Pick of the Week, Pick of the Month!

Two bits of wonderful news today.

First up,  Publishers Weekly has selected Frostbornfor their PW Picks: Books of the Week, August 4, 2014. They say:

Frostborn by Lou Anders (Crown) - In this Norse-flavored adventure, Anders pits a clever boy and a resourceful half-giant girl against numerous enemies and the hazards of the frozen wilderness. Twelve-year-old Karn has no desire to learn the family business of farming; he’s much more interested in playing the strategy board game Thrones and Bones. Thianna’s human ancestry makes her an oddity and object of derision among her full-blooded giant peers. Nevertheless, Karn and Thianna become reluctant allies and friends when trouble threatens: Karn runs afoul of a malevolent undead lord, while Thianna must flee from her human mother’s people, who seek a long-lost artifact. Though a lot of elements are in play, Anders ties the novel’s threads together in a neatly satisfying way, crafting a powerful, fast-paced tale.

And second, Amazon has picked Frostborn as one of only four Best Books of the Month: Ages 9-12 (Middle Grade)!

BEA and AST

I came home this evening to two pieces of very good news.

One, my novel Frostborn (Thrones and Bones book one) has made Publishers Weekly's BEA 2014: Children's Galleys to Grab list. They do get the title wrong, but the rest is on point: "Firstborn by debut novelist Lou Anders, a middle-grade tale of trolls, giants, and dragons."

And second, Russian language rights to Frostborn have been sold to AST, one of the largest publishers in Russia.

PW Children's Bookshelf

I was out of town last week, but as I got on the airplane last Wednesday, I had this nice surprise. My recent good news made Publishers Weekly's Children's Bookshelf newsletter:

Phoebe Yeh has also acquired Frostborn by Lou Anders, book one in a three-book middle grade fantasy adventure series called Thrones and Bones, inspired by Norse myth and folklore. The book introduces Karn, who would rather be playing the board game Thrones and Bones, and Thianna, half-frost giant, half-human, who team up when they are chased by wyverns, a dead Viking sea captain, and a 1200-year-old dragon. Publication is slated for 2014; Joe Monti of the Barry Goldblatt Literary Agency brokered the deal for world English rights.

BISG Report Finds More E-book Buyers Buying Print Books

An article in Publishers Weekly entitled "BISG Report Finds More E-book Buyers Buying Print Books," has this interesting statistic:

"...the percentage of e-book consumers who exclusively or mostly purchase e-books fell from nearly 70% in August 2011 to 60% in May 2012. Over the same period, the percentage of survey respondents who have no preference for either e-book or print formats, or who buy some genres in e-book format and others in print, rose from 25% percent to 34%."

The article also notes that the Kindle Fire has overtaken the iPad among ebook consumers. No surprise there, though iBooks remains my personal preferred reader.  I am hopeful that iTunes will eventually include ebooks in their iMatch service so I have Cloud storage for my non-iBookstore purchased epub titles.

Publishers Weekly on Masked

Publishers Weekly has reviewed my forthcoming superhero anthology, Masked:

Anders (Fast Forward) delivers an ambitious collection of superhero tales that provide top-notch plots and characterizations while honoring their four-color roots. In Daryl Gregory's superbly metafictional "Message from the Bubble Gum Factory," a former sidekick finally realizes the broader implications of superheroes. Stephen Baxter nicely applies hard science to the futuristic "Vacuum Lad." Gail Simone's "Thug" and Mike Carey's "The Non-Event" bolster predictable plots with solid characters and prose. Joseph Mallozzi's "Downfall" and Marjorie M. Liu's "Call Her Savage" embrace comics clichés and make them both more complex and more entertaining. ...Overall, Anders has assembled a solid anthology that provides first-rate entertainment.

Fun-House Glasses and Love that Goat!

Paul Goat Allen interviews Paolo Bacigalupi in a web-exclusive for Publishers Weekly today. Even if he hadn't started off by referencing me, I'd be directing you there for these words from Paolo on the importance of science fiction: "SF has tools for writing about the world around us that just aren’t available in other genres. Reading good speculative fiction is like wearing fun-house eyeglasses. It shifts the light spectrum and reveals other versions of the world, mapped right on top of the one you thought you knew."

Update 2/21/08: Paolo is also interviewed by environmental journalist Michelle Nijhuis on Grist: Environmental News & Commentary today. More choice words, such as this explanation of how science and science fiction go hand in hand: "scientists are inherently conservative, and science journalists are inherently conservative, because you don't want to be wrong. But that's where I can get involved as a science fiction writer. I don' t have to be right, exactly, [but] I need to illustrate. I need to illustrate a feeling or experience so that people can say, 'Does that seem like something we want to be going toward?'"

Anders Game

Well, I finally got the hardcopy of the April 2nd issue of Publishers Weekly with my interview in it. And yes, while my name is correct in the article itself, the caption below my photo suggests I might be a character in a future Orson Scott Card novel. That being said, I was thrilled that the table of contents page used a huge picture of the figures of Lila Black and Zal from the cover of Keeping It Real and a nice shot of the cover itself with the article in question. What's more, I see my company took out an ad for the same issue, so we got the cover in three times. I think it's one of our nicest ads, so I'll upload it here. Feel free to post this to your blogs, email it to friends, print it out and thumbtack it up at your schools and places of business, stick it in your neighbors' mailboxes and insert it into the pages of magazines at newstands. No, really, I'm just sharing it because I think it's pretty - I don't really expect you to do that. Really.

The Universe is Expanding Already

So, Publishers Weekly has done their annual cover story on science fiction and fantasy. "Is the Universe Expanding or Contracting" by Bethanne Kelly Patrick and Michael Coffey proclaims that "Today's bestselling science fiction is outside the genre—Atwood, Niffenegger, Crichton" and then asks editors from a variety of SFF houses for a "hot" current title to plug. (Can you guess ours?)

I haven't seen the print issue yet, though a friend alerted me to the fact that my name may be mispelled there, so I'm curious to confirm that. Also, don't get me wrong - I am very grateful to be included in their roundup for the third year in a row (previous two here and here), but I generated enough material for this interview that once I confirm that the little bit that's online is all they took in print as well, I may come back here with an outtakes blog post!