Have You Heard About Shepherd.com?

Shepherd.com is a relatively new site designed to help readers find books on topics or themes that interest them. Founded by entrepreneur Ben Fox, this startup is intended to provide a more satisfying way of discovering books than that offered by Goodreads or other existing sites.

How does it work? It's kind of an exciting concept--authors create curated five-book lists on a theme connected to their own book and say something about the five books, their own book, and themselves. The staff at Shepherd.com then get to work and create a page for each list with links for readers to be able to buy each book at either Bookshop.org or Amazon.com.

Readers can browse by Wikipedia topic or favorite book or author, and can also see the latest new lists or go to "shelves" of lists arranged by larger topics like France, Family, or African Americans. As more and more authors create lists, the more different kinds of old and new books readers can discover on the site. Here are some lists that caught my eye:

Mitch Horowitz's Best Books on the extra-physical potentials of the mind (because you know you want to know more about consciousness and ESP, right?)
Karen J. Hasley's The best Regency books that showcase women who have more on their minds than romance (not that romance is eschewed here)
Stacey Levine's The best fiction that writes against narrative convention (I want to read everything on this list!)
Tamsin Mori's The best middle grade children’s books with wonderful weather magic (isn't this such a cool and unexpected list topic?)
Hussein Fancy's The best books that capture the paradoxes of medieval Spain (because medieval Spain is fascinating, in part because Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived together in peace)

My first list will be appearing early next week! It's called The best novels about creativity, self-discovery, and (re)invention.

"Discovering a new book should be a magical experience where the search is part of the fun. ... We give readers fun ways to find amazing books."

All the Stats About Middle-Grade Books

Now that I've begun, in my kooky way, a novel for kids rather than yet another book for adults, I wanted to see what kind of word count I ought to be aiming for. After all, while I read huge numbers of children's books growing up and occasionally still read some, this is not an area of publishing that I've really followed.

Well, I found that middle-grade books tend to be somewhere in the 40,000 to 69,000 word range, which sounds just right for what I'm expecting to end up with. But I also found out a whole lot more.

Children's author Hannah Holt has compiled an amazing and incredibly useful set of statistics about middle-grade authors and their books. While for some things it would be nice to have a larger author sample size (76 authors participated), for the most part she was able to offer a fascinating view into this particular subset of publishing, with lots of handy graphs (and I'm not even big on graphs, but these really worked for me).

Not only did she find the usual word count range (in the middle of a surprisingly wide total range) for books for this age group, but she got data on advance sizes for large and small publishers, how advances correlated to agented vs unagented authors (guess what, having an agent makes a big difference in the size of your advance--not a surprise but good to have confirmed), how much this set of authors tend to make per year from their writing, how many hours a week they tend to write, and a whole host of other interesting data.

Major kudos to Hannah Holt for surveying authors and putting together such a detailed and well organized account of what she found! She also surveyed YA authors, chapter book authors (chapter books are for the age group between picture books and middle-grade), and picture book authors (in three parts, starting with this page). It looks like Hannah Holt has lots of other great stuff on her site too, so if children's books and how they are written and published is of interest to you, definitely check her out!

I Suddenly Begin a Middle-Grade Novel

School's out and I've been busy! There's promotion work to do both for Magnetic Woman and, in advance, for In Search of the Magic Theater. I also put together the spring newsletter for the Czechoslovak Studies Association. But mostly, I've been writing.

What am I writing, you may ask?

Well, I always have quite a few projects underway--some scholarly and some fiction. Some are books I've been working on for years, on and off. Others are fairly new or even simply in the planning stages. It's hard to finish writing any book during the school year because my time (and mental energy) is so fragmented. I can get a lot done all the same, but not wrap up a book. Summer break is when I try, these days, to get at least one book done per year, because in the summer I have days and months to focus and I can read an entire manuscript through easily and see what's missing or not working.

For three summers now, I've picked one nearly done project to finish up. And guess what? It's been the same one each year. Yet, oddly enough, in 2019 I finished two novels (one old, one new) and in 2020 I wrote a novella. (I would probably have finished a novel too in 2020, but I had to spend a lot of time prepping my fall remote classes, one of which was one I'd never taught before, let alone remotely.) In other words, I simply ended up working on books other than the one I thought I'd finish.

So, this year is looking true to form. I said yes, I want to finish that nearly done book that I began many years ago and still love. But what happened? In mid-May I had an idea for a whole new book that felt like it would be fun and easy to write, so I set to work. It's been purring right along and I've got about 13,000 words written, not counting masses of additional notes and partial scenes that might go in slightly later. The unexpected thing is that this is not a book for adults, which all of my other books are. This is what's known as a middle-grade book, which is to say that the anticipated audience is aged about eight to twelve.

It's a lot of fun, and I'm guessing that I'll finish it and still have time to see if I can wrap up one of those nearly done books that have been inching toward completion for years. Maybe even the one that has waited the longest to be finished! We shall see.

Of course, with two novels, one novella, and a story collection all seeking publishers, it'd be nice if I had an agent again to handle shopping them around while I promote the published book and the soon-to-be published book and write my new books. Unfortunately, looking for agents is yet another of those time-consuming tasks in a writer's life.