Children's column: Reasons to be cheerful from 2009

Written by Nicolette Jones

Friday, 18 December 2009 10:44

It has been a hard year for children’s publishing and bookselling. Everyone says so. So amid the gloom, Pollyanna that I am, I suggest a few reasons to be cheerful.

It has been a great year for anyone who likes the idea of undying passion with an improbably handsome supernatural. Stephenie Meyer spin-offs – though not all of them (perhaps not any) suitable for children - have included (in the style of the picnic in The Wind in the Willows) books by:

LJSmith RichelleMead RachelCaine SophieCollins EllenSchreiber PCCast LiliStCrow AlexandraHarvey AlysonNoël LaurenKate BeccaFitzpatrick MariMancusi NancyACollins MelissadelaCruz KimberlyPauley RachelHawthorne MaggieStiefvater GabriellaPoole EdenMaguire CynthiaLeititch SmithHollyBlack AmandaMarrone ClaudiaGray ElizabethChandler

as well as more authors than I care to list in the Erotic Historical Vampire series.

For those not turned on by creatures of the night, there are, happily, the spoofs: New Moan, Nightlight and TwiLite by, respectively, "Stephfordy Mayo", "Harvard Lampoon" and Stephen Jenner, and The Vampire Is Just Not That Into You by "Vlad Mezrich".

Even as lists, and outlets, shrink, there have still been great initiatives to find and promote new talent, including Random House's nurturing of new illustrators for their picturebooks (Katie Cleminson’s debut Box of Tricks won the Emerging Illustrator Award at the Booktrust Early Years Award) and Puffin's New Talent promotion. There were the ongoing prizes for debuts: the Waterstone’s Book Award, won this year by Michele Harrison for The Thirteen Treasures, and the Branford Boase, which recognised the worthy B R Collins for The Traitor Game. Some of my favourite books of this year were debuts: Helen Grant’s The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, for instance, and Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied. All these things give me hope for the future.

We are seeing imaginative strategies for involving teenagers in the promotion of teen books – Spinebreakers set a trend, and teenagers chaired events with YA authors at Hay and Bath this year. Headspace in libraries is doing something similar.

Books have not lost their appeal as raw material for film. This year has seen Coraline, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Fantastic Mr Fox, as well as the Potter/Twilight movies. Which is great for sales, if bad for the imagination.

The appointment of Anthony Browne as the new Children’s Laureate is a boost for picturebooks, as are new initiatives such as Macmillan’s Picture Book Parade.

After Jordan, the craze for celebrities to write children’s books seems to be waning. I hope I haven’t spoken too soon.

And children’s book borrowing is flourishing in libraries. Participants in the Summer Reading Challenge are up to 750,000.

Tell me what makes you feel positive about the children’s books industry. And have a Happy Christmas.

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