The problems of Australian children's book publishing

The problems of children’s book publishing are not really different in kind from those which beset other types of publishing; they are the familiar problems exacerbated by the fact that these books are designed for a group of second-class citizens who, being young and dependent, have little influence on what is produced for them, and little financial clout. All commercial publishing involves the struggle to keep producing the right book, by the right author, at the right time, in the right format, at the right price, and to make sure that it is available in the right places, and that everyone hears about it. Sounds straightforward enough, you are probably thinking, but getting the rights right is often a matter of fine judgement, and they are frequently impossible to reconcile. (The most suitable author is invariably too busy to produce the book when you need it; the ideal format often means a prohibitively high price, and so on.) The problems involved in this process are more acute now than they have been in the past because books are in competition with many other (sometimes cheaper and often more glamorous) forms of communication, and because of a curious but commonly-held belief that books, unlike other goods, should somehow have a miraculous immunity from the effects of inflation. The problems are more acute for children’s books than for others, because children are more easily seduced by the competition, and because they are poor (or rather, adults are parsimonious on their behalf). Before I launch into more detail, I would like to say that I am focusing on the problems of children’s book publishing, rather than the rewards, because that is what I have been asked to do, but I am conscious of the dangers of writing myself out of an enjoyable and – dare I say – worthwhile job. Children’s books can pay their way, even if they seldom lead to mega-bucks. Despite general hard times in publishing, children’s paperbacks have shown a marked increase in sales over the last few years, both here and overseas. But more of that later on. Meanwhile, let’s hope that the dollar is not the only yardstick of value. (Note: one minor problem of children’s book publishing is the tendency of those involved to retreat into sanctimony when threatened.) The main problems are, of course, economic. Sigh. Children’s books are often as expensive to produce as books for adults (sometimes more so), and yet people expect them to be cheaper. Many adults who will happily spend $30 on a glorified picture-book for themselves (which may only ever receive a cursory flip-through) will scorn the idea of paying $10 for a child’s picture-book (which may be loved to dog-eared death over many months, even years). Things for children should somehow be cheaper. It is useless to point out that it costs a publisher the same amount of money to produce a 50,000-word novel for children as one for adults (more, if the children’s book has illustrations); people (a few at least) will spend $18 on the adult novel, but rarely more than $10 on the children’s. Children’s books are undeniably value for money if judged in terms of the talent, time, effort and loving care expended on them by authors, illustrators, editors and designers (as Bob Sessions of Nelson demonstrated in the May Bookseller & Publisher). The price of children’s books compares well with that of many other less durable things that are regularly bought for children: how many pizzas, show bags or cinema tickets can you buy for $10, and how does their long-term value compare with that of a good book? But these justifications for book prices – so compelling to the makers of books – carry little weight with most people who either lack the money to spend on books for children, or do not rate them highly among their priorities. Ironically, the people most likely to value books for children, and to be in a position to afford them, are also the people who are most familiar with the public library system, and inclined to say ‘why buy if you can borrow?’. And who would blame them? Of course I don’t mean to decry public libraries, which are faithful buyers of Australian children’s books (as far as their dwindling funds allow) but unfortunately there are not enough libraries to support a healthy print run. School libraries – other important customers for children’s books – are also short of money these days and are forced to be highly selective in their buying. More problems for publishers … If price is such a stumbling block, why can’t children’s books be cheaper? The answer lies in the costs of production, the size of the Australian market and the problems of promotion and distribution. People have come to expect colourful children’s books. Colour printing is expensive and the fixed costs (i.e. the costs which remain the same whether you print 10 copies or 10 000) are high. The unit cost of a book is linked to the print run: the more copies you print (up to a point) the cheaper each copy is. It is tempting, therefore, to print more in the hope of selling more because the book is cheaper, but this is the thorniest trap in the publishing jungle, especially with children’s books where the price needs to be lowered by several dollars before the volume of sales will increase dramatically. The Australian market is a small one. An average print run for a picture-book is around 3000 copies for Australia (unless the book or author/illustrator is a well-established favourite). The print run for a new novel may well be as low as 1,500 copies. Unit costs are therefore high. {It is interesting, however, that the print runs for high-quality children’s books in large markets such as the USA and UK are often lower in relation to the overall population than ours are.) Given these conditions, the reason for the $10 price of a picture-book can be seen from this breakdown: retail price (100%) $10.00bookseller’s discount (approx. 40%) $4.00author’s royalty (10%) $1.00unit cost (includes design, typesetting, printing, binding, freight and landing) (20%) $2.00publisher’s margin (which has to cover overheads, promotion, distribution and profit) (30%) $3.00 You can see that there are no spare dollars in this sum, and not much to make a publisher’s eyes light up. The fact is that the $10 book, which seems so expensive to the public, is small beer to the publisher. And when you realise that it costs much the same to promote and distribute a $10 book as it does a $30 book, you will have come up against the vicious circle of price, quantity and promotion which is at the heart of children’s book publishing. If the value of a book (i.e. the $3 which is the publisher’s margin in the above example) you need to sell a lot of copies to make the exercise worthwhile. To sell a lot of copies you need to promote the book widely. But if the value of the book is low, you cannot afford to promote widely. Obviously. If you are confident that you have a winner, you promote vigorously in anticipation of large sales, but the dangers are evident. Allied to this problem is the fact that there is little free publicity for children’s books. Books depend heavily on promotion from newspapers, magazines, and TV for their success, and the mass media take little interest in children’s books. Happily, there are more newspapers giving space to children’s book reviews now than there were four years ago, but these reviews are less prominent than adult book reviews, and seldom attract much attention outside the circles of dedicated children’s book reviewers. The reviews in professional journals with influence among teachers and librarians are slow to appear, which means that new books often get off to a slow start. And when did you last see Don Lane brandishing a children’s book? One of the reasons for the lack of review space for children’s books is that children’s review pages do not attract as much advertising from publishers as do adult reviews. Here we’re back with the problem of lack of funds for promoting ‘cheap’ books. Up to this point, I have concentrated on hardback children’s books, because these are the books of which I have most experience. But it is important to consider paperbacks, since they are in many ways the most appropriate form ‘of children’s book publishing. They are cheap and disposable, two qualities generally thought desirable in things for children. (I am working on the concept of fast books’, comparable to fast food: short, bland, easy to read, disposable, fun for all the family.) Paperbacks are apparently less daunting; many children prefer them, some think they are actually shorter and easier to read (and possibly more frivolous). They have a contemporary feel to them. Above all they are at a price which more people (even children themselves) can afford. As I mentioned, the sales of children’s paperbacks have increased, but the problems here are again ones of cost and promotion/distribution. The publishers’ share of a $2.95 book is obviously very small, so they have to sell large quantities to justify the effort. This demands efficient mass market distribution, which is expensive, or an alternative means of getting books into people’s hands – such as direct mail, or book clubs operating through schools. The success of certain book clubs in Australia has proved that there are thousands of people who are keen to buy children s books if they can get them easily and at a good price. Producing paperback originals at paperback prices is difficult in a small market when the fixed costs are high. Some publishers do manage it successfully. but you have to sell around three times as many copies of a paperback as you do a hardback to get the same return (for publishers and authors) so it demands expensive distribution systems, especially in a large country like Australia with a far-flung population. Some publishers have experimented with ‘trade paperbacks’ – i.e. with print runs and prices midway between paperbacks and hardbacks – but I gather that these have been unsuccessful unless attached to a reading scheme. Most paperbacks, however, are reprints of hardbacks, where the fixed costs have already been paid. But if the difficulties of hardback publishing for children are such that publishers are reluctant to take the risks, where do the paperbacks come from? There are ways of increasing hardback print runs to more economic proportions, but these too have attendant problems. Children’s book publishers are always chasing the elusive foreign rights sales. The most useful deals are co-productions where you print another publisher’s edition at the same time as your own and share the fixed costs. Australian publishers are not well placed to organise such deals, being so far from their likeliest partners in Europe and the USA. Pursuing rights sales at overseas book fairs and through the lengthy correspondence which ensues can be a time-consuming and frustrating business. Fortunately, however, as Australia’s reputation for good children’s books grows, it becomes easier to attract foreign deals. The pursuit of foreign sales has interesting implications for the content, tone and national identity of the books. In Australia it is still easier to sell children’s books if they are in some way distinctively Australian. Gumnuts and swagmen are still firm currency. But many Australian (and this applies to idiom and tone as well as to flora and fauna) are considered unsuitable for other countries. (Australian books are often more vigorous – more strident perhaps – than European books, for example.) So Australian publishers have to juggle to design books which are Australian enough to satisfy the local market, and international enough to travel. It can be done, and the really good books travel well despite things which are specific to one country, but it is not easy. The other major influence on print runs of children’s books in Australia is the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Award. This award, and the attendant publicity, is the only real annual celebration of children’s books, and has an enormous effect on sales. Even the runners-up sell two or three times as many hardback copies, and their success as paperbacks is assured. But even these awards are not without problems for publishers. The awards are designed to encourage quality in children’s books, and tend (at least in the novel section) to favour a certain kind of literary excellence that is not always accessible to a wide range of children. Award winners are often ‘too hard’ for many children. Since books like this do not sell without the help of such awards, there is a risk for publishers in producing, with an eye on the awards, books which will have a very small market if they do not happen to win. Yet if they publish fiction of a less ambitious kind – the ‘good easy reads’ that people often ask for – they are very unlikely to get any attention from this major source of publicity. Personally, I am glad that the awards make possible the kind of publishing which would struggle to exist without them, since it is this sort of publishing, however elitist, which feeds the world of ideas and has a subtle influence on all writing. But I do hope that the judges will be open to the merits of more modest books which can give a great deal of satisfaction to children. I’d like now to leave the economic difficulties, though they are always there in the background, and to look at the problems involved in choosing what goes into children’s books and how they are designed. Some topics seem to have enduring appeal for children at certain stages of development: the dinosaurs, witches, worlds in miniature, space adventures, triumphs of justice, etc. The more transitory enthusiasm (for Rubik’s cubes or BMX bikes) are not difficult to predict if you keep an eye on what is in vogue in the USA and UK, which films are going to be promoted, what’s on TV, what toys are being made (though you have to move fast in this area). But there are always the tricky problems of matching the subject-matter with the appropriate level of reading difficulty. Children learn to read at very different rates, depending on their situation and their aptitude, so there are no easy rules of progression to follow. A kid’s book can so easily misfire because it is written in too sophisticated or too babyish a style. There are highly competent readers who want a simple, reassuring story, and the stumblers who want sophisticated information on a subject of special interest. Here the technical problems of designing a book for children come into play: how to gauge the right reading level; how to choose the appropriate size and style of type; to choose pictures that will mean something to a child; to provide captions which will draw out the meaning; to combine text and pictures in a way that maintains a balance between liveliness and confusion. I find this a very interesting area, and the challenge to the publisher is to find the right specialists and to make them work together as a team (and to work within your budget -back to the recurring problem of costs). It is so easy for a good idea to go off the rails in production. It is difficult, for example, to find designers with detailed knowledge of typography who are alert to the special needs of children; who will know when a sans serif face is more appropriate than a serif; when a line of type is too long for comfortable reading, or so short that it disrupts the flow of meaning; when type is too small, so that it looks cramped and difficult, or too large, so that it looks babyish, and so on. Editors often have trouble with these things because there is little formal professional training in publishing and comparatively little accessible research on designing print for children. (Editors are also often ill-prepared for producing picture-books, where the visual elements are so important, since they are usually more attuned to working with words than with images.) To come back to my earlier point about children having little influence on what is produced for them, one problem in making children’s books is in getting past the adult preconceptions about what children want to read, or should want to read (i.e. what is good for them) and what they can cope with. So many adults come between the book and the child in the publishing process: adults invariably write the books, choose them to publish, illustrate and design them, review and even buy them. (As a publisher you have always to bear in mind that it is adults .who actually buy the books, so you have to design books to appeal to them quite as much as to children.) It is possible to involve children in the book-making process. I do ask children to suggest ideas, to read manuscripts and to comment on presentation, but there are pitfalls. Their individual responses are often too idiosyncratic to be of much help, and to do systematic trialling is time-consuming and expensive and therefore impractical on small projects. (Reading schemes and text books are another matter.) Publishers are really obliged to rely largely on adult opinions in these matters, and of course there are many sensitive people who work closely with books and children, who listen to children and who really know their tastes and habits. But all too often adult responses to children’s books are coloured by their pet theories about what children ought to like and be like, or by sentimental memories of what they themselves liked and were like as children. Allied to this are the problems of didactics, of ‘acceptable’ values, of censorship and of the tone of voice employed in children’s books. Adults always want to teach children things to combat original sin or the corrupting influence of the world (whichever their bias). This often results in indigestible lumps of fact, of propaganda, or of moralising in books for children which people would be ashamed to put in books for adults. I wouldn’t argue that children’s books should be entirely carefree and frivolous, but there needs to be a balance between frivolity and the thumping moral. Most people involved in making books for children are increasing vigilance against racism, sexism, ageism, and all the other pernicious isms in books, and so they should be. Books are a medium for exploring the world, and for examining ideas. Books do carry messages about rights and wrongs, they do influence people’s beliefs and actions. And since children are impressionable and are sorting out their values and their responses to life, it is important to give thought to the effect that books will have on them. But there is the danger that we sometimes end up with blank, bland, sanitised books for children, in our attempts to avoid contentious issues. The danger of being too responsible lies in stodginess! Some books err in the other direction, in their efforts to deal (heavy-handedly) with all the world’s social and moral problems. But how much of life should we censor from children? What about swearing, which is so much a part of every-day experience, but is it still frowned on in children’s books? Should children’s books always set a good example? I don’t have cut-and-dried answers to these questions which are recurrent problems for children’s book makers, but I do think we often underestimate children’s powers of discrimination, or see books in isolation from other aspects of life. I suspect we are also still over-impressed by the authority of the printed word: ‘bloody’ has more power to corrupt and legitimise when printed than when spoken. I wonder if that’s true. The problem of gauging what is an appropriate tone of voice for children’s books is closely related to the predominance of adults and their ideas of what is suitable for children. Many writers have talked about the appeal of the friendly voice of the story-teller pervading a story, but how easily it can become coy, patronizing, hearty, sentimental, or falsely jolly when directed at children. It comes back to the self-conscious stance of ‘I am now writing for children’, which affects many writers. People are frightened to let go in front of children, and this comes through in many children’s books. Finally, to come back to the question of the competition presented by other media. There is a general feeling that children are less interested now in books and reading than they used to be (though quite when this golden age of children’s attachment to books was, and how long it lasted, I’m not sure). I doubt that the figures for children’s book sales would support this, but it is evident that there are more sophisticated forms of instruction and entertainment clamouring for children’s attention than there have been in the past. Publishers face problems in competing with the electronic media with their flexibility and their complex range of dynamic sights and sounds. The recent flood of pop-up books is evidence of publishers’ attempts to prove that books can play the special effects games too. (Needless to say, pop-up books are extremely expensive to produce, so it is difficult for Australian publishers to compete in this market.) Publishers and other book people expend a lot of energy on trying to seduce reluctant readers into using books when they can quite often get the information and stimulus they need from other non-print sources. (Book-lovers have a sentimental belief in the inherent value of the printed word which children of an electronic age probably do not need to have.) My view is that publishers cannot expect to compete with other media, but should work in conjunction with them (the book of the film, the companion to computers, etc.), and should work out what it is that books do better than other media and concentrate on that. Having said all that, and listed this catalogue of problems I must confess to belief in the value of children’s books. They give a lot of pleasure to children and to adults, and I trust that publishers will continue to pursue economically viable ways of producing them.

Rosalind Price

From the New Issue

The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

Three recent short story collections

Mothers of the Mind: The remarkable women who shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath by Rachel Trethewey

No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton

You May Also Like

Refuge by Libby Gleeson

#Queryfail

'Living in the Indigenous space' by Lynette Russell

This Is America