World Book Day week - how can children find books they really love?

by Paula Harrison

Cupcakes with book covers - a perfect combination! Pic taken at a SCBWI party.

The week of World Book Day (and often the week before and after it) see many authors scurrying around the country armed with notes and power points and a myriad of props, ready to entertain and inspire lots of children during school visits. I've been doing a bit of scurrying myself and enjoying the chance to meet readers which is always brilliant at any time of year. Seeing so many children in such a short space of time, gives me lots of opportunities to find out what they're reading, what they think of books and generally reflect on who I'm writing for.

So I wanted to blog about all this and I have a few thoughts in no particular order...

Firstly, I think access to books and access to a wide range of books is a problem and probably one which is worsening. When asked what they like best to read, many children will list the same books on the bestseller lists - well there's a reason that they're bestsellers! Dig a little deeper and I've found that the children referencing these books often own few books or own none at all. They know the book through borrowing it from the school library or being read to in their class. They're not always getting the opportunity to try out a broader range of books on different topics and genres. This also has implications for diversity in books which we know is already a problem that many publishers are trying to address.

It feels to me as if the range of books being presented to many children is narrowing. I think this is a problem for young readers and could disadvantage them in the future. Not everyone likes the same kind of thing. Yet if children are being offered the same small range over a number of years they may never develop the same love of reading as they would have if they'd been offered the chance to try a wide mix. They may never find that particular kind of book that they love so much it turns them into a reader. Children should choose from all kinds of family stories, nature stories, stories with fantastical kingdoms or fairy tale characters, and more! Where are these alternative books? They're already out there, actually. There's a huge range of different children's fiction and non-fiction being published that's fantastic quality. Publishers are continuing to try new ideas and new voices in the hope of a book breaking through. But I worry that in the current climate they will eventually narrow their lists and the range will narrow for good.

So who are our readers and what do they want? Going round schools, many of whom also have book fairs during WBD week I also noticed that I'm not just writing for the children. I'm writing for the parents and grandparents who buy the books and influence their children's decision. Some may prefer a name they know or a celebrity name which gives them a sense of safety. They feel they know what they're getting when they part with their money. So is there a way that we can help parents and grandparents feel more reassured when they take a chance on a book their child wants even though they don't recognise the name? I think booksellers and librarians have an important role here, making recommendations and writing those little notes on the book shop shelves - something that I have seen working in my local Waterstones book shop and something I know many indie book shops do so well.

So we as authors are not just writing for children, but for parents and for the gatekeepers - the publishers, booksellers, librarians and teachers that may champion our story. I've heard writers talking many times about how they worry their book may not be picked up because it's "too quiet". In other words, it doesn't have that big commercial hook. I would argue, that certainly in the middle grade book (aged 9 +) category it's the "quiet" books where a debut author may find a space for themselves. Those writers who have carved a living by writing the "big commercial hook" type stories - often humorous stories in the vein of Roald Dahl - are having the tougher time. That space has been taken mainly by celebrity authors who lend their name to books that are often ghost written.

This is a book shelf at a well known supermarket, picture taken by a fellow writer. All one kind of book. All celebrity authors.



So where do we go from here? How do we continue to offer children a wide range of books so that they can learn to love reading with all the benefits that brings? I don't have all the answers to this but I believe libraries must play a crucial role in solving the problem. Lots of us have been trying to fight for libraries for a long time but we must keep going - this issue is too important for us to give up.

School Librarian of the Year Award 2012

Adam (right) receives the award from
author Kevin Crossley-Holland who is
President of the School Library Association

Congrats to Adam Lancaster who is SLA School Librarian of the Year and Duston School for winning the Library Design Award. It was an inspiring event with many thrilling ideas about enthusing children into reading. But the awesome initiatives on display were made poignant by a constant awareness of the terrible challenges nibbling away at our libraries. When I was a kid, the library rescued me. But who's going to rescue the libraries?

Read my post on the SLA Librarian of the Year Award

Please participate in this online survey, part of a piece of research entitled Envisioning the Library of the Future, commissioned by Arts Council England. This programme of research will inform the development of the Arts Council’s long-term vision for public libraries in England. Go to the Survey 

Fight for Our Libraries

Tweet to Save Libraries on this Hashtag #CFTB

My school library rescued me. It gave me companionship at a lonely time in my life. And it transformed my future.

Reading the dismissive comments left by readers on Catherine Bennett's piece about library closures in the Guardian made me sick to my stomach.

There is another discussion to be had about how libraries should change because times certainly are a-changing. But close them down? "They might as well start book burning," writes Bryony Pearce, author of Incarnation.

If you care about libraries, join The Campaign for the Book founded and led by author Alan Gibbons.

If you blog, blog about libraries. Make a fuss. Name names. Here are a few:

Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP - Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport
John Penrose MP - Minister for Tourism and Heritage
Hugh Robertson MP - Minister for Sport and the Olympics
Ed Vaizey MP - Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries (joint Minister with Department of Business, Innovation and Skills)

Highlight these names, mention them in your blog posts. These people have the power to change things and they should know it. Their Google Alerts on their names will be crammed with our anger.

Already, the blogosphere is buzzing:

Lucy Coats decries culture minister Ed Vaizey's fair weather support for libraries. "Where is his passion for libraries now?" she asks on her blog Scribble City Central. (I have enlarged Mr. Vaizey's name so that he knows we are laying a lot of this at his feet)

Thanks to Tracy Baines who reposted my piece on the Tall Tales and Short Stories blog.

And Philip Ardagh, author of the Grubtown Tales, who started out being funny and ended with an impassioned plea.:

LIBRARIES MATTER. HELPING TO STOP LIBRARY CLOSURES MATTERS. As for Mr Spock with a goatee beard? That has something to do with ANTIMATTER, but there's no room for that here. We all have to act NOW before it's too late, so what are you waiting for? He also posted this on Facebook and got amazing comments

Here's Nick Cross from Who Ate My Brain, who despite admitting that he doesn't get to his library much, says:

I don't know what the answer is to saving our libraries. But I do know that they are a vital public service and we need to make a hell of a lot of noise about their potential demise. Read the whole essay

And Jon Mayhew, author of Mortlock:

... if it weren't for this humble building, its contents and staff, I wouldn't be a writer now. Next year 250 libraries are set to close.

Don't let them close your library down. Read Jon's piece

And Nicky Schmidt, who lives in South Africa, contributed this on the Absolute Vanilla blog:

...  It strikes me as the most short-sighted move imaginable. It strikes me doubly, living in a place where libraries are in short supply and books are not a priority for children because they're too expensive. The UK has something we do not. It has a cultural love of books and it has produced some of the most remarkable storytellers and fiction writers in the world. It has something which has shaped the both the British and Commonwealth cultural landscape and continues to do so. The UK has, through its library system, something so precious to give its young people, something we do not have. It has a culture of reading, where we do not. UK libraries serve the entire populace, we have considerably fewer libraries and ours serve only a minority. So when I read that the UK is planning on cutting its libraries, I want to smack my forehead, bang several heads together and ask if the UK government has taken leave of its senses. Read Nicky's post (I so get where Nicky is coming from - In my native Philippines where libraries are an unaffordable luxury, people would be shocked at how casually the UK government can throw away something the rest of the world can only dream of) 

And Philippa Francis on the KM Lockwood Blog, wrote an open letter to people like Ed Vaizey who can actually influence policy - warning them that NOT doing anything about library closures shows that  ...

• you don’t care about children who have no books at home, in fact, you don’t care about anyone who has no other access to books
• you think the excitement and specialness of entering a physical world of ideas isn’t important for lots of children or adults
• you want children to see reading as only something you do to fill in worksheets at school Read Philippa's letter

Keren David, YA author, blogged this brilliant piece (which is almost a poem) about Who Uses Libraries

And Kathryn Evans wrote about Why You Should Care About Libraries

And Nina Killham was enraged when someone told her libraries were old fashioned.

Keep blogging, keep shouting. 

Sometimes it's the only way to make people listen.

Bye Bye Libraries. Bye Bye Civilization.

That's the gist of Catherine Bennett's piece for the Guardian, listing all the closures expected in the coming government cost-cutting exercise.

THINK! Kill a library and live with the consequences.

Anyone who loves reading (or writing) will want to bang their heads on the wall if they read the comments below the piece, such as this one from someone calling themselves Taxpayer555:

Close all public libraries ASAP . University and schools already have library. With the internet and ebook readers, ipads, cheap second hand books online and in charity shops, their is no need for libraries. Libraries are nothing more than glorified internet cafes and DVD rental shops. You have to move with the times, Whether librarians like it or not. Shut them all down and use the money for something more useful.

Somewhere down below all the trolls was a comment from Michael Rosen, our Children's Laureate for 2007 to 2009. And I thought it would be a public service to highlight it here.


Readers, if you care and if you blog, or have an online profile, please repost this!

I hope Margaret Hodge, Ed Vaizey, Ed Balls, and Vernon Cloaker have google alerts on their names so that they can read this and blush (I enlarge your names in case you're as short-sighted as your policies). Shame on you.

Here is Michael Rosen's comment:

Michael Rosen

Books have become optional extras in schools. They've been sidelined by ITC and worksheets. There is now a generation of young teachers who have been through teacher training with no more than a few minutes of training in children's literature and little or no work on why it's important for all children to read widely and often and for pleasure.

So, what we have is the notion that there isn't time to read whole books, there isn't time to help all children browse and read and keep reading - but there is time to do worksheets on different aspects of 'literacy'. And yet, the people running education know full well that children who read widely and often and for pleasure find it much easier to grasp the curriculum as a whole. There is an international study showing this.

What does this have to do with libraries? If the government (or the last one) had felt willing, all they needed to do was formalise the link between schools and libraries. They could have required every school and every library to lay down some fixed, timetabled sharing of time and resources, which would involve turning the present voluntary arrangements into certain ones. In one fell swoop it would guarantee library-use and massively enhance the children's progress.

I put all this in a document in Margaret Hodge's library review where it was immediately ignored. I sent it to Ed Vaizey (because he asked me to), and he too has promptly ignored it.

Ed Balls and Vernon Coaker both refused to ask schools to develop their own policies on the provision and reading of books. Neither Ofsted nor schools' 'Self Assessment forms' require schools to make the provision and reading of whole books something that they monitor.

In short, education and library ministers aren't really very interested in the idea of everyone reading whole books, and they're certainly not very interested in the idea of every child reading whole books. I even gave them a 20-point blueprint or outline on how to turn every school into what I called a 'book-loving school' (based largely on the TV programme I did 'Just Read'. And that' blueprint is now available on various websites. The ministers I met weren't interested in sending it out, either as it is, or in any adapted form.

It's clear that they think 'reading' is about 'doing literacy' ie learning how to 'decode' print. What they don't seem to understand is that literature is one of the main ways in which we can engage with difficult and important ideas in an accessible way. It offers children a ladder between their own personal experience, the apparently 'personal' experience of the protagonists in any given text, and the ideas that are thrown up during the adventures, scenes and feelings that the protagonists go through. So, the reader encounters the protagonists' feelings of, say, pity, anger, fear, guilt, envy and the like but in a school context (or indeed many social contexts) those feelings become talk about those feelings as ideas...eg what is 'pity'? what is 'guilt'? ie through reading, the young reader starts to generalise the particular or put another way, discover abstract thought.

Children who read widely, often and for pleasure are the ones who can make the transition between particular experience to abstract thought that all education asks of children between the ages of 8 and 13. The more you read, the easier that transition is. The kids who fall behind don't fall behind because they haven't done enough worksheets. It's because the education curricula haven't helped them discover a wide range of texts through being regular readers.

Michael Rosen's message:
It's about READING, stupid (not 'doing literacy).

Thanks to Teri for the heads up

Save the Library, Save the Book

Save the Cheerleader, Save the World was the slogan on which turned the first season of Heroes, the TV series about people with super powers.

In the real world however there is plenty that needs saving - and here's one campaign that should be dear to the hearts of all writers:

Save the Library, Save the Book.

Here's a sad fact: this year was the National Year of Reading in the United Kingdom and yet spending on books for public libraries is down for the third year running.

Libraries are in trouble. Which means books are in trouble.

Not that books haven't always been in trouble.

Technology relentlessly produces threats to the ascendancy of the book - the telephone, cinema, the radio, TV, and now, the internet have all been accused of ushering the End of the Book. But rumours of the Book's demise has always turned out to be exaggerated.

Here's why I think libraries are important to children's writers like ourselves:

• Libraries create readers.
  


• Libraries aren't Borders or Waterstone's or Tesco. However wonderful a bookstore may be, it is still a business driven by profit. If libraries were properly funded and buying enough books to keep publishers happy, publishers will have the breathing space to take risks with new authors, more "literary" books. They will have enough bottom line to nurture unripe talent.
  


• Librarians love books. A librarian will recommend a book because he/she has read it and loved it. Not because of some statistic that a sales rep has produced or because a publisher has paid for its promotion.

Having said all that, I recently visited a library local to me where there was no comfortable seating in the adult section, when I asked if I could sit in the children's section, the librarian tried to discourage me from hanging around, then scolded me for keeping a pile of books on my table because they were made unavailable to others (the library was empty).

The thing is, libraries have to change too. I am not just talking about technology or serving a better latte than Borders, I am talking about becoming a place where the young people of today would want to hang out.

Books I Borrowed Last Week:

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Abhorsen by Garth Nix

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

The Savage by David Almond

The Red Necklace by Sally Garner

The Stuff of Nightmares by Malorie Blackman

Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn

Save the Library, Save the Book ...

If you haven't yet signed up to the Campaign for the Book, do so now. Go to this Facebook page and sign up. Here is the draught charter as conceived by author Allan Gibbons (Shadow of the Minotaur). Attend the conference for the campaign on Saturday, 27 June 2009 at King Edward's School in Birmingham.

Blog about the situation (feel free to use the image I created above). Visit a school. Borrow books at your local library and post a list of the books you've borrowed on your blog (check out mine above!)

Save the Library ... who knows, the book you save might be yours.

Children's Books: Dissed through the Years

I was discussing writing with a good friend the other day, how I felt every novel I completed was practice towards the next one. His well-meaning response was:

And then when you're ready, you can write an adult novel.

Sigh. An adult novel is always a possibility (maybe when I'm 80 and thinking about oldie stuff) but writing for children is as tough and as deserving of regard as writing for adults and no way is it a little league trial before moving on to the big league. I think.

Which leads me to this great article from the New Yorker which I found signposted on the Achuka blog (thanks, Achuka!) - a must read for all who love books for children.

It is the story of the clash between EB White (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web) and the legendary librarian/critic Anne Carol Moore (1871 to 1961), to whom the world owes the elevation of children's books to a status that deserved bespoke libraries and book reviews. And yet she subscribed to children's books as twee, cute, sentimental and worthy objects.

EB White described their quarrel thus:

Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe. They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is as nothing to a child.

It was a tough business then, it's an even tougher business now - speaking of which, I have just been asked to do more work on one of my manuscripts. Argh!

All ye who are near despair over their manuscripts can take heed of this poster I've just put up on my study wall:

Keep Calm and Carry On.

Amen.