At the end of April publishers announced a new initiative to put suggested age-ranges on the back cover of children's books. The categories, on books published from this autumn, will be: 5+, 7+. 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen and the guidance will be printed near the bar code and ISBN...
Moves, mergers, and all the rest of the industry news.
Longlists, shortlists and announcements of winners.
"I'm spitting mad, and not afraid to say so" is the kind of statement that makes me quite interested in what's going on. This time it was my blogging colleague Lowebrow in Germany, whose feathers were a bit ruffled. She was enraged on behalf of author Nick Green, whose first book The Cat Kin was published by Faber last summer. Lowebrow went on to say how she thought this book was one of the best for the age group 9-12 that she'd seen for a long time. And now, six months later Faber had decided not to publish the sequel, due to the first one not selling enough copies...
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Linda Newbery spent most of her childhood in Epping, Essex, where her parents still live, and went to a girls' grammar school in Loughton. Long after leaving the school, she discovered that Ruth Rendell had been a pupil there too - and, more recently, another crime writer, Mo Hayder....
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Armadillo: Reading about your childhood - born in Jerusalem, living in Cyprus, Borneo and various African countries - plus going to school at Roedean and university at Oxford, people could think you'd had a privileged life. Do you feel this is so and if true, how do you think it's affected your attitude to life? You seem always to be a very confident person; does that come from your upbringing...
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