An "upbeat" and busy Bologna Children's Book Fair 2025 has seen a marked appetite for shorter and illustrated works - despite there being no runaway book of the fair - though the grim state of geopolitics dimmed many fairgoers' moods.
Alice Hoffman, author of numerous adult and young adult books including Practical Magic and Aquamarine, has a new middle grade book, When We Flew Away, a historically based imagining of Anne Frank's life before the family was forced into hiding. Young Anne is grappling with her developing identity within her family and community, at times blissfully happy and others deeply contemplative. Read more
In 2022, over 4 million books were released via traditional publishers and via self-publishing. According to author Sam Subity, less than .02% of those published were middle-grade books. Middle-grade book sales were down 16% in the same year. According to Publisher's Weekly, however, there was an overall increase in sales of Young Adult novels.
Nominations for the 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards recently opened, and Goodreads is coming under fire for its decision to eliminate several categories. Children's & Middle Grade, Poetry, and Graphic Novels were removed from the awards. A new category, Romantasy, has been added.
The middle grade years are often called the golden age of reading, a time when kids connect fiercely with characters and stories. Some of the all-time bestsellers in children's literature (think Harry Potter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid) are middle grade books. Read more
For our latest look at the middle grade category of children's books, we turn to the professionals who work in, well, the middle of it all: the literary agents who serve as intermediaries between authors and publishers. A handful of agents revealed some of the middle grade trends they are observing from their unique vantage point.
Young adult literature has been a huge catalyst and money-maker for publishing over the past few years. Beyond the books, the category's given birth to several multimillion dollar franchises and new Hollywood stars. With all of the glamour and glitz that can come out of the YA world, it's easy to forget about the rest of children's literature. Read more
'I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.
Kate Thompson was horrified to discover that her book, The Sunday Times bestseller, A Mother's Promise, had been plagiarised and rewritten by AI - just days after publication. And then it happened again.
On Saturday, the Trump administration fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright OfficeThe US copyright office has information on its website about how to register and what advantages there are in doing so. www.copyright.gov/register/, just two days after the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, under whose auspices the U.S. Copyright Office operates. Perlmutter was appointed by Hayden in 2020.
Protection of copyright has always been a top priority for the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies, and that point was driven home again during the organization's annual meeting held via Zoom on May 8. Read more
Mark Price has said he has been advised that there are "two grounds on which a legal case could realistically be pursued" against Meta in the UK for the company's use of pirated books to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Read more
When readers first met her in The Golden Compass (first published in the U.K. in 1995 as Northern LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/), Lyra Belacqua was a young orphan, hiding in a wardrobe at Oxford's Jordan College, spying on the scholars she lived among in a world with some parallels to our own. Read more
'You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.'