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Can J.K. Rowling really grow up?

One of the better critical reviews of The Casual Vacancy

What's unusual about Rowling's genre-skipping is that she has moved from children's author to adult novelist, rather than the other way around. Traditionally, that is a difficult feat. For example, Lucy Maud Montgomery, who published Anne of Green Gables in 1908, never achieved the same success with her long since-forgotten adult novels.

Applying the skills and experience you have acquired in other literary forms to children's books seems to make for a happier genre-changing transition. C.S. Lewis was an Oxford don, a medieval scholar and a poet when he began writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of the seven volumes in his Narnia series. A classic Christian allegory - although he denied that - the Narnia books have enthralled children and their parents for decades.

Most writers want to experiment with technical and literary challenges, to test their mettle, to find new audiences, to have fun with voice and narrative, to force themselves to keep staring at the blank screen. Even those, like the late Christopher Hitchens, who can't escape their own genre (his genius was as a polemicist and literary and cultural critic) admired the best writers for children. In a Vanity Fair column in October, 2002, he wrote about Philip Pullman, another writer who sticks to his main strength, decreeing that Pullman's books, especially the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass), "have begun to dissolve the frontier between adult and juvenile fiction." Hitchens and Pullman shared a world view - they were both atheists, although Pullman likes to call himself an "agnostic atheist" - but Hitchens's point about the artificial boundary separating books for children and those for adults is well taken and speaks to the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Sandra Martin, a senior features writer at The Globe and Mail

Sally Gritten Dies

Announced in The Bookseller:

Sally Gritten, formerly managing director of HarperCollins Children's Books, died on Monday 24th September following a long battle with leukaemia.

J. K. Rowling Interview Transcript

Anyone who has followed this blog over time will know that I have not been the hugest fan of the Harry Potter series.
The reception of her adult novel, published tomorrow, will be very interesting.
The opening pages of her debut Harry novel, Harry and the Philosopher's Stone, suggest to me that it could be very good indeed.

an extract from the BBC interview:

Do you aspire to be the Dickens of our day?

No [laughs]. Again, I think it's a curious thing being me, because it was all an accident and then, when you become very successful, people assume there was a game plan. So there are no motivational posts on my wall saying "Be next Dickens" - well, because he's Dickens. It would be so outrageously presumptuous to say that. You pay your respects to him and then move on.

What do you aspire to as a writer?

To get better. I think you're working and learning until you die. I can with my hand on my heart say I will never write for any reason other than I burningly wanted to write the book. I very rarely think about who I'm writing for, except that clearly there is an adult/child divide and certainly my next book is a children's book, if that's what I do publish next - she said, covering all her bases.

The one thing Potter has left me with is an absolute dread of committing myself because it came back to bite me so often.

This is your first published adult novel. It is inevitably going to sell truckloads. It is going to get reviews good, bad and indifferent. People around you are going to say nice things about it. How will you judge if it's been a success or failure?

The simple answer is speaking to readers. I have to say that latterly with the Potter books, when the hype became insane, it was a monster that was out of control. Speaking to readers really brought you back to what it should be about.

So ultimately, the people who have read the book, who are not paid to have an opinion, are generally the best benchmark of whether you have done what you set out to do. But you're right that that was a consideration for me, particularly with being published next time round.

James Roy, On The Writing of his Latest Book, City

A guest blog post on WestWords:

Cities are different from towns - we know this. They're bigger, for a start. Much, much bigger, both geographically and in terms of population. By virtue of that, they generally cover a much more diverse range of characters. Of course many of those characters are connected, but it's the way they're connected that really caught my attention: it's often in anonymous ways, such as through found objects, chance meetings or random acquaintances. It fascinates me that in small communities we think we know everything there is to know about pretty much everyone (even if we actually don't) while those of us who live in cities will think nothing of driving for an hour across town to have coffee with a friend, yet we don't know that name of the lady who's lived across the hall from us for years. If the story about taking the cricket catch by accident was the first seed-point for Town, this book started with a couple. One was Veronica, or Ronnie, from Town, who was the much-maligned 'scarlet woman' at the high school. It was Ronnie who found herself stranded up in a dark bush clearing with a bunch of drunk and sex-crazed guys, and had to do some rapid diplomacy to make a terrible situation a little less bad. Perhaps more than any other, The Clearing was the story that people most liked to talk about when we discussed the book. But as is usually the case with the short form, the character's story continues on after the last full-stop...

Roy's earlier book, Town:

Outside In World

Thanks to the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Outside In World has been able to launch of a range of new online resources for different audiences. Visit the dedicated zones for teachers and librarians; parents; publishers, writers, illustrators and translators; and children and young people.

Also new is an Online Gallery of Children's Book Illustrators - Windows on the World.

Highly Recommended

Killing Off Her Past

Barry Cunningham, founder-director of The Chicken House, but once an editor at Bloomsbury, where he worked with Rowling, believes there is a character based on him in The Casual Vacancy:

Barry Cunningham, the editor who published the first Harry Potter book, believes that the character of Barry Fairbrother is based on him and is Rowling's joky way of "killing off" links to her past as a children's author. "I can't believe it's a coincidence," he said of Rowling's choice of name for Barry, a parish councillor whose death triggers a bitter local election. "To have your early editor disposed of in your first adult book can hardly be an accident." Cunningham said he believed the death symbolises "leaving your editor behind as you move to adult books".

Michael Rosen On Roald Dahl

The BBC News Arts reporter, Sabrina Sweeney, talks to Michael Rosen about Roald Dahl...

Today, September 13th, is Roald Dahl Day.

Michael Rosen has just published a children's biography of Dahl.
See it here, on ACHUKA's newlook Books pages:

www.achuka.co.uk/children.html

Student by David Belbin

A very interesting blog post describing the writing history and genesis of his latest work of fiction, Student.

The book is published by the small independent press, Five Leaves, and - until the end of September - is also available for just 99p as a Kindle download.

Print edition

Kindle Edition

Buy from Waterstones

Children's Ebook Sales Soar

Francesca Dow, managing director of children's books at Penguin, said that the group is seeing a "big jump" in e-book sales for children, many of whom are being given their own Kindles by their parents. Recent advances in technology to allow "flowable text" where lines of text and pictures adjust to fit the particular reading device used are behind the rise...

Have you visited our redesigned, mobile friendly "flowable text" main site yet?

Philip Pullman on rewriting Grimm

Philip Pullman on rewriting fifty of his favourite Grimm tales...

DEMONS by Bill Nagelkerke is published today

ACHUKAbooks publishes the seventh title on its list, a longer work of fiction by Bill Nagelkerke, whose short novella The Field launched our digital imprint at the start of the year.

To celebrate, we are offering every title on the list at 99c/77p, and The Field is on a 24hr free download. The perfect opportunity to taste and discover the quality of this New Zealand author, and indeed the other ACHUKAbooks.

We are keen to get DEMONS reviewed. Please contact us to request a review copy.

When Are You Going To Write A Proper Book?

Ina piece that references several authors who write for both audiences, including herself, Sarah Webb considers (in the Irish Independent) what is, for chuildren's authors, the most irritating question of all...

When are you going to write a proper book -- a book for adults? It's a question every children's writer is asked at some stage of their career. I started out writing for children, switched to adults, and now write for both...

Sarah Webb has two books out this month, 'Ask Amy Green: Dancing Daze' for young teens (Walker Books) and 'The Shoestring Club' for adults (Pan Macmillan)

Macmillan have issued a special celebratory hardback edition of Gobbolino The Witch's Cat by Ursula Moray Williams on the 70th Annivrsary of its first publication, with new illustrations by Catherine Rayner.

Moray Willaims died in 2006.
Guardian obituary http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/nov/15/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries

The new illustrations are based on Catherine Rayner's own cat, Ena:

Award winning author and illustrator Catherine Rayner studied Illustration at Edinburgh College of art. She fell in love with the city and still lives there with her husband, young son and a handful of creatures: Shannon the horse, Ena the grey cat and a goldfish called Richard.

She finds huge inspiration in her pets and often uses them as models, frequently asking Ena to pose so that she can study her posture and movement.

Barrington Stoke specialises in publishing short dyslexia-friendly chapter books and these two new publications are excellent examples of what they produce. Since they launched the paper used is a more appealing, lighter shade of buff and the cover designs have improved immensely.

Their website includes detailed advice for parents on dyslexia:
http://www.barringtonstoke.co.uk/resources/Barrington_Stoke_In_Depth.pdf

They have recently reissued two earlier titles in more appealing format

Wartman by Michael Morpurgo

The Fix by Sophie McKenzie

Then, to follow up our previous post and continue our look-back at ACHUKA's various incarnations, the ACHUKAchick was hatched in the Spring of 2004, and remained on the site's masthead until a few months ago.

A new mobile-friendly ACHUKAbooks site is launching on Monday September 10th.

In 2008 it was goodbye to pink and green and the introduction of a cleaner design with a more sophisticated navigation bar. 2008 also marked the first use of Amazon widgets to display our ACHUKA Picks titles - hence the empty white space in this screenshot from the waybackmachine...

Don't miss the launch of our entirely redesigned website on Monday September 10th, when ACHUKAbooks will be moving into the mobile, handheld age.

...which brings us up to the present time.

The first Big ACHUKA Thing of 2012 was the establishment of an exclusively digital imprint, ACHUKAbooks.

The next Big ACHUKA Thing will be happening on Monday, with the launch of a new, mean, lean site look, designed with mobile and handheld technologies in mind.

Here is a sneak peak

Now that the new-look ACHUKAbooks is launched, I thought I would combine three recent posts to provide a single composite entry tracking the changes in ACHUKA's presence over the years since the site was founded in 1997.

Remember our first iteration? All that pink-and-green-ensuring-we're-seen colourscheme with a newspage style layout.

It was also the days of a splash page, and the ACHUKA homepage only loaded after several seconds of typographical Flash animation. I'm rather embarrassed to see how long that splash screen was maintained when I check things in the waybackmachine.

Our first 'look' survived until 2003.

When the homepage became:

... retaining the pink and green, but losing the newspaper styling.

The ACHUKAchick was hatched in the Spring of 2004, and remained on the site's masthead until a few months ago.

In 2008 it was goodbye to pink and green and the introduction of a cleaner design with a more sophisticated navigation bar. 2008 also marked the first use of Amazon widgets to display our ACHUKA Picks titles - hence the empty white space in this screenshot from the waybackmachine...

Two years ago, the site broadened its perspective and ceased being an exclusively children's books site. It added two new sections, one for adult titles (focusing on Photography, Poetry and Art) and another one devoted to self-published titles and eBooks.

Once again, the empty space was originally filled with an Amazon widget slideshow.

Those Amazon widgets have been a mixed blessing. They are remarkably easy to update and maintain, and they display really well on a fullsize PC screen. But being flash-based they are not Apple friendly, and are not viewable on mobiles.

They have also proved to be very ineffective in encouraging click-throughs.

So the new site has eliminated widgets altogether, and has a simple grid design of static book jackets.

Until this past weekend we looked like this:

The first Big ACHUKA Thing of 2012 was the establishment of an exclusively digital imprint, ACHUKAbooks.

The next Big ACHUKA Thing has bee today's unveling of a new, mean, lean site look, designed with mobile and handheld technologies in mind.

Telegraph Feature

Charlie Higson: why would kids read books if their parents never do?

Look out for the special chance to win a signed copy of Charlie Higson's latest novel, The Sacrifice, on the all-new, mobile-friendly ACHUKAbooks site...