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Boy Books/Girl Books

Posted on by scott

Here’s an interesting question: Is Uglies a “girl book”?

Well, okay, if you put it that way, it’s a stupid question. It’s just a book, and it has as much supposedly “boy stuff” (things exploding, hoverboard chases, science fiction) as it does supposedly “girl stuff” (relationships, plastic surgery, things not exploding).

So the first thing I’ll say is, I’d hate for this post to suggest to anyone that these books aren’t for them. I write for everyone. (Except for boring people.) And I’d especially hate to suggest to any male readers that reading Uglies will “un-man” them. (Snorts derisively.) But it’s still a really interesting question about how readers see themselves, especially teens.

For example, I’ve seen the following in email and comments over the past few months:

A) Girls saying that they couldn’t get male friends to read the series.
B) Boys wondering if they’ll get hassled for carrying the books around.
C) And people of all genders saying the whole question is silly, of course.

It hasn’t been a huge thing. Most people who post here are pretty much into discussing the characters, themes, and imagery—which is as it should be. And no one seems to worry about Peeps, Midnighters, or So Yesterday. But there’s been just enough gender questions about Uglies to make me curious, and I’d like to hear from you guys. Because you’re all really, really smart.

So please answer whichever of these questions feel relevant to you:

1) When you suggest Uglies to friends, is it easier to get girls interested?
2) Do boys ever go “Nah, that’s girly!” if you suggest the books to them?
3) If so, do you think it’s the covers? The beauty themes? The titles?

And some other questions:
4) Do you think that girls read more than boys in general?
5) Do any of you boys feel weird talking about/carrying/liking Uglies?
6) Have I made you paranoid just by bringing this up?

Of course, my ulterior motive for doing this research is my next book, which is called:

Hah! Just kidding. But I had you going there, didn’t I?

Yes, I did.

Listed! Times! Bestselling! (now with proof)

Posted on by scott

Well, that headline pretty much says it all.

This morning (it’s Thursday here) my editor emailed me to say that Specials has appeared at number 6 on the New York Times chapterbook bestseller list!

I believe the word is . . . w00t.

Thanks to all of you who told your friends and librarians, made your parents drive you to the store, and forced some poor bookstore employee open a box early (you know who you are). You have been counted! Thanks to Rodrigo Corral for his ace cover designs. Thanks to S&S for being an excellent publisher.

Oh yeah, and thanks to J.K. Rowling, who single-handedly forced the Times to create a set of children’s bestseller lists. Because, like, they got sick of Harry Potter books getting all up in Salman Rushdie’s and James Patterson’s face. (Hah! YA rules!)

That little story reminds me to mention that all bestseller lists are mysterious and kind of fake. No one really knows what books are selling everywhere in the country (much less the world), so it’s all done by polling a hundred or so bookstores. And every list picks stores that tend to sell the kind of books that they like. And of course putting things into categories is always fraught; like, Specials is a chapter book and the latest Potter is a series book? Huh? The USA Today list doesn’t even bother with categories, just goes by raw Bookscan data, which misses non-bookstores like Target and K-Mart.

But you know what? I’ll take it. Because the NY Times is the list everyone’s HEARD OF! And that’s all that really matters, this big fat banner of credibility:

What’s REALLY annoying is that it’s not online yet, because the Times has this crazy system where they don’t publish lists until a fortnight after the end of the week in question. (Why? Why?) This news came from my editor (who must have some sort of Secret Publisher Decoder Ring) leaving me half wondering if a Terribly Embarrassing Mistake has been made.

But probably not, so once more . . . w00t!

Also, Midnighters fans will note that Specials is my thirteenth novel! Trideca-liscious!

(By the way, this little surprise is STILL not the big news I’ve been talking about. Soon, baby, soon.)

UPDATE: I have proof! (Thanks, Shana.)

Specials in Paperback

Posted on by scott

First off: We had a great time in the Blue Mountains, which are exceedingly beautiful. Thanks to Justine for a view-tastic birthday!

So I’ve been getting a lot of mail asking about the infamous Uglies series format shift. The first two are in paperback, but due to the great success of the books, Specials is in hardback. See, it’s your fault for telling your friends about them.

Granted, most people don’t care, but some folks don’t like the extra expense and some collector types really seem to hate the inconsistency. (Me, I love small hardbacks, and the more money is nice too. But it wasn’t my idea, yo. Me write words only. Publisher all else do!)

Fortunately, there is a solution, at least for the collectors among us. The Canadian and Australian version of the book is soon coming out in trade paper, in an edition that exactly matches the first two USian books. It’s a bit cheaper too, but probably not after getting it shipped to America. That depends on your source.

This non-US paperback comes out on June 1. The only place I’ve found it available online is Amazon.ca. But I know that at least one Canadian bookseller reads this blog, so comment away, and I’d be happy to update.

Now if you live in Canada or Oz, of course, this is all moot. Moot, I say! And if you live in the UK, mootness also graces your shores. Because you will eventually have a lovely trio of books with entirely different covers in totally matching format. Same goes for all translations. It is only us Americans who suffer, so it probably has to do with the metric system, writing our dates wrong, or affordable health care.

Me, I blame soccer.

And so to add visual interest to the most boring post in the history of this blog, I present the SOCCER PLAYING ROBOTS of MR. SOCCER!

(Oh, and that really, really exciting news? Yeah, it’s coming. Any. Day. Now.)

Specials Spoiler Zone

Posted on by scott

Zane or David? Ugly or pretty? Wild or city?
Special or sane?

How does it all end?

Well, the final volume of the Uglies trilogy is available now, and this is the place to discuss it. That’s right, it’s the Specials . . .

WARNING: Do not read the comments of this post
until you have read all three Uglies books.

Unless you really want to know about Dr. Cable dying on page 596.
(No, wait . . . that’s Dumbledore.*)

Let the spoilage begin!

*I slay me.

UPDATE: Most of the conversations here have moved over to westerboard.com, the forum for all things westerfeldian.

Specials Is Shipping! (updated x 2)

Posted on by scott

Okay, this isn’t the big news, but it is big:

Specials, the final volume of the Uglies series, is shipping from Amazon right NOW!

Tell your friends! Tell your cats! Tell your friends’ cats!

It was “officially” supposed to go on sale May 9, but there’s always some gun-jumpage in the crazy world of bookselling. I’m still in Australia, so you guys have to do the in-store spotting for me. Anybody seen a copy of Specials in the wild yet? (I hope they have them in stores soon, because it’s just not fair otherwise.)

UPDATE: Copies of Specials have been spotted in stores, at least in Canada. They should be everywhere in Canada and the US soon, and in Australia in a month-ish. Just call ahead! (The UK version comes out in October, but you guys don’t even have Pretties yet.)

And yes, this is the hardback edition of Specials. I don’t know when the paperback will be out, or if hardbacks of the other two books will appear. I’m only in charge of the words! UPDATE ENDS

Also, I will be putting up a Specials Spoiler Comment Thread soon, for those of you who’ve read the book and want to divulge and discuss. BUT THIS IS NOT IT! Do not engage in spoilage here.

And in celebration, here is some fab fan art, a hoverboard-a-rific illustration by Kate:

I love the blue lines and faded math homework in the background, the true sign of fan art direct from study hall. (Um, because nobody draws in class, do they? Unless it helps you listen, of course.) The crash bracelets are bigger than I imagined, but I kind of like the hugeness of them. These look big enough to actually work, and maybe even help you guide your way through the air, sort of like wings.

Check out the rest of Kate’s work, including headshots of leather-jacketed David, slightly gothoid Zane, pretty vacant Tally, and ugly-befreckled Tally.

In the meantime, rest assure that the previously alluded to news will be announced here . . . shortly (-ish). And apologies to anybody whose fan mail I haven’t answered yet: I’ve been snowed under with work.

Now go and read.

One More Update: Specials got to 393 291 224 today on Amazon! (I know, looking at one’s Amazon rating is pretty lame, especially as independent bookstore sales are really more important. But some days it’s all we authors have got, okay?) That’s the best rating any of my books have ever achieved, even Evolution’s Darling the day it was reviewed in the NY Times way back in June of 2000, which was merely 692-ish. Let there be w00ting, and let it be loud.

Italian Uglies

Posted on by scott

Hey, sorry it’s been so long between posts. Justine and I were at Conjure up in Brisbane over the weekend. It was the Australian national sf convention, and a great time was had by all.

The most hilarious thing was the Juvenalia panel, in which Justine, Kim Wilkins, Sean Williams and I all read from our childhood and teenage writings. And oh, my, god was it funny. For the audience, at least. A friend of ours later said, “You guys’ body language got all teenagery as you read, as you madly shifted in your seats and rolled your eyes.”

And with good reason. Maybe I’ll post some of my juvenalia here some time. For any of you young’uns writing now, it will be eye-opening as to how much better you can get.

Kim’s stuff was very sweet and earnest, including a traffic safety guide penned when she was seven(ish). Sean, of course, had planets blowing up (his excellent novel Geodesica: Ascent also won the Ditmar Award at the convention—it is highly recommended). And Justine’s 15-year-old work was eerily like her current stuff.

It was a cool experiment. Yay to Kim for having the idea.

Upon our return to lovely Sydney, we discovered a cover mock-up for the Italian version of Uglies! Here it is in very rough form:

What’s interesting is that the face is pulled around from the back of the book, so there are two eyes instead of one. The face is also flipped, and, of course, the title’s on top now. Hmm. What do you guys think?

In Bologna, our Italian editor said she was having trouble with the title. She didn’t think that Brutti was as sonorous as Uglies, but couldn’t think of anything else that would make sense in Italian. But like I said, this is still a rough draft.

By the way, can anyone translate the tag line? Something about “Two rebels, two heroines . . . “?

Due ribelli, due eroine
in lotta per la liberta
in un mundo dove
essere belli e “legge”

Uglies on TV

Posted on by scott

I stumbled across something interesting today. It’s a review of Uglies by something called the Deabeat Club. But it’s not a “text-based” review; it’s internet TV!

The Deadbeat Club is a Vermont public access show made available on the internet by a TV network called Chantz TV.

To see their video-collage homage to Uglies, click here.

It’s gloriously lo-fi (thank you, YouTube compression), but you can see that a lot of care and intelligence has gone into choosing the images. I especially love the way they use current-day footage to evoke the cultural and emotional terrain of Uglies and Pretties. (Which means you’ll see lots of, ahem, Paris Hilton. And some bonus strains of Mad Max!)

Like all home-grown media, it takes a minute to get used to the grainy video and uneven sound. But really, you’d never see anything this interesting on regular TV. Not about some book, anyway.

Now I’m going to poke around and check out more of their stuff.
Here’s their blog.

Uglies in the NY Times

Posted on by scott

Naomi Wolf has an article in the NY Times today, in which she disses the heck out of Gossip Girl and its spin-offs. Also, Uglies gets a positive mention (see below).

She starts by warning parents:

They carry no rating or recommended age range on the cover, but their intended audience—teenage girls—can’t be in doubt. They feature sleek, conventionally beautiful girls lounging, getting in or out of limos, laughing and striking poses. Any parent—including me—might put them in the Barnes & Noble basket without a second glance. Yet if that parent opened one, he or she might be in for a surprise.

Oooh, scary. But one question: Does anyone buy books “without a second glance”? Really?

And another: Is Naomi Wolf calling for parental advisory labels on books? I hope not. Probably this is more of a “hook” than an argument. It’s like when the local TV news says, “Some scientists think that this common household cleaning product can kill you! Details at eleven.”

Because teen culture is just like chemicals: to comprehend it you have to be some sort of gnarly expert. And it’s dangerous! Terribly dangerous! So I’m sure there are people out there who do want warning labels. Reading stickers is easier than, you know, talking to your kids about what they’re reading.

What Wolf is really obsessed about it the lack of judgement these books take against their shallow, vain characters. She says they’re “like Lord of the Flies, set in the local mall, without the moral revulsion”? And it’s true—there is no moral revulsion on the page in GG. There’s ironic detachment, but you have to bring your own revulsion.

But you know what? My guess is that teens do bring their own value system to these books. No doubt some read them in a totally shallow way: “I wish that was me all beautiful, dripping with Prada and ruining some other girl’s life.” But I know for a fact that others read them as satire, as an attack on the shallowness they portray. And some read them simply as a tacky pleasure. (I sort of like excessively self-centered characters, just like I sometimes enjoy excessively top-loaded ice-cream sundaes.)

I’ve only read one GG, and I liked it that there’s a bulemic character, but without bulemia being the central arc. It’s just something that happens, something unpleasant, but not The Plot. (Sort of like having a character in a wheelchair, but being in a wheelchair isn’t the whole friggin’ point of the book.)

GG did bore me with its relentless brand names. (Stephen King does too.) My eyes bleed when books employ brand names instead of adjectives and dramatic exposition. But this isn’t a moral failure; it’s an artistic one. You can read brand-name overload as satire, wish-fulfillment, or product placement.

So instead of worrying about the lack of moral instruction in GG, maybe parents should focus on knowing what kind of people their kids are—the subversive kind, the kind who like a good trashy read, or the kind obsessed with status. And instead of warning that YA packaging doesn’t give adequate parenting info, maybe Wolf should encourage parents to talk about books with their kids. (Strangely, this suggestion never comes up in her article. Not once.)

The Good News

Of course, we all know that my books are chock full of moral-icious goodness. And to prove it, there’s a sidebar to Wolf’s article that lists eleven decent and uplifting books. Uglies is the very last one. (Damn you, alphabetical order!)

So I’m curious. How many of you guys have read the Gossip Girl and A-List, Clique books? And what do you think they did to your moral fiber? And how many of your parents talk to you about what you’re reading?

Hoverboard! +Blue Noon Countdown

Posted on by scott

One more week till:

blue noon

That’s right! Seven more days until the Midnighters trilogy reaches its mighty climax. In honor of this last week, I’m doing a tridecalogism countdown.

Today’s word is: “nonattendance.”

As in, “Rex is having a very important meeting tonight,” Dess said. “Nonattendance is compulsory!”

In unrelated news, here’s how to build a hoverboard from a leaf blower. Alas, this hoverboard will be really loud and only hover about as high as an air hockey puck.

But still. Hoverboard!

From BoingBoing, and thanks Bill!

The Ugly Face of Crime

Posted on by scott

“I’m too ugly to get a job.”
—Daniel Gallagher, a Miami bank robber, after police captured him in 2003

Here’s a weird little article about a study that tracked 15,000 teenagers for four years, analyzing grades, income, and brushes with the law. The interviewers also rated the kids on their attractiveness, and when the numbers were crunched, the study found a correlation between being ugly and committing crimes.

The authors don’t miss the obvious point, though: “Other studies have shown that unattractive men and women are less likely to be hired, and that they earn less money, than the better-looking. Such inferior circumstances may steer some to crime, Mocan and Tekin suggest.”

Notice that the correlation wasn’t huge, but it was there. To state the obvious: not everyone who was rated unattractive was a crim, and a lot of the pretty kids had broken the law. But being ugly clearly leads to social stress, which can push human beings closer to anti-socal behavior. (Economic stress does, too. When unemployment goes up in a group, crime and divorce almost always go up.) This doesn’t excuse any individual’s behavior, but it does make this point:

There really is a social cost to the way we think about beauty, and to the way we treat each other based on looks.

It makes me feel like the Uglies universe really is a possibility. Maybe one day some society really will decide to get rid of the beauty problem once and for all.

(But in the meantime, it’s nice to know that TV and movies never lie.)