Exciting news! In-house Cap’n Sweet Valley has been working on an initiative to start publishing a series of e-originals that we are calling e-serials. What are e-serials? An e-serial is a series of digital-only discrete dramatic novella-length “episodes” that advance an overall “season” narrative arc through 4-6 installments, published in at regular intervals at a [...]
Allison Rushby's six episodes in an original e-serial, pitched as DOWNTON ABBEY for the New Adult market where triplets, estranged since birth, are suddenly brought together and forced to compete for their inheritance, to Dan Weiss at St. Martin's, with Vicki Lame editing, for publication in 2012, by Sara Megibow at Nelson Literary Agency.
Semi-Charmed Life by Nora Zelevansky
In Nora Zelevansky’s hilarious debut, Semi-Charmed Life, an Upper West Side naïf, Beatrice Bernstein, gets swept up in the seeming magical life of socialite Veruca Pfeffernoose, while ghost-writing her blog. Veruca’s glitteringly opulent world soon seduces Beatrice away from her own insular, arty family with a promise of fancy parties, travel outside Manhattan (gasp!), and [...]
YA as Genre or YA as Reading Level
Lately I’ve been mulling over a question that seems to crop up in a lot of what I read for both work and pleasure, namely whether or not a definition of YA exists. Of course YA exists, but what it is seems to be a fluid idea, shaped by many different considerations: age of protagonist, [...]
Typical Work Day
COLLEAGUE: Oh my god. JJ: What? Did you find another crazy copyedit note? COLLEAGUE: No, someone sent me a video of alpacas.
How I Came To Work In Publishing
Well. Hello! Oh excuse me while I dust off the layers of dust that have settled over this blog. Dear me, how long has it been since I’ve written anything substantive? Wait, don’t answer that; it’s really embarrassing. Anyway, I promise I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet, although I’ve been submerged in [...]
The Power and Persistence of Labels
There persists a myth in our collective social conscience: that to name something or to know someone’s true name was to have power over him or her. I thought that if I could just find my sexuality’s true name, I could finally stop refining and defining that part of myself. I really need to stop [...]
The Editorial Process
John Green on the editorial process. Oh John, even editorial doesn’t read the Chicago Manual of Style. That’s what production editors are for! (Comma usage? What comma usage?)
You Will Get Chlamydia…and DIE
There must be something in the air (or perhaps the books we read and the media we consume) that is making many writers blog about the subject of sex in fiction (and specifically YA). Kody Keplinger (who wrote the wonderfully sex-positive THE DUFF) blogged about it (twice!) at YA Highway, Marie Lu asked why sex [...]
I don’t think any writer wants a reader to read their book, and think: ‘Well, I’m not there. Guess I’m on the Isle of Issuelandia. Oh man, not again. Kind of like always going to the Isle of Wight for your holidays. We never get to go out clubbing in Spain.’ It is wrong to banish people from the mainland!Sarah Rees Brennan
A really beautiful, thoughtful essay about the necessity of showing the world as it is, not the fantasy of white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied protagonists that has somehow convinced the mainstream it is the default.
Show Me Some Love
