#CoverKidsBooks – The Facts

"It's a fantastic time to be writing children's and YA fiction," Frances Hardinge told the world last week.  The Lie Tree had just become the second children's book in history to win the overall Costa Book Of TheYear.  "For those who think children's and YA fiction is not their thing: please do come and explore.  There's a beautiful jungle out there."

The jungle is beautiful indeed.  It's getting more beautiful all the time, as more and more brilliant writers are attracted to the infinite imaginative space it offers. 

It's also getting bigger.  Children's literature – by which I mean the entire range of books for young readers, from the youngest picture book to the oldest YA, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry – is growing every year.  According to The Bookseller, sales of children's books overtook adult fiction for the first time in 2014, and they now account for over 30% of the UK publishing market.

So this is a golden age for children's literature.  But how do you navigate your way through a jungle?  Book reviews and other media coverage should be guiding the public, helping them discover the riches of contemporary children's books.  Are they?

#CoverKidsBooks commissioned some research into the question.  Imogen Russell Williams, a children's literature critic who writes for The Guardian, Metro and MG Strikes Back, spent a month last year counting the number of reviews and column inches given to children's books in UK national newspapers.  Here are her findings. 

Weekend newspapers, August 2015

Newspaper	All Book Reviews	Children's Book Reviews	Percentage Children's Book Reviews	All Book Reviews (Inches)	Children's Book Reviews (Inches)	Percentage Children's Book Inches
Times	110	7	6.4	1117	42	3.8
Sunday Times	95	3	3.2	891	12	1.3
Guardian	104	4	3.8	1645.5	58	3.5
Observer	61	2	3.3	792	29	3.7
Independent	73	2	2.7	871	25	2.9
Independent On Sunday	67	3	4.4	392	21	4.3
FT	41	0	0	699	0	0
Telegraph	52	13	25	723.5	58.5	8
Sunday Telegraph	42	1	2.4	352.5	2	0.6
Daily Express	1	0	0	1	0	0
Sunday Express	41	1	2.4	137.7	2	1.5
The Sun On Sunday	5	0	0	7	0	0
Sunday Mail	60	1	1.7	405	1	0.2
TOTAL	752	37	4.9	8034.2	250.5	3.1

Three things stand out to me. 

Quantity

Children's books currently get just 3% of all book review space, despite accounting for over 30% of the market.  That is an entire order of magnitude of under-representation.

Frequency

In the period monitored, only one newspaper published a children's book review every week.  Almost all newspapers average fewer than one review a week.  For most newspapers, most weeks see no children's books reviewed at all.

Length

Children's book reviews are typically shorter than other book reviews.  That's why the figure for column inches is almost half that for the number of reviews.  So even when children's book reviews do appear, they get less space than other book reviews. 

The research shows how children's books are under-represented and under-valued across the board.  Very few children's books are currently being reviewed, representing a very narrow range.  Yet this was not always the case.  Julia Eccleshare, The Guardian children's books editor, remembers a very different situation in the 1970s, when she began working in journalism.

"There was a serious commitment to children's books among the national newspapers," she recalls.  "Brian Alderson was children's books editor of The Times, John Rowe Townsend was children's book editor of The Guardian, Naomi Lewis wrote for The Observer – there was a named person at each newspaper who had a role.  These people made their living out of reviewing children's books.  And people talked about reviews of children's books, because that's how they found out about children's books.  How else would they have known about them?"

One newspaper made a particularly strong commitment to children's books.  The Times Literary Supplement ran four children's literature supplements a year, each of which contained at least 24 pages of children's book reviews.  That averages two pages of children's book reviews a week.  These supplements were regular and comprehensive.  As such, they attracted a large, loyal following.

"You could cover a lot of titles," says Eccleshare, who worked at the TLS at the time.  "We did fiction and non-fiction, picture books, the whole range.  It was supported by The Times; they thought it was a good thing to do.  It was taken by all the librarians, and as you can imagine, the readers of the TLS who were parents fell on this thing, and it was hugely influential and opinion-forming."

The situation changed in the 1980s.  Newspaper coverage of children's books declined, and the TLS stopped publishing those supplements.  What happened?

"It was a very low point for children's books," says Eccleshare.  "They were getting shorter and shorter, because people were less and less confident that children would read them.  It was a moment when it felt like television was going to rule the world and books were going to vanish.  And once you don't have a good time for children's books, you're not going to get the coverage.  So it fell off the perch."

But something unexpected happened in the 1990s.  Children's books didn't vanish.  Instead, they became the biggest phenomenon in publishing.  That was when the current golden age of children's literature began; when it started to expand to become the most dynamic sector of the industry. 

"This children's books boom has gone on for a long time now," says Eccleshare.  "It's nearly 20 years since the publication of Harry Potter and His Dark Materials.  I don't think it's going to go away."

When Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass became the first children's book to win the overall Whitbread (now Costa) Book Of The Year, back in 2001, it should have been a moment when newspapers responded by giving more space to all the wonderful new literature that was appearing in a great flood.  Yet somehow, that didn't happen.  Review coverage remained tiny.  The boom in YA fiction that began with books like Twilight and The Hunger Games had no impact either, even as films based on those books received massive review coverage. 

So why is a field with such enormous cultural impact being ignored?  Have newspapers not caught up with what's happened since the 1990s?  

"I think that's right," says Eccleshare.  "They don't realise the frenzy there is around children's books.  In any week, if you follow the bestsellers, children's books are enormous.  And if you follow the PLR, children's borrowing is astonishing.  Nobody's paying enough attention to that."

The argument we often hear for why children's books get so little coverage is because children don't read newspapers.  But this ignores the fact that children aren't the main buyers of children's books.  Huge numbers of adults need to know about what's new in children's literature: booksellers, librarians, teachers, parents, and all the other buyers and recommenders of children's books, as well as adults who read them for their own enjoyment.  Many of these people read newspapers.  I'm going to be talking to some of them in the next #CoverKidsBooks blogs, hearing their views on why children's books coverage matters so much. 

It should be said that there's a lot of brilliant children's books coverage online.  But it's found most often by those who already know about it.  For the general public, the traditional mass media remain vital.  As Eccleshare says of newspapers: "Their discoverability level is so high.  And the whole point about newspapers is that they are the place of record.  I think it devalues children's literature not to be recording it.  If we don't have reviews, we are belittling the crucible of reading.  And if we don't have reviews, there is only noise."

#CoverKidsBooks believes it's time for newspapers to make a serious commitment to covering children's literature again.  Perhaps it could start with the simple, achievable goal of every newspaper running at least one children's book review every week.  But just imagine what might happen if a newspaper gave a page a week to them – or even two pages, as the TLS did in the 1970s, when children's literature was nowhere near as significant, culturally or commercially, as it is now.

Because there is a moment right now – with The Lie Tree winning the Costa, and The Fox And The Star becoming Waterstones Book Of TheYear – when children's books are very much in the public eye.  Readers who love those books will want to know where to go next.  But with over 10,000 children's books published a year in the UK, unless children's literature is properly reviewed, most people will never know where to start. 

They will never explore the beautiful jungle.  They may never even realise that it exists.

#CoverKidsBooks – Booksellers
#CoverKidsBooks – Librarians
#CoverKidsBooks – Teachers
#CoverKidsBooks – Parents
#CoverKidsBooks – Experts
#CoverKidsBooks – Writers & Illustrators
#CoverKidsBooks – New Research, One Year On

#CoverKidsBooks invites you to join in a public conversation about children's books.  Leave a comment, write a blog of your own, or tweet about it using the hashtag.  Tell us why children's books matter to you, and what you'd like to see the media do to #CoverKidsBooks!