Something new...About Time!

Everyone’s saying what an amazing time it is to be a teen/YA writer. YA lit is being taken more seriously. Over the last ten years, the teen/YA market boomed, expanding dramatically with books about the paranormal, myriad dystopias (always in a long series) and dark supernatural romances. These books became the next big thing, and then thebig thing, as they were adapted and appeared in a cinema near you. Book shops were awash with one or two narrow genres, filling shelves until they were overflowing. But there was barely any space left for any diversity, and dare I say it, bar a few exceptions, anything original.

Agents, at least in the States, are saying they’ve had enough. The market has had enough. It’s all reached saturation point. Now agents are looking for something else. The problem is, they’re not entirely sure what that is.

The genres they now say they’re interested in are crime, psychological thrillers, gritty realism and contemporary dramas. The one-off, stand alone book looks to be making a comeback. If that’s true then hooray!

It is too often I hear people saying that boys are reluctant readers, and asking what we can do about it? Well, given the choice they’ve faced over the last decade, I’m not entirely surprised. I was in a bookshop the other week and a teen, a boy, was asking for recommendations. The shop assistant had very little to offer him – he’d read the small number of general action/adventure series that were on display there, and he wasn’t interested in paranormal or dystopian. Well maybe, finally, the kind of books boys like him might like to read will get a look in now. Of course many other factors will play a part, but this is a beginning, a small kernel, which needs to be nurtured and developed.

To read the full report from the Publishers Weekly about the changing focus of agents and publishers in the US follow this link:

 Publishers Weekly

Here’s another link to an interesting US blog post with literary agents there about what they’d like to see landing on their desks:

Adventures in YA Publishing

Of course the most important thing in teen/YA writing, and actually in any writing, is the voice and the story, no matter what the genre. But it is good to hear that, at least across the Pond, agents and publishers are showing an interest in manuscripts across many different genres, which means that the contemporary stand-alone novel has more of a chance to get its voice heard and to find some shelf space in a bookshop or library.

Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman’s work has been diverse, covering different genres, themes and age groups. She has initiated a YA convention to be held in London next year where she will be promoting Young Adult literature. It’s going to be held at the London Film and Comic Con at Earls Court in June 2014. The convention will include publishers and writers, workshops, signings, and talks. It sounds exciting and I’m looking forward to it. I hope it makes a difference.

So what are publishers and agents saying here in the UK where UKYA is on the up and up? I think it’s time to find out...

www.savitakalhan.com

@savitakalhan

A First Book For My Grandson, by Paul May

(This is a very topical guest post from Paul May - many thanks to him for producing it with a turn of speed that Mo Farah would envy!)

I have seen various reports recently about the lack of diversity in children’s literature: from SavitaKalhan on this blog, and elsewhere from Malorie Blackman and Bali Rai.  This is about what happened to me.

My grandson is seven months old and the other day my daughter, Emily, asked me if I’d like to buy him his first book.  ‘Yes!’ I thought, ‘That will be fun.  Maybe I’ll get a board book copy of THE BABY’S CATALOGUE.’ It was my son’s first book too.  He’s a few years younger than Emily and it hadn’t been published when she was born.  In fact, Emily more or less grew up with the Ahlbergs. EACH PEACH PEAR PLUM was published the year she was born. I even have her original copy of FUNNYBONES, in which, long before there were any sequels, she had penciled her own ideas for future books.  For example: GETTING MARRIED AND KISSING and BIIING A HOUSE. You see how children engage with picture books? 

Emily’s ideas for FUNNYBONES sequels

So,I took myself off to my local children’s bookshop.  I should say at this point that while I am a white, grey-haired man, and my daughter is white with blue eyes and masses of curly blond hair, my son-in-law is black.  Fallou, my grandson is a perfect, mid-brown mixture.  

On the way to the bookshop I wondered whether maybe THE BABY’S CATALOGUE would be a little old-fashioned.  Then I started to remember that it was full of those wonderful pictures of all kinds of babies and all kinds of mums and dads.  And I remembered all the fun we used to have looking at it, and how Tommy eventually destroyed it; used it up entirely, what with eating it and dragging it around.

Sadly, when I went into the shop they didn’t have a copy, which was a shame.  On the other hand I would enjoy looking through all those picture books for the first time in years, wouldn’t I?  I was sure to find something good.  I must have looked through twenty or thirty board books before it dawned on me - I hadn’t seen a single picture of a child who wasn’t white.

At first I thought this must have been bad luck, so I kept looking.  It wasn’t bad luck.  The board books in this (very well-stocked) bookshop were almost all about white children or animals. I moved on from board books to picture books.  It was the same thing.  Sure, there were some books with black, brown, yellow children, but the others vastly outnumbered them.  I found to my astonishment that I was starting to feel upset.  I guess I’d assumed that in the fifteen years or so since I last looked seriously through the picture book shelves of a bookshop there would have been many more books like THE BABY’S CATALOGUE that depict children of every shape and colour routinely.  I’d seen what Malorie Blackman had said, but there is no substitute for personal experience.  I also know that for many of you reading this it’s already personal, and has been for far too long. And I feel embarrassed that it’s had to become personal for me to feel angry about it.

It can be done – spreads from CLAP HANDS and TICKLE TICKLE by Helen Oxenbury.)

I asked a member of staff about the situation.  She very helpfully found me some books, among them THIS IS OUR HOUSE by Michael Rosen and Bob Graham and the CLAP HANDS series of board books by Helen Oxenbury, but the Michael Rosen was published in 2007 and the Helen Oxenbury in 1987.  Other books I was shown included SO MUCH by Trish Cooke (1994) and books by Ezra Jack Keats, who died in 1983.  They’re all terrific books, but we should be able to go to this year’s crop of picture books and find images in them that ALL our children and grandchildren can recognize and identify with.  There are some, sure, but nowhere near enough.

The world that is represented in a lot of picture booksdoesn’t seem to have changed much since the world of Judith Kerr’s THE TIGER WHO CAME TO TEA, whose café and Dad and street scenes come straight out of the 1950s England I grew up in.  It looks absolutely nothing like Wood Green, where I live, or like Peckham, where my daughter lives, or Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle or Liverpool.  It doesn’t even look like provincial market towns and villages in the countryside.  Not any more.

I’m not sure where it is, this picture book world, but I can tell you that in most primary schools and nurseries in this country there are children who won’t find anyonewho looks like them in most of the books that they are given.

#WeNeedDiverseBooksUK by Savita Kalhan

Recently I wrote a blog here about diversity in children’s literature Black and White and Everything in Between. I'm returning to the discussion again today.

Malorie Blackman has talked and written and discussed the lack of diversity in children’s literature. Recently she was interviewed about the issue and egregiously misquoted, which led to a lot of racist comments on her Twitter feed. On the Edge Writers blog, Paula Rawsthorne discussed this and the issue of diversity. You can read it here..

Bali Rai has talked about the lack of diversity in children’s literature, as have many other writers, librarians, readers and reviewers.

In the States a huge campaign was launched after it was revealed that all the ‘luminaries from the world of children’s, teen and YA writers invited to the panel discussions at the BookExpo America were all white and all male’. After the campaign, a much more diverse group of children’s authors were invited to sit on a panel to discuss the issue.

The American Association for Library Service to children also initiated a programme to address the lack of diversity in children’s literature available in libraries.
I blogged about the whole US #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign on the Edge Writers blog, which you can read here.

When I talked about the issue on Twitter I was told by an editor at a very big publishing house that it wholeheartedly promoted diverse writers, and already had two on their lists, (the inference drawn was that obviously that was quite sufficient). But, she said, the problem really was that British writers from ethnically diverse backgrounds were not submitting manuscripts to publishers, and she could not understand why...

I know the truth to be a little different.

I also know she did not grasp this concept at all: that if children from ethnically diverse backgrounds rarely see any version of themselves, other than occasionally as stereotypes or as bit parts, then they are in danger of believing that books are the preserve of the white middle classes, and also that the children’s publishing industry might not be a place for them when they grow up. Perhaps I’m painting it too black and white, but I’m sure you know what I’m saying.

Children’s fiction, teen fiction and YA fiction is a tougher market than it ever was before, it’s also become far narrower than ever before, both in terms of the books commissioned and published, and the apparent ‘market trends’ as dictated by the publicity and marketing departments. This is reinforced by the lack of diversity in terms of ethnicity, age, background, and sex of most of the editors at most of the publishing houses in the UK. You only have to go to a book publishing event or conference to see that for yourselves. There are few people of colour.

Everything has been squeezed. The market-driven publishing houses are all on the look-out for the Next Big Thing, mid-range writers are often fighting a losing battle, teen/YA shelves are now full of very, very similar books on very, very similar themes, and you’ll be very lucky if you find much diversity in theme never mind anything else.

Something has to change surely. So I wholeheartedly support Malorie Blackman in her endeavour to promote diversity in children’s literature. I know lots of children’s writers who feel the same way and are blogging to raise awareness.

Here’s a hashtag we can all use to help promote diversity in children’s literature, and I use the term diversity in its widest possible sense - #WeNeedDiverseBooksUK
And I very much hope that the publishing industry pays more than lip service too.

Savita's website

YALC and the Beauty of Bloggers - Lucy Coats

Last Saturday I found myself in the company of Wookies, Jedi, sundry Game of Thrones characters, Spidermen, ogres (male and female) and a raft of other bedecked and be-axed cosplayers. I also had the pleasure of meeting some of the many wonderful YA bloggers I chat to and follow online. Yes, this was the mad and crazy glory that was the UK's first ever Young Adult Literature Convention (mixed with lashings of ComicCon). The Daily Telegraph deemed it a hit - and barring a few gripes about the nightmare queues, the heat, the lack of seating, the audio-fails and the heaving walls of bodies blocking the way to the book lecture stage (all dying to have their photo taken with Marvelmeister Stan Lee), I loved every minute. The whole thing was dreamed up by Booktrust and our very own Children's Laureate, Malorie Blackman, and I think we should all stand up and cheer her to the steel rafters that only just kept the roof on Earls Court (the noise was ear-tingling). Much has been written about the brilliant panels and workshops elsewhere, but I want to focus on something else. Yes, those book bloggers.

With much of the newspaper industry (the Guardian being an honourable exception) giving less and less review coverage to children's and YA books, the book bloggers are our enthusiastic champions, and we need to recognise the HUGE amounts of unpaid time and energy they put into reading and then writing about our neck of the literary woods. They tweet, they discuss, they get the word out there, and I think we owe them all a great debt of gratitude - including our very own Awfully Big Review team, of course!

The post-conference 'For the Fringe' party (organised by the indomitable Sophia Bennett) was a marvellous mix of authors and bloggers - @YaYeahYeah, @Serendipity_Viv, @JessHeartsBooks, @Splendibird, @RachReviewsAll, @carlybennett, @lynseynewton...er, in fact far too many to name-check them all here  - and the level of knowledgeable bookish chat was off the scale. To meet so many enthusiastic readers was a shot in the arm for all the authors who were there, I think - and I was kept busy scribbling down new blogsites and book recommendations as well as chatting till I thought my tongue would drop off.

Another thing I discovered at YALC was The Siobhan Dowd Trust in action. Actually, I discovered it before I even got there, while I was still on the tube. Overhearing a group of teenagers enthusing excitedly about their favourite authors (quite a lot of screaming) was another shot in the arm - and I later discovered from their librarian that they were from a Manchester school, and that their trip had been funded by the SDT. They weren't the only ones either. I found more while listening to one of the panels. They were the ones at the front, grabbing the microphone to ask intelligent and insightful questions of the panel members. This is the wonderful thing about the SDT - they give bookish kids opportunities they might not otherwise have had.

Altogether, YALC was a real eye-opener. The power of books and reading to inspire was demonstrated on a grand scale there - and while some may have felt that ComicCon was not quite the right place to have it, personally, I thought it gave the whole thing added 'buzz'. I really do hope it happens again in 2015 - I'm already planning an Egyptian costume. Be very afraid!

Why do we believe these things? - John Dougherty

Image © LostMedia

Ever since the beginning of my involvement with the publishing industry, I’ve had the suspicion that its thinking is full of ‘accepted truths’ that are, in fact, not true. My suspicions are growing.

One of these so-called accepted truths - shall we call them SCATs for short? - is the idea that “boys won’t read books with a girl as the central character”. I was involved in a conversation recently where this was asserted as fact.

- Hmmm, I said; but is that true? After all, boys read Mr Gum, and the hero of those books is a girl.

- Yes, came the reply, but it’s sold on Mr Gum himself.

- The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? It’s Lucy’s story, really. If there’s a central character, it’s her.

- Yes, but there’s Peter and Edmund and Susan, too, so it’s a gender-balanced story.

- Northern Lights?

- Yes, but Pullman’s exceptional, isn’t he?

- The Hunger Games?

- Well, sometimes a book comes along that just breaks all the rules.

…and so on. 

Interestingly, the person who most strongly made such statements also quite blithely said that their company does no marketplace research; they just trust in instinct & experience.

This is not to denigrate anyone involved in the conversation; they’re all good people who have achieved much in the world of publishing, and it was a privilege to talk to them. But it did get me wondering - is there in fact any real evidence to support the idea that boys won’t read books about girls? Or is it simply an unfounded myth that has gained traction and now won’t let go?

On the same day, I responded to a tweet from the inestimable Let Toys Be Toys campaign about their Let Books Be Books initiative. They’re building a gallery - which is here and growing; do take a look - to challenge this idea. Examples there, and others I’ve spotted or thought of since, include:

• Alice in Wonderland 
• The Silver Chair
• Matilda
• the Sophie stories
• Pippi Longstocking
• A Face Like Glass
• Peter Pan & Wendy (interesting, isn’t it, that since Disney the title has been shortened to Peter Pan, when really it’s Wendy’s story?)
• The BFG
• Mr Stink
• the Tiffany Aching books
• The Story of Tracy Beaker
• Sabriel
• Fever Crumb

And there are more. Does anyone honestly think boys won’t read Geraldine McCaughrean’s wonderful The White Darkness or Not The End of the World? Is Tony Ross’s Little Princess really rejected by half the toddler population? Does the possession of external genitalia truly impede enjoyment of The Secret Garden?

Then I started thinking about my own childhood reading. I was a very insecure boy, bullied by my classmates, and gender-shaming was one of their weapons. I learned early on that anything that marked me out as insufficiently masculine was to be avoided. So did that mean I didn’t read “girls’ books?” Nope. I just read them in secret. I rather enjoyed Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl and St Clare’s series, for instance, and Pollyanna; and truth to tell if gender wasn’t signified on the cover in some way then it didn’t even occur to me to ask if the central character was a boy. The two things that sometimes stopped me from reading books about girls - or being seen to read them - were:

1. the fear of being shamed
2. being given the message in some way that these books were not for me

In other words, there was nothing about either me or the book that made us a poor match. It was external pressure that got between me and those stories. And despite what my classmates would have had you believe, I don’t think I was a weirdo.

This isn’t the only SCAT that restricts young readers and the adults who write for them. Malorie Blackman recently challenged the idea that white children won’t read books starring characters from minority backgrounds. And where did we get the idea that children won’t read about adult characters? Have we forgotten how successful Professor Branestawn was in his day - or that children are happy to read about King Arthur’s knights, or Heracles, or Superman? 

Do we really believe that children are so closed-minded as to only want to read about characters like themselves? Do we honestly think so little of them? And if we think it true that children need characters to be like them even in age, colour and gender before they can identify with them, why are we happy to give them stories about rabbits and hedgehogs and guinea-pigs, about water-rats and moles and toads and badgers? Is there any sense at all in the assertion that a boy will identify with a different species more readily than with the opposite sex? That a white child will happily imagine himself to be a dog or a pig, but balk at imagining himself as black? 

We need to challenge these SCATs. They’re bad for books; they’re bad for readers; they’re bad for our society. So thank goodness for Let Books Be Books. Thank goodness for Malorie Blackman. Thank goodness for those people who are prepared to say, “Is there any actual evidence for that?” - and let’s agree to be those people ourselves.

And if we ever feel unsure of our ground, and wonder if maybe the SCATs are right, let’s remember a film industry SCAT recently reported by Lauren Child. Let’s remember that she was told a Ruby Redfort film was out of the question, because a female lead in a kids’ film is box-office poison.

And let’s remember that the highest-grossing animation of all time is now Disney’s female-led Frozen.

_____________________________________________________________

John's latest book is Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers (OUP)

Black and White and Everything In Between by Savita Kalhan

According to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013 in the US, just 93 were about black people. The UK fares little better by all accounts.

Leila Rasheed has blogged about the importance of non-issue based children’s books featuring children from ethnic backgrounds, and why she finds it hard to write about non-white characters.  http://leilarasheeddotcom.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/permission-to-write-my-experience-of-being-a-british-asian-reader-and-writer-of-childrens-books/

Tanya Byrne has written about this on the Guardian books blog where she calls for more books featuring children of colour. https://href.li/?http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/mar/20/tanya-byrne-top-10-black-characters-in-childrens-books?CMP=twt_gu

The dearth of non-white characters was raised by Dean Myers, in his article: Where are the People of Colour in Children’s Books. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrens-books.html?_r=1

And then again by his son Christopher Myers in The Apartheid of Children. https://href.li/?http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html

There is now an increasing debate and demand for more diversity in children’s literature to reflect our increasingly multi-ethnic and multi cultural society.

Almost thirty years ago Verna Wilkins set up Tamarind Press in an attempt to redress the lack of books with children from non-white backgrounds being published in the children’s market. But ‘mainstream’ publishers have yet to catch up, and there is clearly still a huge lack of such books.

As a British Asian, who is 100% Indian in terms of heritage, but who is essentially more British than Indian, and as a big reader during my childhood, it was always a surprise when I found a book about a child who shared my skin colour. A nice surprise. Yes, often those kids were beset by problems such as racial abuse and stereotyping, but that wasn’t a problem for me because growing up in the UK at the time did in fact necessarily involve having to face those issues to a greater or lesser degree.

What bothers me now is the fact that, as all of the above authors have pointed out, there are still very few books that feature children of colour, whether or not they are issue-based or are 'normal' non-issue based stories .

Children are growing up in a society which is far more culturally mixed and diverse. But, for today's children, not much has changed from when I grew up, in terms of seeing and reading about a diverse range of children like themselves and their friends in literature.

That’s a problem.

I completely agree with Malorie when she talks about diversity of multi-cultural voices in children’s literature being of paramount importance, not least because it would promote awareness and understanding, and tolerance.

On a personal level, as a writer, I have written books featuring all white characters. People have often said that The Long Weekend could have been written by a white Anglo-Saxon. That’s fine. I find it quite amusing. It’s my fully Indian name on the spine. In another novel, Amnesia, the main character is an English boy, but his best friend is Indian and his girlfriend is half Italian. The book I have just completed is about an Asian girl and features predominately Asian characters of different backgrounds. I don’t feel that because I’m Asian I have to write about Asian characters all the time, or that I should feel obliged to.

What’s important in children’s literature is that a diversity of characters in terms of ethnicity and culture is depicted, and that their voices are heard, and that a child is no longer surprised when they find more than one book featuring someone of their ethnicity, culture or colour. Sadly, that’s not happening yet.

 www.savitakalhan.com

The Long Weekend Book Trailer

Twitter @savitakalhan

 

What You Learn on a Writing Weekend with the SAS - Liz Kessler

I am writing this blog from a train, having spent the weekend locked away in a hotel with forty wonderful children’s authors (all members of the Scattered Authors' Society, otherwise known as the 'other' SAS). And I have to say, it was a very lovely hotel to be locked away in, surrounded by trees and lakes and snowdrops.

OK, we weren’t actually locked away. We were all there by choice. And while I'm clearing up inaccuracies, I'm not in fact simply 'getting the train home'. I'm getting a...

• Taxi to the station;
• Train to London;
• Tube across London;
• Train to the airport;
• Flight to Newquay (not because I’m a posh jet setter who normally gets around via aeroplane, but because train lines in and out of Cornwall are currently out of action due to the recent storms);
• Lift home in a car.

I’m not saying all this in an attempt to impress anyone with my mammoth journey, but to show how much trouble I am willing to go to in order to spend a weekend with not only some of the finest children’s authors in the country, but some of the loveliest people to boot. (I don’t think I’ve ever used the expression ‘to boot’ before. I like it.)

In other words, it was a wonderful weekend.

As writers generally work at home on their own, you can perhaps imagine how we feel about getting together like this. It’s a bit like a group of work colleagues who have LOADS to talk about, but only get to hang out around the water cooler three times a year.

It’s not just a whole load of fun; you also learn things. So, here are ten things I learned this time.

1. Writers’ fortunes go up and down so much that we really shouldn’t worry too much when times are tough – or get complacent when they’re good. It’s probably all gonna look different when you come back and see everyone again next year.

2. The Scattered Authors’ Society will always support you in the former of those times and cheer for you in the latter.

3. Most children’s authors seem to have black swimming costumes.

4. Tim Collins is extremely good at coping with being surrounded by forty women (and is also very clever and very funny).

5. Anne Rooney is totally amazing at putting together huge amounts of interesting information and producing a fascinating PowerPoint presentation in the time it takes other people to sleep, have breakfast and brush their teeth.

6. Sally Nicholls will always be the winner if you get into a game of ‘How many people have you killed off in a single novel?’ (Unless you know anyone who has killed more than 45% of Europe.)

7. Malorie Blackman is, basically, wonderful.

8. If you get ten SAS members sitting in a bar at an event like this, you are quite likely to discover that you have 156 years' experience of the publishing industry around the table.

9. My A Level in Maths wasn’t all for nothing, as I managed to correctly work out the above without the use of a calculator.

10. When you’re running late with your blog post and haven’t got any ideas of your own, someone else will usually have a good one you can nick/share. Thanks Abie! 

(Please head over to Abie Longstaff’s sister blog today!)

MASSIVE thanks to the wonderful duo, Mary Hoffman and Anne Rooney, for working so hard to put together such a fab weekend. Hope to see lots of you around the water cooler again soon.

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