Does This Spark Your Pinterest?

Like most publishers, Scarletta Press is on Pinterest. And yes, like most, we love it. We have boards with titles like Book Humor, Dream Bookshelves, In Memory of Maurice Sendak, Kid Lit, and Book Trailers—just to name a few—and we’re constantly looking for new images to pin and repin. Well that’s all fine and good, you say, but what’s the point?

Music Education Week

It's National Music Education Week, and to celebrate, we've compiled a list of musically inclined books for your reading pleasure. No matter if you're looking for books by musicians, about musicians, or inspired by musicians, there's something on the list for you. We even added a few children's books in case you want to celebrate music education week with your family!
If you want to find out more about any of the books, or purchase them online, you can follow the links that correspond to each numbered cover. Happy reading!

1. Forever Young by Bob Dylan and illustrated by Paul Rogers
2. High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby
3. Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
4. One Love Adapted by Cedella Marley - Based on the song by Bob Marley
5. Come As You Are by Michael Azerrad
6. The Ice Castle: An Adventure in Music by Pendred Noyce
7. Hassie Calhoun: A Las Vegas Novel of Innocence by Pamela Cory
8. Just Kids by Patti Smith
9. Spiral Bound by Dessa
10. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus
11. Mama Don’t Allow by Thacher Hurd
12. Under their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It) by Bill German
And if we've forgotten one of you're own favorite music books, make sure to add it to the list!

Let's Hear a Hip-hip-hooray for ALA!

We're so excited for ALA's annual conference in California this weekend--or at least we will be as soon as we finish the million and one things we need to do to prepare! This week is proving to be crazy as we finalize travel arrangements, make sure all our lovely books are shipped correctly, pack our posters and press releases, and try to figure out if there's time in the schedule to visit Disney. This last one seems doubtful with all the other cool stuff going on.
If you're also going to be in Anaheim for ALA, make sure you remember to visit us! We'll be part of the Publisher Group West booth (#2566) and we've got plenty of stuff going on make it worth your while.

Book Trailers

I doubt that book trailers will ever get the same attention that movie or TV trailers do. Just look at The Hunger Games: the movie trailer has gotten over 4.6 million views on YouTube, while its book counterpart has only gotten 1,700. But I'll admit that more than once a book trailer has pushed me to get a book that I was previously on the fence about reading. Yes, some of them are terribly boring or have nothing to do with the book, but there are also some great ones out there that deserve some recognition.
So when I came across Melville House Books' Moby Awards for the best (and worst) book trailers, I was delighted. You can check out some of last year's hits—and MAJOR misses—on their website, but here are some of their picks, as well as some of my own favorites.



It's a Book by Lane Smith


This is such a great book, and I love how the trailer makes the illustrations come alive.

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick
 

Wonderstruck's illustrations are beautifully intricate, and this trailer not only shows that, in an interesting 3-dimensional way, but it also allows viewers to hear about the book from Selznick himself as he walks in and out of the sketches.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
 

The typography and silent-film feel of this trailer are what attracted me to it. It's only text, but it still manages to be more appealing than other trailers with hired actors.

Watch BEA!

Today is the last day of BookExpo America, and if you aren't in New York to see all the events in person, the good news is that you can still watch them online. It's ALMOST as good as being there....

If We Were at BEA...

Over the next few days, book people from all over will head to New York to attend BookExpo America, or BEA for all of you who love a good acronym (and there's plenty of them when it comes to BEA: ABA, ABC, AAP, AAR, ABFFE, IDPF…the list could go on). Unfortunately, Scarletta Press isn't attending the show this year, so we've decided to live vicariously through everyone else and plan what we would have done had we been jet-setting to NYC on Sunday. Of course, BEA is overwhelming, and it’s impossible to see everything you intend. But still, there are some highlights that we would definitely check out.

Monday’s festivities start out with an opening session from the American Booksellers Association—or ABA, ok there I go again—based on the campaign called “Why Indies Matter.” This video campaign on the IndieBound website features authors, booksellers, and customers giving short testimonials on independent bookstores and why we love them. At the BEA event, Richard Russo will be speaking about the current and future role of indie bookstores, and what’s also cool is that on Tuesday, ABA will be capturing other responses to the question of why indies matter from this year’s honorees.

The adult book and author breakfast on Tuesday morning will have appearances by Stephen Colbert and Junot Diaz, and later in the day is an interesting panel on the “Ongoing evolution of YA fiction.” So for everyone who’s dying to know the deal with Hunger Games-type trilogies and their wild popularity, all your questions will be answered.