New book!

Just to tell you if you didn't know - and remind you annoyingly if you did - that the new edition of our Ultimate Book Guide (for 8-12s) is out this week!

The 8-12 was the very first UBG we published, back in 2004, and this is a substantially revised edition, with about a hundred new entries, supplied by new contributors like Jeanette Winterson and Justin Somper, Cornelia Funke, Linda Buckley-Archer, Tobias Druitt and Steve Cole, and Heather Dyer, and Julia Golding, and Joshua Doder, and Robert Muchamore, Brian Selznick, David Roberts and Jeremy Strong and many others... And of course all the amazing contributors whose great work we've kept from the original volume too. It's pretty exciting. (Well, we think it is.)

Posh launch party in a couple of weeks, which is pretty exciting too.

Oh, and last week we delivered the mammoth manuscript for the new edition of the teen guide to our publishers, so that's (sort of) under control now too.

By 'mammoth', I mean '173,502 words long', incidentally. Not a small book. But you'll have to wait for that one for a bit. But you can buy/borrow/steal your second-generation 8-12 UBG *now*. So please do!


PS I was invited to speak about the UBGs at the Lewes Children's Book Group last week which I really enjoyed - a really nice group, and it was held at the brilliant new Lewes library too, which was very good to get a chance to see. My talk was scheduled for just a couple of hours after delivering the manuscript of the Teen Guide, so I was a little de-mob happy (not to say a little sleep-deprived) so I do hope that at least some of the things I said made some sense to someone...