Charlotte, N.C. children's bookstore Author Squad, kids and parents don't just buy books, they make books—as in writing, illustrating, laying out, and hand-binding hardcover volumes, at the store's own publishing center. Owner Lauren Garber has gotten the process so kid-friendly, in fact, that even two-year-olds can get in on constructing their own books.
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Ruta Drummond Makes a Leap from Bookselling to Publishing
Ruta Drummond, whose career at Borders spanned 25 years, has joined Tiger Tales as associate publisher. It's a neat fit for the former children's book buyer: her special interest is books for very young readers, the bailiwick of Tiger Tales, which since its 2000 launch has concentrated on offerings for children ages eight and under.
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