Word: authorly
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...hardly a new approach - young-adult series have often been written by multiple authors under contract, ever since the Bobbsey Twins. The Maze of Bones is by Rick Riordan, a former middle school history teacher who is the author of the best-selling Percy Jackson series, and who also helped flesh out ideas for the other books in the 39 Clues series. "They were very secretive," Riordan says. "They did nondisclosure agreements. I felt like I was working for the CIA!" Riordan's involvement with Amy and Dan will end when Maze goes on sale Sept...
That's one of the advantages of doing business this way, without a single author. By rotating writers, Scholastic can put out 39 Clues novels at Gatling-gun speeds: there will be a total of 10, a new one appearing every three or four months. Another advantage is that it allows Scholastic to retain ownership and control of the intellectual property they're selling. Harry Potter quickly made J.K. Rowling one of the richest women in the world. But Amy and Dan are company property. In the post-Potter world, publishers realize there's too much money at stake...
...there's also a disadvantage. The post-author approach gives The 39 Clues a synthetic, focus-grouped quality. It's nothing you can easily point to. It's just the absence of anything risky or anything strange. The Maze of Bones is scrupulously smooth and generic and meticulously calculated to appeal to everyone and offend no one. As the product of a corporate hivemind, it isn't stamped with the signature quirks of a single distinctive authorial sensibility. If it were a baby it wouldn't have a belly button...
...returned from Iraq last month, says there is "still a running gun battle with al-Qaeda in Iraq" in the northern part of the country around Mosul. U.S. troops there are "still in the 'clear' phase of 'clear, hold, build' counterinsurgency strategy," said Nagl, a West Point graduate and author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam who recently helped Petraeus rewrite the Army/Marine Corps' Counterinsurgency Field Manual. "There's still a fight going on up north, and we're going to have a fight there for awhile...
...Schroeder is the author of a recent study about how little German youngsters today actually know about the GDR. He and his colleagues surveyed over 5,000 students aged between 15 and 17, and found that many, especially those actually living in areas that formed part of East Germany, have an extremely distorted view of the GDR. More than half of the respondents, for example, believe that the GDR was "not a dictatorship," and that the Stasi was an intelligence service like any other, deployed mostly against people of other countries rather than against its own citizens. The figures...