Observations on the publishing industry

Even when I was a librarian, ordering thousands of dollars of YA books a year, I still wasn't having access to the breadth and depth of what is being published every year the way I've been able to so far with BFYA.  Granted, we are for sure not getting everything.  But we sure are getting a lot of books.  I've received 240-something titles as of yesterday, and I'm clearly in the throes of the beginning of the month torrential downpour of books.

Yesterday, 20-something titles arrived from Penguin, a smattering from its various imprints.  While watching Glee and catching up with a friend on Facebook, I did what I always do when a new box comes. I read the flap copy, check out the acknowledgments page to find out what agent reps the author (sometimes this can be an indicator of whether or not I'll love the book), enter the title and author into my Excel spreadsheet, and put the title in a "to read" or "not to read" pile.  This time, my "to read" pile was larger than my "not to read" pile.

It's amazing to see how many books are published in the same year with very similar plot lines or facets. Like there are two books coming out that are about a fat guy named Tiny and his friend named Will Grayson.... oh wait, no, no, that's just one book with a repetitive title.  All kidding aside, there are two books that came in the same box yesterday that have to do with Yellowstone, my favorite national park.  (You can bet they are both also sitting in my "to read" pile.)  Kirsten Chandler's Wolves, Boys, and Other Things That Might Kill Me (Viking) whose title is awfully intriguing, is a modern story about wolves being introduced into Yellowstone.  It's coming out May 13th, the same date as Faithful by Janet Fox (Speak), which is set in the early 20th century, and tells the story of a privileged young woman from Newport who is dragged off to Yellowstone by her family.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of 2 YA books set in Yellowstone that I've even heard of until now.  And then there are two coming out on the same day from the same publisher.

I was looking at Susane Colastani's Something Like Fate and felt a wave of deja vu roll over me.  A book about a girl who starts seeing her best friend's boyfriend behind her back.  Ummm... sounds like Elizabeth Scott's The Unwritten Rule, which I read a month ago.  When you get down to it, I know there are only so many essential stories that are being told, just in many variations, but it's still kind of amazing to look at all the similarities.  When I think of the manuscript I'm working on, there are a few comparisons I can draw, but nothing that seems to be the same thing.  Which is good, right?  But then I wonder if this is how the authors of these books felt, selling their stories to different publishing houses (or imprints) and then finding out that their book is coming out roughly the same time as another very similar book.

Another observation I've had from all the reading, is the way all the books I read seem to be loosely connected to each other in some weird tangential way.  I almost want to track these tinier similarities, as I go from title to title, but I think I've got too much on my plate at the moment.  When I say tiny similarities, I mean, reading two books in a row where there is a character obsessed with words for the groupings of animals, ex. "a murder of crows."  That's weird, right?, to read two books in a row with a secondary character that has the same mini obsession.

Well, those are all the observations I have for the moment.  The bf and I are in the middle of unpacking in Cambridge and oh, this one's a doozy.  It wouldn't be doozy if the movers hadn't lost our custom made, 7 foot bookshelf... but that's moving.  It's going to be a while until we're completely organized, but I'm sure we'll get there.