and the winner is...

Yesterday, I forgot to announce the winner of our Comments for Books & Cookies Contest. Ooops! So very scientifically, I asked my Sasquatch husband to pick a number from 1-28 (we had 28 comments) and he chose 16, so....

JEN, LIBRARIAN FROM OHIO is the winner!

Jen, please send an e-mail to bluerosegirls@gmail.com with your mailing address and we'll send you our books and cookies (gingerbread or vanilla/chocolate? let me know!).

Thanks to all that commented and hope you keep reading and joining in our discussions!

what should we talk about?

So as you can see (and as Alvina said) we've freshened up here at the Blue Rose Girl blog. As we head into the next decade and our 5th(!) year, we thought we could use a little enlivening. Thank you so much, our faithful readers that have made this blog what it is and helped us keep our conversations going.

One of the reasons we started this blog was to talk to each other, but we want to talk to you too! So one of the new features we are planning are our Blue Rose Girl Conversations. Once a month, we'll tackle and talk about kidlit topics that are causing our brains to work in overdrive--kind of like "Hot Topics" on the View!

But we need your help! What do YOU want us to talk about?

We're open to any and all suggestions! You can go deeper than the usual "how do you promote your books" (though we're happy to talk about that, too)-- you can also suggest the real nitty gritty like "what are the ethics of authors reviewing other books?" to "have you ever thought of leaving the industry?" Everything will be considered! Combined, we have over ten years of struggles, triumphs, failures and successes to talk about, as well as the issues we face everyday. So, what do you want to hear about?

Don't worry, besides our thanks, we are giving away a big thank-you gift! To a commenter (chosen at random) we'll send you a collection of our books (one from each BRG) and some delicious, homemade cookies (made by moi!)

(these aren't the actual cookies I will send you, I promise they will be fresh and extremely yummy)

All YOU have to do is leave a comment that tells us:

1. what you want us to talk about

2. your occupation/why you read our blog (teacher, author, etc)

Comment & make as many suggestions as you want.

Winner announced on Wednesday, November 10th--so get going!

Many thanks for being a Blue Rose Girl Reader, from all of us!

Question and naming contest!

One of the main reasons I started blogging was because I wanted to write about the books I edit, to do my part in spreading the word about these wonderful things that I love. In the past, I always thought the most interesting and "insider-y" thing to write about was the acquisitions story, but now that many of the books I edit are the second, third, or fourth novels of authors I've worked with before, the acquisitions process generally consists of the author or agent saying, "Here's XX's next book!" and me saying, "Great!"

Not that interesting. So, I try to give a little anecdote that will be interesting for readers, like our cover redesign for Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass that I wrote about here, and Peter Brown's surprising fan, Jon Stewart when I wrote about The Fabulous Bouncing Chowder.

I'm planning to write about Justina Chen Headley's third novel North Of Beautiful next week. So, I have two questions for you all.

1) What do you want to hear about North of Beautiful? Justina went on a blog tour when the book came out, so there's a lot of great information out there already. What don't you know that you want to know?

2) I'd like to come up with a name for these book posts I do. I thought I could do something like "Inside Edition" or steal the name of some other entertainment show. Any ideas, all you wonderful, creative Blue Rose Girls readers? If you need inspiration/more examples, on my personal blog, a bunch of my posts about my books are linked to on the right side under "A sampling of my children's book-related posts."

Post your questions and ideas in the comments section. If I pick your question and/or naming idea, I'll send you a Little, Brown book of your choice! This contest will close at 5 pm EST on Sunday, March 15, and you'll find out if you've won when I post on Monday morning. And because I need all the ideas I can get, I'm going to ask my fellow BRGs to give me ideas, too--but if I end up going with something they suggest, I'll choose another entry at random as the winner.

Thank you in advance!