Tattered Essence

Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards have been announced.

There are two winners in the children’s text category and two in the children’s illustration category.

The Children’s Text winners are: Iain Lawrence for Gemini Summer (Delacorte) and François Barcelo for La fatigante et le fainéant (Soulières éditeur).

The Children’s Illustration winners are: Duncan Weller for The Boy from the Sun (Simply Read Books) and Geneviève Côté for La petite rapporteuse de mots, written by Danielle Simard (Les éditions Les 400 coups).

The awards are Canada’s oldest prizes for English- and French-language Canadian literature.

Have you heard of the UK show “Richard and Judy?” They did an episode called Richard & Judy’s Best Kids’ Books
Ever, which aired October 28 on Channel 4 and the results have been amazing for the kids book market.

Book such as Aliens Love Underpants, as well as Sophie McKenzie’s Girl, Missing have seen major sales boosts since the airing of the show. Never before has a television show had this sort of effect on the kids book industry. This is definitely a development to be watched. No word yet on if they plan on having a follow up show.

The Golden Compass is set to sail into theaters soon. It had its world premiere in London Tuesday night. And has already received a four-star review from the Guardian!

The book is written by Philip Pullman. The movie debuts here on December 7, 2007. There has been some controversial press for this movie and book though. Seems the author is an atheist and some people do not care too much for that.

A lot of books get made into movies. Some of them are really good. And some of them are really bad. For instance, for the most part the Harry Potter books make great movies. And the Eragon movie was a disaster. Of course, I thought that the Eragon book was not so great. And the Narnia movie was pretty good. So was The Thief Lord. What are some of your favorites?

What do you think about book trailers? There are a lot of authors out there that are using them. Most of the people that seem to be embracing them though are self published writers. I do not know of any big house publishers that are doing book trailers. Sure they have money for other kinds of advertising. But are they totally missing out on the best way to advertise? I think so. What do you think?