The Picture Book Markets Warms Up - as a Buzz Grows Around Another Kind of Picture Book

The picture book market has been tough – as can be attested to by anyone who’s spent the last few years licking stamps and sending off picture book manuscripts only to have them returned to their letterboxes with a thump.

But at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair last month, there was a glimmer of something good about the picture book market.

“Picture Books are doing a little bit better, easing up a little,” Barry Goldblatt told aspiring authors at SCBWI’s Before-Bologna agents panel. (Read Barry's blog).

Now Graham Marks of Publishing News reports (cautiously, I might add) it might be better than a glimmer. If you caught this early you can read the whole report. But since Publishing News wipes its web pages regularly, anyone who catches this too late will be interested in the key passage from Graham’s report:

By Wednesday there was a definite feeling of consensus amongst publishers. It will, of course, take a few more weeks before everything has been sifted to see what gold remains in the pan, but it does look as if at least some of the bright, shiny bits are going to be picture books, and that the market may have turned a corner at long last.
Bloomsbury’s Sarah Odedina (who edited Witch Child by Celia Rees and that wonderful book A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly) is quoted as saying that “the most exciting thing is how strong colour is – co-editions are back for us”.

Co-editions are what make picture books worth publishing for many publishers. For those who haven’t heard of co-editions before, co-editions are re-publishings of books in other countries.

Without co-editions, smaller markets like the United Kingdom would not be able to make a profit on expensive-to-print picture books. "Picture books are expensive to originate and, unless the publisher can find international co-edition partners, impossible to publish successfully," explains the Writers Services report from Bologna. Unlike Publishing News, the Writers Services report is less optimistic about the prospects of picture books:

The focus at the world’s biggest children’s book fair has shifted from co-editions to fiction and film deals, with film scouts much in evidence. Barry Cunningham of Chicken House said: ‘The market is still very good for fiction and still extremely sticky for picture books. Although the right picture book still does OK in the US and Australia, it’s curtains on the co-edition front.’ Perhaps this is because of international publishers focusing more on home-grown material which they hope to sell to the co-edition market, rather than buying in as they have done in the past.

But the Publishing News coverage lists picture book successes that suggest things might be getting better.

Odedina was happy about pan-European co-edition sales of The Mysterious Parcel by Francesca Chessa and Milo Mouse and the Scary Monster by Louis Baum and Sue Hellard.

Oxford University Press’s Liz Cross was thrilled by coedition sales of I Love My Cloth by Amber Stewardt and Laya Marlow. And Walker’s Jane Winterbotham reported “huge co-edition interest” for Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen and Kevin Hawkes.

Hodder had The Story of Everything and Scholastic had Tiddler by Julia ‘Gruffalo’ Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.

It could, noted Graham Marks in his Publishing News report, be the “tipping point” – “the unexpected does happen, because, two weeks ago, no one had any expectations at all for picture books.”

Speaking of picture books, the other picture book that has been attracting a lot of attention is the graphic novel.

Graphic Novels have come a long way from when the only successful graphic novels had to have heroes wearing their underpants over brightly coloured tights. These days, the graphic novel is closer to the YA novel, except its storyboard style is closer to film than to the printed word – makes a lot of sense when you think that the modern teenager is brought up on cinematic storytelling (some people might see this as more bad news about young people, but hey, it just goes to show nothing can beat a good story).

Goldblatt has already sold six of them this year and Scholastic is about to relaunch the popular Babysitter Club as graphic novel books. “Graphic novels are the hottest buzzword at the moment. A lot of stuff is going to come out in the next year. A lot of it is going to be great and a lot of it is going to be crap,” he said. “Graphic novels have the excitement of a picture book but they are full novels. It is a wholly new and different thing.”

Graphic novels are such new territory in the United States (Europe’s had a small but loyal market for ages, and of course there’s Japan’s manga comic books) that “there are no fixed rules yet”, says Goldblatt. “We agents are not sure how far to push and publishers are not sure how much to offer!”

Like picture books graphic novels trigger a sense of unease in publishers because of the time and effort that go into producing one. But for kids raised on TV and rock and roll, it makes perfect sense.

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Here's a relevant news item on manga graphic novels sales in the UK from Publishing News (posted 14 April 2006:)

OTTAKAR'S HAS DOUBLED its manga sales in the past month with the Manga Collector’s Club and manga-themed evenings in some of its stores. Loughborough store Manager Melanie Ball told PN: “Manga is doing fantastically well. It’s just been climbing and climbing, and the events also do brilliantly.” The chain’s Fiction Manager Janine Cook added: “It’s looking very good. We’re at least 100% up on the month before. It might be even more, but that’s the minimum impact.”

At the chain’s manga evenings attendees are offered giveaways, discounts, and the chance to watch Japanese anime films. The Manga Collector’s Club allows customers to get a special card stamped every time they buy a title from either Gollancz Manga or Tokyopop, and be given a free manga title once they have three stamps

YA Voice: Slang and Teen Vernacular

Scott Westerfeld likes the idea of language so much that, as a child, he learned Braille, the tactile code used by blind people, as well as Esperanto, the artificial language based as far as possible on words common to all the European languages.

Language is the reason why Scott writes young adult (YA) novels. “When you are a teenager you are still in the act of acquiring language ,” he says. “One of the reasons I really like YA is that teenagers are more interested in voice than adults.”

Teenagers, he says, write more poetry per capita. They play more word games. They memorise more song lyrics. They like to spell things creatively. And a high percentage are in fact learning a language in school.

Slang is necessary to capture the teenage voice – in the teen domain, slang is often a factor that determines acceptance or exclusion, “you talk like me, you are like me”.

Slang as euphemism can turn embarrassment into amusement – why mention sex when you can describe two people “banging boots”? And admitting to playing “tonsil hockey” doesn’t sound as gross as saying you “tongue kissed” someone. Slang can define the previously undefined – a chubby girl wearing a midriff exposes her “muffin roll”.

“Teens are saying: I care about language, I am having fun with language; (slang) is pure emphasis on the joy and expansiveness of language. And that’s a perfectly good reason for slang.”

But YA writers beware. Today’s slang can be tomorrow’s embarrassment.

“Slang is like a fish,” Scott says. “Good when its fresh or when its old, a fossil. But in between is a nasty period, something you don’t want at all. I would never use anything from this year’s slang dictionary, your writing will be passé before it goes into print. Don’t listen to your teenager and reproduce what they say – and don’t try to talk like them either, that’s the worst mistake in the world.”

But slang is necessary to YA literature. “One of the most important things you need to know is that YA is voice and a voice is good when you get the feeling of being inside a world and being inside someone’s head. When you are a kid, there is less caution about verbal hygiene than in adult literature.”

What the YA author must do is generate his or her own slang – “Slang from 20 minutes in the future from the next town over; slang that’s a little bit off but hangs together.”

How to Generate Slang

Use the classics – “cool” and “lame”, believe it or not, have become classics, they’ve been around for so long. “You cannot go wrong if you use the classics,” says Scott.

Steal it from really far away. For a book set 300 years in the future, Scott used slang from 1920s Evelyn Waugh to create “future slang”. “Bogus” began life in the 1700s to refer to counterfeit coins before Waugh used it to mean “no good”, a meaning that persists to this century which Scott used to good effect through the mouths of his teenagers of the future.

Make it up yourself. In his Uglies trilogy (Uglies, Pretties, Specials), Scott describes a future world where everyone has to have an operation when they turn sixteen to become supermodel beautiful. Everybody is beautiful therefore everybody is equal. Except of course for the Uglies, a bunch of radical teens who want to keep their own faces. In the series, a “new surge” is someone who’s just had the operation. If you “surge”, you’re getting something fixed.

How to Make It Stick

Allan Metcalf wrote Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success, chronicling the origins of a fascinating list of words and phrases. In the process he developed the FUDGE factor – a way to measure the potential success of a word. Scott subverts the FUDGE paradigm into a means for authors to create convincing slang for YA readers.

F stands for Frequency of use. “You have to use something more than once. Use it in context and then define it three paragraphs later.”

U is for unobtrusiveness. “It might look familiar, but it doesn’t stand out. It’s so unobtrusive that when you see it the Microsoft spell checker in the brain takes less time to reload.”

D is for diversity of use and situations. And G is for Generate other forms and meanings. “Don’t just use something one way, use it as a verb or noun. Meanings will start to support each other in the text. That’s the way language works.” Eg. “Did you surge last week?” “He was a new surge.” “Surgeless” “Resurgent”.

E is for the endurance of the concept. Can you make it stick? At the end of the day, says Scott, “Slang is like reading Shakespeare – you eventually figure out what they are saying.”

Slang Mechanisms

Just substituting words for words will not convince your reader. “More interesting is to produce slang out of familiar language.”

Retronyms are “words you didn’t have to say, but you have to say now.” You didn’t have to say acoustic guitar in the 1920s because all guitars were acoustic. You didn’t have to say broadcast TV, optical telescopes, pocket watch, biological parent, heterosexual parent, first wife, World War I – “all these imply huge change”.

So if your story is set in the future, and a character complains, “Dad was late picking me up in the ground car” implies that cars can fly. It creates a feeling of anticipation in the reader. What should one expect?

“A retronym can indicate a lot about the character. You learn a whole bunch of things about how that character moves … ‘I don’t know, she wants to hang out with me in meetspace’ indicates that we are not in cyberspace. The character is someone who hangs out a lot online.”

You can divine rules in slang just by trawling through synonyms in a dictionary. Notice for example how certain suffixes – eg. head – are associated with stupidity. Bakehead, ballooonhead, chucklehead. There is also a preponderence of food – bananahead, chowderhead, melonhead, cabbage head. This frees you to create your own: nappyhead, turniphead. The suffix –oid indicates something geeky, scientific – mathoid, cretinoid, humanoid. Then there’s –land as in Disneyland or Wonderland – ditherland, slumberland, wankerland. Fake high culture can be evoked by du jour – boy du jour, pain du jour, failure du jour.

Ungrammar and backformations can fill an idiom dictionary:

“It wasn’t much fun?” “No, it was much fun.”

“How much fun is this?” “Lots of much.”

Teenagers are often uncomfortable with things which is why they like generating euphemisms – an “unboyfriend” could be someone you hang out with but don’t have sex with; or maybe someone you have sex with but don’t hang out with.

“Build yourself a grid of the prefixes and the suffixes and you will end up with something you like,” Scott says. “You are gaining your reader’s trust – something that doesn’t happen when you are using your reader’s slang because you look like you are trying too hard. Make it up as you go along – if you make it up it will never go out of date”

Scott Westerfeld was speaking on ‘Slanguage: Teen Voices and Teen Vernaculars’ at the SCBWI Before Bologna Conference in Bologna, Italy on 25 March 2006

Illustrator Bee Willey

This article has just been published in British SCBWI's Words & Pictures Newsletter, available as a free download to SCBWI BI members.

When Bee Willey told friends in the children’s publishing industry that she was illustrating Bob Robber and Dancing Jane, she was amazed to discover that the picture book text had been doing the rounds of editorial submission desks for years.

“It transpired that Bob had been going round and round for eight years,” Bee says. “It had a whole life before I was asked to illustrate it. All the people who had seen the text had wanted to publish it and it hadn’t been the right time or the right place!”

Bob Robber put Bee on the shortlist of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal 2003, along with such illustrating luminaries as Anthony Browne (The Shape Game), Mini Grey (The Pea and the Princess) and Shirley Hughes (Ella’s Big Chance), who won that year’s medal. In 2004, Bee was also shortlisted for illustrating The Wooden Dragon, written by Joan Aitken.

Bob Robber and Dancing Jane was Bee’s first attempt at using computers after a long and accomplished career in illustration (mixed media) that included 20 children’s books and clients as varied as Conran Design, The Wine Society, the Royal Mail and Halifax Building Society.

“Part of the reason I went into computer was because fixative was having an effect on my eyes – paralysing the pupil,” she explains. Although she uses a digital pen and tablet, Bee still paints the main figures in every work by hand. She scans the painting, and then uses the digital pen and Adobe Photoshop to work on the background.

Photoshop’s use of layers for compositing – in which layers of images can be stacked, rearranged, added to or subtracted from to create a complex work – revolutionises the illustrator’s work process, though as in any technology, there are those who resist it.

“I do millions of layers – sometimes up to forty, before I can get an image right. But you have to be careful how you use Photoshop because you can end up making your picture too air brushy,” Bee says. “It’s great when you are pushed for time. And there are no smudges – I used to get smudges on my work no matter how hard I tried to keep them clean. Best of all you can work on the smallest detail.”
But Bee cautions would-be illustrators to remember that the computer is not the only tool. “You can make computers do things for you but it still needs you to push it beyond what it can do.”

Bob Robber and Dancing Jane was about a compulsive thief who steals the shadow of the ethereal beauty he has fallen in love with. The challenge was to juxtapose the darkness of Bob Robber, who steals under cover of darkness, with the luminosity of Dancing Jane, in whom eventually finds redemption.

Bee fleshed out the book’s spreads in storyboards – pencil sketches of how each page would look: “You show the various routes you might take – or not and along the way, your character appears out of the scribble. At one point, I realised I was going down the German gothic route and had to change!”

Bee worked closely with the editor and book designer. “There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing,” she laughs. “I like that sort of thing. We had such a lovely time making it. At one stage, we were all sitting on the floor and looking through the drawings. There was a christmassy feeling about it. I think I spilled my coffee three times!”
Bee has kept samples of each stage in the process, a creative roadmap she can take out once in a while to review – from the pile of sketches, embroidered all over with notes from the editor and Bee’s own reminders to herself, to the actual colour proofs of the book.

The designer’s input was invaluable. “She spent ages getting the typeface right. She tried and tried to be sure that the typeface held itself well, she wanted it to flow. She managed to convey a gothicky sort of feeling. It was a fantastic design. So many books flounder in the market because the design is so repulsive.”
Would Bee ever considering writing her own text?

“I did try,” she laughs. “I sent it to a friend, saying, ‘I am counting on you not to be polite’ – and she wasn’t!”

Forthcoming is Celebrity Cat by Meredith Hooper, published by Frances Lincoln. Bee Willey was speaking at a Professional Series Evening for SCBWI BI.