Editors at the Top! Beach Lane’s Allyn Johnston

The third in a four-part series interviewing editors that run their own imprints. Allyn Johnston began her children’s book career as a marketing assistant at Clarion Books and then spent 22 years at Harcourt Children’s Books in San Diego, where she started as an editorial assistant and ended up as Editor-in-Chief. She …

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These Books Give Me Courage

In Tammi Sauer’s last post, she mentioned that “The Watermelon Seed” made her want to be a better writer. Reading that simple statement led me to know immediately what I had to write about next. Don’t you love it when inspiration strikes like that? (Thanks, Tammi!) My first book, MISS …

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Retelling A Classic Fairy Tale

Fairy tales and folktales are favorites to many, and for some (myself included) they’re what made us fall in love with storytelling from a very young age. They’re often beautiful, haunting, mesmerizing; sometimes bizarre and confounding. One of my favorites is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”. The protagonist, …

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