Lerner Publishing Group has announced that the Minneapolis-based children's book publisher will launch Carolrhoda Lab, a new line of fiction for YA readers. A total of four titles will be released during Carolrhoda Lab's debut season this fall, including three hardcover novels: Draw the Dark by Ilsa J. Bick; The Absolute Value of -1 by Steve Brezenoff; and The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston. Each will retail at $16.95. Traitor by Gudrun Pausewang, originally published by Lerner in 2006, will be reissued in paperback as part of Carolrhoda Lab's fall 2010 list, priced at $9.95.
Carolrhoda editor Andrew Karre will acquire and edit six to eight Carolrhoda Lab titles each year. Lindsay Matvik, Lerner's senior publicist, said that Karre's expertise in YA fiction provided the impetus for the company to more aggressively target the YA market than it had previously.
"Bringing Andrew Karre on [from Flux, the Llewellyn YA imprint] inspired Lerner to break into the YA market. [YA] is Andrew's baby, his big thing," Matvik told PW. "We've done some YA before, but we wanted to hit the ground running with explosive titles by new and interesting authors with this launch."
