From: Genco, Barbara <b.genco>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 11:06:52 -0400

Thanks Perry--As usual,a particularly clear-eyed and thoughtful assessment.

I too am convinced that The NY TIMES will make changes in the NYTBR's Best Seller list for economic reasons first and editorial reasons second. After 25 years of viewing the Manhattan?sed book biz from my aerie in the
'outer' Boro of Brooklyn, my formerly rose colored reading glasses are more and more green tinged! Perhaps my penchant for seeing publishing as first and foremost an INDUSTRY--not a 'calling' akin to the religious, academic or librarian life--might identify me as a Marxist as well? 8-) bg

To further fuel the fires-- Here's a post from yesterday's PW Daily for Booksellers (September 7, 2000)
---------------------------------------------------------Potter's Precarious Placement: Times Splits Kids' Bestseller List

The New York Times is changing its recently launched children's bestseller list, which has been criticized by some for being the sole Times list where Harry Potter titles appear.

The Times will now divide its children's bestseller list into three categories--picture books, paperbacks and chapter books--which will rotate weekly in the printed version of the Book Review. All three category lists will appear every week on the Times' Web site, however, and those lists will be used to keep track of the "Weeks on List" numbers.

Chip McGrath, editor of the Book Review, explained that the Times felt that lumping the categories together was unfair and left out books that should have been included, namely, a number of paperbacks and young?ult novels. The change is partly dictated by the design of the Book Review, McGrath added, saying, "The children's list has to fit on one page, and we weren't willing to expand it to two pages." Also, McGrath observed that the list wasn't changing much week to week and pointed out that "this new format should allow us to use the list to take a look at other kinds of books."

McGrath said that industry feedback about the creation of a children's bestseller list has been generally positive. "The controversy, if there was one," he said, "was in calling Harry Potter a children's book--which it clearly is." This new rotation means that Harry Potter titles will not appear in the print version of the Times list week after week, as they have until this point. "That doesn't mean anything," McGrath said. "I don't think Harry Potter will suffer from not being on the printed list every week."

Brenda Bowen, v-p and publisher of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, told PW Daily, "I'm very happy that the Times has started a children's list. I think it's great for children's publishing. And expanding the lists will certainly give exposure to a lot more titles, though it means that true bestsellers like Harry Potter will fall off the list for two weeks at a time, and that seems a shame."

Barbara Marcus, president of children's books at Scholastic, which publishes the Harry Potter books, strongly protested the changes in the list. "It is inconceivable to me," she said, "that the best-selling book in America over this summer will not be listed anywhere on the Times bestseller list. The point of a bestseller list is to reflect the bestselling books in the country, and now this list does not do that. I'm not saying there aren't some positive things to this decision, because there are some children's books appearing on the list that people might not have known about before. But to punish books that are being read by generation of adults and children both and then to remove them because of this categorization seems unfair."

The categorization, fair or not, may raise some other issues. While
"picture books" is a relatively precise label, "chapter books" is a very specific term within the children's industry, usually applied to books for readers who have graduated from picture books; the term does not normally encompass longer fiction (such as the Harry Potter titles and other bestsellers like Louis Sachar's Holes). Nonfiction titles, such as the current bestseller Backstreet Boys: The Official Book, will presumably be listed in the "chapter books" category as well.

Since the introduction of the children's list, many of the newspapers that publish the Times's adult list have refrained from printing it, effectively knocking children's books out of the view of non-New York Times newspaper readers. Whether or not these papers will eventually publish one or all three of the children's lists is still up in the air.

The first children's list in this new format will appear this Sunday, September 10, and will feature the 10 bestselling picture books.--Jason Britton and Diane Roback

(c) Cahners Business Information. Published weekdays except holidays.

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 Message----From: Perry Nodelman [mailto:perry.nodelman at uwinnipeg.ca] Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2000 7:16 PM To: ccbc-net at ccbc.education.wisc.edu Subject: Reviews in the Times


literature occasional

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



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Received on Fri 08 Sep 2000 10:06:52 AM CDT