Thursday Links

Look no further for all of this week's YA news! Okay, maybe you could look further, because I’m not on top of everything. But here’s some of the newsworthy stuff I found:

An article in PW last week by Wendy Werris reported on the fall meeting of the California Independent Booksellers Organization. Very interesting stuff being said about the teen market, including some stats telling us that 75 percent of teens read for fun every day, on average 43 minutes a day. So good news! Too much interesting stuff to report here, so check out the article for yourself.

On a related note, Tess Gerritsen shares her reader demographics on the Murderati blog. One interesting fact: she has a following with readers under 18. This brings me back to last week’s article in PW, reporting on teen reading habits. Yes, 61 percent love mystery/thriller books, but 89 percent of teens venture into the adult section for their books. Not that this is a bad thing, but I’ll bet good money that it’s those mystery readers that get their books on the adult side of the bookstore. I’ve said it before: let there be more YA mystery/thrillers!

And off my soapbox now…

I found Harper Teen’s (new?) website Pitch Black, which gets major points for creativity. It’s a bummer it’s all about books with fangs, at least to me, but if you’re into vampire YA, check it out. Kudos for the creativity, Harper Teen people.

Another publisher promoting teen books: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children's (now there’s a mouthful) did a live webcast on 60 of their new YA releases for teen read week, which I only read about until this week. But happily, you can still check out the archive of that webcast here.

Penguin is giving away money to charity to promote Mike Lupica’s novel Million Dollar Throw, which just came out this week. Props for thinking outside the box, I say. Read all about it in this PW article.

Want more bloggery? Check out School Library Journal’s article by Elizabeth Bird on blogs about children’s books (you have to read to the bottom of the article to get her top 10). Or try KidLitosphere (thanks to Olgy Gary for referring to this!)—there are a scary amount of blog links there.

On a bit of an off-topic and serious note: this month is Youth Homelessness Awareness Month, as reported on YPulse. Apparently more than 75 percent of homelessness cases go unreported, and these are kids who should be worrying about their grades and their hair, not where they’ll be sleeping that night. Very gripping stuff. Causecast tells you how you can help this growing group—talk about a great way to celebrate Thanksgiving.

GalleyCat’s Jason Boog reports on Jericho Brown’s advice for young poets: "Think about the whole of things, as opposed to thinking about right now (..)” Seems like good advice all the way around.

And as a final note for all us writers who think we know what craft means, check out this photo. Now that’s impressive.