Thursday, March 20, 2008

Young, scholarly superheroes?

The Junior Library Guild may sound like a team of young, scholarly superheroes. It's not, of course, though it does do a great good.

Each year, this organization buys a decent quantity of a select group of books before publication and sells them at a discount to libraries—often libraries that could not afford the books without that discount.

The JLG chose Boys of Steel as one of their titles. "Any book that they take ultimately ends up doing extremely well in the library market," my editor wrote. I said I was thrilled and then scampered over to the JLG's site to find out more.

I immediately learned that I'm also honored. Currently, the JLG reviews 3,000 manuscript submissions annually and chooses only 336. Especially uplifting was this, from their site: "
Nearly 100% of JLG books receive favorable reviews and/or win major children’s book awards."

We're still almost two seasons away from finding out which end of that "nearly" my book will be on, but I'll take being 1 out of 336 out of 3,000 any day.

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