According to Publishers Weekly, the golden award is “one of the few surefire ways” to increase sales in the children’s market. However, William Morrow associate publisher Jennifer Hart said that Gregg Kulick‘s design was meant to attract adult buyers.

Inkwood Books owner Leslie Reiner had this comment, in the article: “I can definitely say that a Newbery Medal on the cover would not be a selling point [for adults] and if I were in marketing I would not put it on the cover. Covers sell books, and I think of [Markus Zusak's] The Book Thief and how the cover works for adult and teens.” What do you think of this new cover?

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Here’s more from the article: “They had been developing a feature version of the popular book for nearly a decade before it wound up at Warner Bros., which ponied up nearly $1 million to set up the tome with Red Wagon’s Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher in 2007. When the rights became available again, Bridges and Silver stepped up to reacquire them.”

Lowry set The Giver in a dystopian world starring 12-year-old Jonas. The book won the 1994 Newbery Medal and the 1996 William Allen White Award.

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Are you an author who checks your book’s Amazon ranking obsessively? Do you not care that such rankings account for maybe 5 percent, tops, of total book sales? Then Aaron Shepherd‘s Sales Rank Express, a website that lets authors check their Amazon rankings instantly, is for you. “People want to know where their book stands, just for the thrill of that score,” said Shepard to the NYT’s Lyndon Stambler. Shepard’s own top seller, THE BUSINESS OF WRITING FOR CHILDREN, clocked in at 1,834th during one random check of Amazon last week, and at 2,070th during another one. He says it sells 250 to 450 copies a month.

How nice. But then Amazon rankings only have limited meaning in terms of guaging a book’s popularity or after some new review, controversy or exposure. When Susan Patron won the Newbery Medal in January for THE HIGHER POWER OF LUCKY and a controversy erupted over her use of the word “scrotum,” sales also rose – something she’d never thought about till then. “s a writer, I can’t be too concerned about that,” she said. “If it’s not the number you want, how hard is it to return to the keyboard? I just need to be writing the next book.”

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