Little House on the Prairie actress Melissa Gilbert will write her debut picture book.

Paula Wiseman Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, will release Daisy and Josephine on January 28, 2014. Associate editor Sylvie Frank will edit the manuscript. Artist Julia Kuo will create the illustrations. Here’s more from the release:

Daisy and Josephine tells the story of a little girl named Daisy who often travels with her father for his job. She is very shy and gets lonely on these trips so her father surprises her with an endearingly peculiar puppy named Josephine. Can this rambunctious new pet draw Daisy out of her shell?

Rock star Rick Springfield has sold his debut novel to Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint.

The publisher will release Magnificent Vibration in May 2014, a novel about a man who gets “a 1-800 phone connection to God via an inscription in a mysterious self-help book.”

Publisher Stacy Creamer will edit the manuscript. She negotiated the terms of the deal with Foundry Literary + Media agent David Patterson. Patterson worked on behalf of Dana Borowitz and the United Talent Agency.

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We’ve had a number of job changes in the publishing world this week.

Cal Morgan will leave his post as publisher at HarperCollins’ It Books imprint to serve as senior vice president and executive editor at the Harper division. Morgan will continue on as editorial director for Harper Perennial and Harper paperbacks.

Throughout his career, he has worked on projects with several celebrity authors such as Amy Poehler, Alan Cumming, and Tom Piazza.

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Jenny Han has inked a deal for her “semi-autobiographical” young adult novel. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers will publish To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before in April 2014.

Publisher Justin Chanda negotiated the deal with Folio Literary Management senior vice president Emily Van Beek. Executive editor Zareen Jaffery will edit the manuscript. Here’s more from the release:

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is the story of Lara Jean, who has never openly admitted her crushes, but instead wrote each boy a letter about how she felt, sealed it, and hid it in a box under her bed. But one day Lara Jean discovers that somehow her secret box of letters has been mailed, causing all her crushes from her past to confront her about the letters…

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Months before the release of the first Mortal Instruments adaptation, lead actors Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower have confirmed that they will return for the second installment of the franchise.

Director Harald Zwart will also be back to helm  City Of Ashes, the next film based on Cassandra Clare’s series. The film will hit theaters on August 23, 2013.

Follow this link to watch the official trailer for the City of Bones movie.

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Penguin International president Andrew Phillips has been named the next CEO of Author Solutions, the self-publishing business purchased by Penguin.

He will start in July. Current CEO Kevin Weiss “will leave to take up a new position which will be announced separately next week.”

A number of publishing promotions were also announced this week…

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Happy National Poetry Month! All throughout April, we will interview poets about working in this digital age. Recently, we spoke with New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins.

Hopkins (pictured, via) has been writing poetry throughout her entire life. She first established her professional writing career by penning nonfiction children’s books.

After Simon & Schuster Children’s Books published Crank in 2004, she became well-known for writing novels in verse. Many of her hit titles focus on dark topics including addiction, mental illness, and prostitution. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

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Simon & Schuster will now share piracy statistics with authors and agents.

The publisher has worked with Attributor since 2011, a company that searches millions of pages for pirated copies and sends takedown notices every day. Authors can report piracy by using the publisher’s Online Piracy Report Form to report piracy to Attributor. In a letter, Carolyn Reidy explained the new reports:

The reports that you will see provide information about the number of infringements identified and takedown notices sent to infringing sites, success rates in removing infringements, the types of sites where infringement is occurring, the specific urls and geographic distribution of sites where unauthorized copies are offered and more.  (We expect that in the future we will expand upon the information currently available.) We have also provided a set of Frequently Asked Questions to increase your understanding of how piracy occurs and how we are combatting it. All the information we are providing is confidential and private, but please note that we are making the same information available to agents at the Simon & Schuster Agent Portal.

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Sony Pictures Animation has released the official trailer for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. We’ve embedded the trailer above–what do you think?

Here’s more from Deadline: “It’s directed by Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn from a script by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein and Erica Rivinoja. Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Neil Patrick Harris, Terry Crews, Will Forte, Andy Samberg, Kristen Schaal, and James Caan, among others provide voices for the movie that Sony will release September 27th.”

The first movie came out back in 2009; it’s based on Judy Bartlett‘s popular picture book which shares the same title. Simon & Schuster’s Atheneum Books for Young Readers imprint published it in 1978 and also released the sequel, Pickles in Pittsburgh, in 1997. A third book entitled Planet of the Pies will hit bookstores in August 2013.

Dawn Davis, the publisher of HarperCollins’ Amistad imprint, will move to Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group to serve as publisher of an as-yet-unnamed imprint.

She will assume her new post on April 1st. Davis had spent 12 years at HarperCollins, beginning as the editorial director of Amistad.

Here’s more about the new imprint, from the release: “The new imprint will draw on Ms. Davis’s strengths as an editor and publisher, with a list that will encompass the best in literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, journalism, memoirs and pop culture, and drawn from a wide range of authors of all backgrounds.”