From: Perry Nodelman <perry.nodelman>
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 18:15:31 -0500

Having reviewed occasionally for it, I know that the Times Book Review devotes exactly as much space to reviews of children's books as publishers are willing to support in terms of advertising. Like it or not, the Times is a business, and a successful business exactly to the extent to which it focuses on making a profit for its investors. If the children's divisions of publishing houses aren't willing to buy advertising for their books in the Times, then the chance for profits isn't there, and so the editorial space available for reviews simply and inevitably gets smaller--the reviews have to justify their existence financially or go.

If you've been following the Times Book Review in recent years, you'll know that the willingness of publishers to buy advertising in it has been gradually disappearing. Recently, just about the only advertising of children's books has appeared in the twice-yearly children's books supplements--and I know that, even there, numbers of already-commissioned reviews have had to be dropped in recent years because of the lack of advertising support.

And yet--as soon as the new children's bestsellers list appeared, there began to be ads for children's books positioned near it--and these have been ads for books other than Harry Potter. The existence of the list seems to be encouraging people in children's divisions of publishing houses to begin spending some of their advertising money at the Times.

I see this as a good thing. The reason publishers stopped advertising so frequently in the Times in the first place was, I think, their lack of interest in anything but the professional market for their products. This market they reach by advertising in professional journals, such as School Library Journal and Booklist--and editors can develop a pretty good sense of this audience and tailor books to their needs in a fairly easy manner, this making their own job of engendering a profit for their own companies easier. It's no wonder publishers increasingly concerned with the bottom line focus so exclusively on this professional market.

But if the readership of the Times Book Review does include people interested in children's books, they are more likely to be parents, grandparents and such than librarians and teachers in the process of doing their ordering--just mere amateurs looking for books for the children they know, for a whole range of non-professional reasons. If it's teachers and librarians you perceive as your main market, then buying ads in the times is inefficient and a waste of money.

The extent to which the market for children's books (except for popular series like Goosebumps and, now, HP)) has focused on the professional market in the last decade or so has narrowed down the range of subjects and styles for children's books in hardcover--made them as a group more consistently representative of the relatively narrow tastes and interests of the professional adults in the field they are primarily designed to appeal to. A resurgence of children's book ads in the Times might help, even just a little, to recreate a market for the books amongst non-professional adults not so concerned with the same few pedagogical assumptions and interests.

And the existence of the children's bestsellers list has already led to more such ads. Let's hope that enough publishers buy their way onto this new gravy train to allow for lots and lots of space for children's book reviews in the future, in the Times and in other newspapers that might get interested in carrying the lists in terms of their potential for engendering advertising revenue. The result can only be a more diverse potential audience of purchasers of children's books, a consequently wider range of themes and interests and possibilities in the children's books that get published--and more fun and more to think about for child readers.

Perry Nodelman perry.nodelman at uwinnipeg.ca http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~nodelman
Received on Wed 06 Sep 2000 06:15:31 PM CDT