Watching paint dry...

Today should be a Time Travel Tuesday, but I am too bored to surf youtube. Did you know that was even possible? Last week Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were holidays. Thursday I was in the office with nothing to do. Friday, I taught 3 elementary school classes. Monday, back at the office with nothing to do. Tuesday, my JHS kids were all practicing for this weekend's sports festival, and the one class I was actually supposed to teach was sequestered by the dentist. Today (it's already Wednesday here), I actually taught a class. Yay! Tomorrow is probably 1 class at my small elementary and Friday is 3 at big elementary.

So my class total for the last two weeks? 8! Oops I forgot kindergarten. 9. 6 hours of the 35 in my workweek. Needless to say, I am bored to tears. You think being employed to do nothing would be fun. Until you actually are!

Since I had nothing to do yesterday (but re-learn the town dance and watch centipede races- where the kids tie themselves together) I started looking for a list of upcoming YA novels to post for my friends on inkwell. But I couldn't find one. :( I can't even find a list of upcoming novels. If you search upcoming movies, a gasquillion sites will pop up telling you whats coming up from now til December 2013. So I decided to use the almost 14 hours at my disposal over the two days and compile such a list.

It's a summer reads list, so it's only releases for June, July and August. And I'm not including everything I find, just because it would be too long. . I only checked Harper, Penguin, Random House, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Bloomsbury and Amazon. So if a book isn't on any of those lists, it had no chance to make mine.

Here are a few things I discovered as I was poking around.

-Some publishers websites leave a lot to be desired. I couldn't figure out how to search upcoming titles on some.
-Hachette didn't list too far into the future, nor did Bloomsbury.
-Publishers didn't provide synopses for some books. On some of those occasions, synopses existed on Amazon. There is no reason in the world a middle man should be better than the source. No reason at all.
-Some publishers didn`t differentiate in a searchable way, between YA and children`s and some didn't differentiate at all.

The lesson I learned from all of that?

Self promotion!!!

There was one author, who's cover looked interesting on Amazon, but the book didn't have a write-up. There was a write-up for the first book in the series, however. Same thing on her publisher's page. I even tried her blog. And while the info might be there somewhere, I couldn't find it. You can't sell a book that you can't look inside, with no info other than the title and the cover. Well maybe you can. But you can't sell it to me!

Authors, expect your publishers to do what they promise, but also have a web presence of your own, and links to synopses and other relevant pages in the sidebar or on the top page.

On top of that, you might want to do some research on the publishers, as your agent submits. See what they do for books, and what goes on on their websites. I'm not telling you to turn down your only publishing offer. But seeing what I've seen these last two days, the website would play a role in my choice if I had more than one bid.

Something else did come of these hours of searching.

The lack of one place to find upcoming YA (Amazon does a half decent job of it, but I can't help thinking how fantastic it would be to have an extensive independent source) has me kinda tempted to start a blog or website for the cause. Maybe when I'm done with this list, and have got the million other things on my plate in order, I'll think about doing it for real.

Hopefully, tomorrow I'll present my list.