Buzz Worthy News: January 25, 2016

Welcome to Buzz Worthy News where the stories are awesome and not at all well-written. Need your YA industry news? Never fear, Kate Copeseeley is here to give it to you straight.

In this week’s Buzz Worthy News: Anne of Green Gables Adaption, Walter Awards, #ToTheGirls2016, Fairy Tales’ True Age, and more!

Buzz Worthy News is Cuddlebuggery’s weekly news post bringing you all the best information about the book and blogging world, particularly for the venn diagram of people who overlap between the two.

Anne of Green Gables Gets Adapted

In probably the most thrilling and terrifying book adaption news I’ve heard in years, it’s time for a new Anne of Green Gables. And why is this terrifying, Anne with an ‘e’ fans? Here is why:

The network announced Tuesday that it has greenlit a new straight-to-series adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic children’s novel from Breaking Badalum Moira Walley-Beckett.

Anne is described as a coming-of-age story about an outsider who fights for acceptance, for her place in the world and for love. The drama revolves around a young orphaned girl who, after an abusive childhood spent in orphanages and the homes of strangers, is mistakenly sent to live with an elderly spinster and her aging brother.

Over time, 13-year-old Anne will transform their lives and eventually the small town in which they live, with her unique spirit, fierce intellect and brilliant imagination. While the new series will follow a similar storyline to the book that millions of readers around the world know and love, it will also chart new territory. Anne and the rest of the characters in and around Green Gables will experience new adventures reflecting timeless issues, including themes of identity, sexism, bullying, prejudice and trusting oneself.

Ummm… new adventures? What does this mean, exactly? Breaking Bad isn’t exactly sunshine and roses, you know?

“Anne’s issues are contemporary issues: feminism, prejudice, bullying and a desire to belong. The stakes are high and her emotional journey is tumultuous. I’m thrilled to delve deeply into this resonant story, push the boundaries and give it new life,” Walley-Beckett said.

Please don’t ruin it, please don’t ruin it, please don’t ruin it.

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Fairy Tales Are (WAY) Older Than You Might Think

So, I guess they did some stuff and discovered that fairy tales are super old. The original says there were “techniques employed by biologists”. Ah, Science.

But anyway, so it turns out that some fairytales are like older than the bible. Wow. Examples:

Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, said Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split more than 5,000 years ago.

Analysis showed Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old.

And a folk tale called The Smith And The Devil, about a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the Devil in order to gain supernatural abilities, was estimated to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age.

And guys, this was all before the printed word! Imagine that, these fairytales were passed from person to person to person for thousands of years! The mind boggles.

The study, which was published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, employed phylogenetic methods to investigate the relationships between population histories and cultural phenomena, such as languages, marriage practices, political institutions, material culture and music.

It also used a “tree” of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time.

Dr Tehrani explained: “We used a toolkit that we borrowed from evolutionary biology called phylogenetic comparative methods. This enables you to reconstruct the past in the absence of physical evidence.

Blah, blah, blah, sciencey science stuff. It’s all very complicated.

But basically, yeah, fairy tales are super old.

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Shelfari Is Going Bye Bye

It’s the life-cycle of the internet. Websites are born, they thrive, and then they fall away. In the case of Shelfari (created the same year as Goodreads) Amazon didn’t feel like owning two bookish review sites at the same time, so they’re doing a big fat merge with Goodreads as the eater and Shelfari as the food. As you might guess, many people (especially those in Shelfari groups) are very unhappy about this:

TheReadersRoom is certainly not happy about this move. “The worst thing about the whole “merger” is that Amazon is giving Shelfari members just two months to move all their data over to Goodreads. I actively participate in two Shelfari groups that have been operating since 2008/2009 and have thousands of discussion threads, challenges, and games. The move will likely kill one of those groups completely and severely impact the other. So two months just doesn’t cut it – it is rude and sends a message that Amazon doesn’t truly care about some of its best customers.”

I really can’t blame them there. Goodreads groups are horrific with probably the worst layout I’ve ever seen. The difference in layouts is noted by a user named Anita:

“While I understand Amazon’s desire not to run two sites, one that it will not be updating, what I find hard to fathom is their unwillingness to work with group administrators to facilitate the move of their groups. What’s worse is that I am pretty sure the Shelfari product managers know that the reason all the people haven’t migrated is because they like nested messaging so that conversations can be deeper and more thoughtful. That’s a feature that I’m pretty sure could have been implemented in the many years Amazon has controlled Goodreads.”

Yes, because we KNOW how motivated Goodreads is to make real, useful changes. Good luck to Shelfari users. I hope you figure out a way to continue your booknerd life.

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Criminal Book Narrator Defended By Author

Phil Gigante was a narrator for Karen Marie Moning’s “Fever” books until last July, when he was arrested for

exchanging indecent photos of himself with a 14 year old on Facebook. Gigante is 49. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months in jail.

Here is where the story gets odd. Moning posted the following announcement on Facebook to explain the change:

FEVERBORN AUDIOBOOK: Getting tons of emails about the change in narrators. Please spread the word about this. We had zero control over it. There were issues that prevented Phil and Natalie from narrating this year. They are THE VOICE of my characters to me but we couldn’t influence it. The bright side is they are confirmed for FEVERSONG. I LOVE that you guys love Phil and Natalie as much as I do.

Spread the love for Phil and Nat but please don’t spread the hate for those who tried their best to step in when needed.

There were several fans would couldn’t believe her expressed love and admiration for a convicted sex offender and they took to Facebook and other social media outlets to comment on her post.

I think most people would want to know if they are spending money to support someone who pleaded guilty to sex crimes.

— Jen Davis (@RedHotBooks) January 20, 2016

Currently, all comments have been deleted with the following explanation by Moning:In the interest of protecting all parties involved in this case, we are deleting all comments on this post. My Facebook page is not the place to discuss this.

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#WeNeedDiverseBooks Announces Winners of Debut Walter Award

It’s the inaugural Walter Dean Myers award this time, and #WNDB is very happy to announce that the winners are Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely for their co-written book, All American Boys.

All American Boys is the story of two teens, one white, the other black, and the aftermath of an act of police brutality upon one that is witnessed by the other, who flees the scene.

The novel, which is co-written in alternating voices by Reynolds, who is African-American and the author of two other novels, and Kiely, who is white and the author of one other novel, received a starred review from PW, which called it “both welcome and necessary” with its “all-too-timely” message.

The Walter Dean Myers Award, also known as “The Walter,” is named for prolific children’s and young adult author Walter Dean Myers, who was the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature from 2012-2014, as well as a champion of diversity in children’s and YA books. Myers died in 2014.

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AAP and UNCF Partner Up For Goodness

#WNDB isn’t the only one thinking more about diversity in the book business. The United Negro College Fund and the Association of American Publishers are teaming up to offer paid summer internships for black students.

From the announcement:

The AAP/UNCF partnership will offer paid summer internships at a number of major publishing houses, among them Cengage, Elsevier, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, W.W. Norton and others. The program will fund a maximum of 10 paid internships for African American students who display strong leadership and writing skills and maintain at least a GPA of 3.0. In its first year the program will place students in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, and St. Louis.

Go HERE or HERE to apply.

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Penguin Random House Changes Job Requirements

Calling all booknerds! Maybe you’re a college dropout, or maybe you’ve never had an interest in going thousands of dollars in debt to get a degree. Whatever the reason, PRH has good news for you. From here on out, a university degree isn’t required for a job at their company. And the reason why may surprise you:

Penguin Random House human resources director Neil Morrison said that growing evidence shows there is no simple correlation between having a degree and future professional success.

Morrison said: “We want to attract the best people to help grow and shape the future of our company, regardless of their background – and that means that we need to think and act differently. Simply, if you’re talented and you have potential, we want to hear from you. This is the starting point for our concerted action to make publishing far, far more inclusive than it has been to date. Now, we need to be more visible to talented people across the UK.

“We believe this is critical to our future: to publish the best books that appeal to readers everywhere, we need to have people from different backgrounds with different perspectives and a workforce that truly reflects today’s society.”

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#ToTheGirls2016

Last year, in celebration of the release of her book, author Courtney Summers created a campaign centered around positive messages for girls called #ToTheGirls2015. These messages let girls know that their voices were important, to let them know that they were understood, and spread across social media like a firestorm. As Summers notes:

The hashtag trended worldwide and inspired countless hopeful, beautiful, wonderful, fun and moving notes to young girls. No sooner had it ended than I was being asked, “Will you do it again?”

I’m so happy to be able to announce the answer to that question is yes.

All the Rage celebrates its UK release on 28 January and on 21 January, #ToTheGirls2016 will be launched. With the help of my publisher, Pan Macmillan, we are not only asking people to use #ToTheGirls2016 to continue sending their amazing messages of support, advice and empowerment across social media (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram), but we have also created a dedicated Tumblr for people to submit their messages whenever they want: http://tothegirls2016.tumblr.com.

The campaign is intended to continue throughout all of 2016, and if twitter is any judge, it’s already a success.

Ladies, the floor is yours #ToTheGirls2016 https://t.co/TIpBgNiook

— Catherine Alport (@cralport) January 21, 2016

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Interesting Links (i.e. Everything I didn’t have time for this week. Sorry!)

The Biggest Mistakes In Queries

HELP MARLEY DIAS GET #100BlackGirlBooks (donate by Monday January 25^th)

http://veronikelly-mars.tumblr.com/post/137686071474/dias-latest-social-action-project-is-the

Caitlyn Jenner Signs Book Deal