One: Thanks to all the blog commenters over the past four days!  We raised $77 for the Berks County Public Libraries.  A complete list of participating blogs is here and many of the challenges are still active - stop by to comment & increase their donation amount, if you can.   Two: After many late nights, the first round of Vision’s [...]

A quick note before our regularly scheduled post: don’t forget to add your comment to this post  - I’ll donate $1 for each new commenter, up to $150, to the Berks County Public Libraries.  Thanks to all who’ve participated in the Library-Loving Blog Challenge so far! And now, on to today’s releases… Brightly Woven is a YA [...]

I’m participating in Jenn Hubbard’s library-loving blog challenge! For every commenter on this post between now and Friday, March 26th at 5pm EST, I’ll donate $1 to Berks County Public Libraries up to $150 total.   Berks County is where I grew up and the libraries there, the ones that had a real impact on me.  I [...]

Book Briefs: an interview series where authors talk about…what else?  Books! Jacqueline Houtman is a fellow Tenner.  Her debut middle-grade novel, The Reinvention of Edison Thomas, will be published by Front Street, an imprint of Boyds Mills Press, Inc. on March 15.       What book are you reading right now?  When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Your favorite [...]

Head over to the Tenners for this month’s giveaway of awesome, book-related stuff: The giveaway ends Thursday, March 18th at midnight – may the luck of the Irish be with you!

Release Day is a recurring blog feature to give a shout-out to Tenner books on their official debut day.   Argh, 11:51pm!  Another post just under the wire.  Vision’s edits are keeping me up way too late.   The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting was one of the first books I read on the Tenner ARC tour.  It [...]

Release Day is a recurring blog feature to give a shout-out to Tenner books on their official debut day.   I’m getting this in just under the wire, East Coast time, but today’s release is The Reinvention of Edison Thomas, a middle-grade novel by Jacqueline Houtman.  I’m really interested in reading this book, about a boy with an Austim-spectrum condition trying [...]

Book Briefs: an interview series where authors talk about…what else?  Books! Kimberly Derting’s debut YA novel, The Body Finder, will be published by Harper Collins on March 16 (but I saw it in the stores already this week!)     What book are you reading right now?  Giving Up the Ghost by Megan Crewe and Hush, Hush by [...]

Release Day is a recurring blog feature to give a shout-out to Tenner books on their official debut day.   Escaping the Tiger is a middle-grade novel by Laura Manivong loosely based on her husband’s own escape from Laos with his family.  It’s gotten some terrific reviews which you can check out on Laura’s website.   Congrats, Laura!

The most surprising thing to me in the publishing process for The Mark was how much editing is done after a manuscript is sold.  As a first-time author, I’d assumed it would just be minor changes – copy edits, maybe tweaking a few plot points – since so much time is spent polishing the novel before submission.  Not [...]