ABE books had a great post about minimalist covers that's worth a gander if you like covers. .

Here's one example:


[Full disclosure: I posted about this book before, and I'm pretty sure the author wrote me back. http://aprilhenry.livejournal.com/174262.html]

And here's another:


Which reminds me of these dueling covers:

Meet Kevin, the zombie bookseller. In Australia, Notions Unlimited Bookshop is "an equal opportunity employer" and numbers among its booksellers a zombie whose customer service skills are still a work in progress. [Thanks to Shelf Awareness to alerting me to great link.]

I was so excited to see this in Publishers Marketplace:

Paula Stokes's THE ART OF LAINEY, in which a recently dumped girl employs strategy and subterfuge cribbed from The Art of War to get her ex-boyfriend back, with unanticipated results, to Karen Chaplin at Harper Children's, in a two-book deal, for publication in Summer 2014, by Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (NA).

I met Paula in 2010 at the Oregon Coast Children's Book Writers' Workshop. I knew then that she would get published, and she sent me a nice note this week saying I was right!

I'll be teaching at OCCBWW again this summer.

We’ve all seen the guidelines for writers that give the same advice - “read more!” “write every day!”

Maybe that’s why I found this McSweeney’s advice funny. Here’s a sample:

FIND YOUR MUSE
Finding a really good muse these days isn’t easy, so plan on going through quite a few before landing on a winner. Beware of muses who promise unrealistic timelines for your projects or who wear wizard clothes. When honing in on a promising new muse, also be on the lookout for other writers attempting to swoop in and muse-block you. Just be patient in your search, because the right muse/human relationship can last a lifetime.

Over in the UK’s The Guardian, Anthony Horowitz looks at all aspects of blurbs, from back-scratching blurbs to head-scratching blurbs (when his words have been used to sell something he’s pretty sure he didn’t recommend).

He also looks at people asking him for blurbs: Will I read their manuscript and offer something for the cover? I have to say, I dread this. It's as if I'm walking into an emotional minefield. You might think I'm being churlish. But it seems to me that the request comes with so many suppositions. 1) That I have time to read the book 2) that I will actually like it 3) that if I don't like it I will pretend otherwise because I don't want to hurt their feelings and anyway what does it matter if I lie to the public, it's only a bit of blurb – and 4) that my name will help with sales anyway..

Read more about blurbs here.

That rarest of creatures: a true cover double, differing only in cropping, for books issued less than a year apart. The nearly identical cover doesn't seem to have hurt the adult book, since it's gotten great reviews in People and Entertainment Weekly.

Yay! It's our online buddy jbknowles!

See all the Indie Next Children's list here.

I was at 478 wpm, but I'm tired and it's an odd selection. How did you do?

Source: Staples eReader Department

An article in the New York Times describes a chilling episode: Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans who has studied risk factors for psychopathy in children for two decades, described one boy who used a knife to cut off the tail of the family cat bit by bit, over a period of weeks. The boy was proud of the serial amputations, which his parents initially failed to notice. “When we talked about it, he was very straightforward,” Frick recalls. “He said: ‘I want to be a scientist, and I was experimenting. I wanted to see how the cat would react.’ ”

My husband and I know a sociopath quite well. We were discussing whether we should feel pity for her. He said yes, the way you would pity a rabid dog. I said no, that you couldn’t risk feeling pity. Because a sociopath will simply take the pity, the hesitation, the hope that things could be better - and use it against you.

Read more about child sociopaths - or psychopaths - here.