Smugglers’ Stash and News

Happy Sunday, all! Hope it’s a good one. Time to get down to business…

Giveaway Winners:

First we have TWO lucky winners of our giveaway of Patricia A. McKillip’s The Bell at Sealey Head. The two winners are:

Congratulations! You know the drill. Send an email to us (contact AT the book smugglers DOT com) with your snail mail address, and we’ll get your books out to you as soon as possible. Thanks to everyone that entered!

Around the Internets:

We are totally forgetful slobs – we forgot last week to announce that fellow blogger and aspiring author Rhiannon Hart has HUGE news! She has just signed with big agent Ginger Clark of Curtis Brown in NYC, who has a specialty in sci-fi/fantasy/PNR. We are so freaking excited for Rhiannon and hope her YA manuscript and series gets picked up soon by a big publishing house! Check out her post for more info.

In other news, you may have noticed that Technorati recently changed the way they calculate blog rankings. They’ve also given the site a huge facelift, allowing for “Top 100” subcategories…AND we are proud (and somewhat mystified) to announce that The Book Smugglers has made TWO top 100 lists! In the “Entertainment Blogs” category and in the “Book Blogs” category. Yes, it’s probably a miscalculation, but we are STOKED nonetheless! We were going to list the top 10 list of Book Blogs, according to Technorati v2.0 but it keeps changing daily. Two days ago, we were #6, yesterday we were #3, today we are down to #4. The question we really want to ask is: how in the world are we on the top 10 and say…Neil Gaiman’s blog is aaaaaaaaaaaaall the way down to 200s? NOT POSSIBLE. But for now, we just celebrate!

Also, we’ve just learned of the awesome Nerds Heart YA 2009 Tournament!

The Nerds Heart YA tournament is organized by Renay of YA Fabulous, and looks at sixteen “under the radar” YA books published in 2009. These titles are awesome YA books that have for some reason or other not gained as much attention as the Big Names in the genre. The way the tournament works is, each judge on the panel reads and reviews the two books in their bracket, and picks a winner to advance to the next round, and so on until the final winner of the tournament is determined. This year’s nominations are now open! Here are the guidelines:

1. Young Adult fiction, we’re not called Nerds Hearts YA for nothing!
2. First published in 2009 (unless it was published elsewhere in a language other than English and is a translation, which I think we should make exception for!)
3. If it’s already received a lot of blog coverage, there’s a good chance it’s outside our scope, but toss it on anyway if you’re unsure.
3a. Go crazy and we’ll eligibility check later. 😀

In order to enter your nominations, go forth to Renay’s blog, and leave a comment after this post.

Finally, you can keep track of the tournament by following the official Twitter Account.

Patrick Rothfuss, the author of The Name of the Wind (aka Ana’ favourite book read in 2009) has something really cool brewing at his blog. You can get your name in book two, The Wise Man’s Fear….

by taking part in a raffle to raise money for Heifer International. You can read all about it here.

This Week on The Book Smugglers:

It’s another crazy week! On Monday, Ana and Katie of Babbling About Books and More! do a powerpuff review of Young Adult Romance novel, Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles.

On Tuesday, Thea reviews fantasy novel Firethorn by Sarah Micklem.

Wednesday, Thea reviews Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier, one of her most highly anticipated books of the year! We’ll also have a giveaway of the novel, so make sure to tune in!

On Thursday, it’s another installment of our What She Said feature! This time, Ana takes on Heir to Sevenwaters by Juliet Marillier (one of Thea’s Top 10 Reads of 2008), and Thea FINALLY gets to read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (one of Ana’s favorite books of 2009)!

And finally, on Friday we have Kati Dancy of Katidom over for our October installment of the Guest Dare! Kati will review Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassoti. Also on Friday, Ana reviews Little Black Lies by Tish Cohen.

Phew.

And after next week…it is time for HALLOWEEN WEEK! But we’ll have more on that later…

Until next time!

~ Your Friendly Neighborhood Book Smugglers