Missing Voices in the Discussion of Multicultural Book Sales

Last month Lee and Low asked on its blog, “Why Hasn’t the Number of Multicultural Books Increased In Eighteen Years?” That’s an important question, and the posting attracted a lot of attention, mostly echoing the concern without offering new insight. Roger Sutton at The Horn Book was one of the few I saw who asked some follow-up questions.

I didn’t see anyone noting the huge missing voice in the discussion. Lee and Low had invited responses to its question from six professors of children’s literature, one book review editor, two authors, and one librarian/author, Betsy Bird. All important perspectives, but by no means a cross-section of people in the American children’s-book field.

In those responses, Kathleen Horning of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center explicitly blamed Barnes & Noble, though not based on direct knowledge. Poet Nikki Grimes spoke of “blockbuster-craving bookstore markets.” Rudine Sims Bishop of Ohio State mentioned ”my closest big chain bookstore” as an example. Several people spoke of the lack of “marketing.”

And yet the discussion didn’t include one bookseller or person working with booksellers. None of the respondents described working in a bookstore. None described seeing how most families actually buy or choose books. None indicated any experience in marketing a product, much less in working with the publishing industry’s minuscule marketing budgets.

And information from the commercial sector is vital to this conversation because individual sales are more important and influential in children’s publishing than ever before.

At one point, libraries and schools comprised a large and influential segment of the market for children’s books. Today they represent a much smaller portion of the overall sales. Professional book reviewers have become less influential and ordinary readers’ feedback more so.

At one point, publishers and bookstores were mostly family-run, and managers could take a risk or even a loss on certain books they thought were important without having to justify their actions to higher powers. (Lee and Low is a mission-driven press of that sort.) Today most children’s books come from publicly-traded corporations under pressure from stockholders to maximize profits, and bookselling is dominated by two more publicly-traded corporations, B&N and Amazon.

At one point, booksellers and publishers had no real-time systematic data about what books were selling. Now they have weekly reports from BookScan, Ingram, the big chains, and other sources. Amazon can track not only what its customers buy but what other titles those customers buy and what they look at without buying.

The strength and danger of profit-seeking corporations is that they want to make money any way they legally can. They may forgo immediate opportunities to increase long-term profitability (e.g., stepping away from a deal with cookbook author Paula Deen after she became a shameful punchline), but they’re always chasing those profits. And with the data that companies like Amazon and BookScan are collecting on book traffic, they can spot and chase unexpected areas of sales.

When Horning wrote, “I’ve heard many times from publishers that the ‘buyers at B&N’ believe multicultural books don’t sell,” the obvious next question is whether that’s true. Do B&N buyers still believe that? Does any data support that belief? Does data from other booksellers refute it? Have things changed over the past two decades? Only when we’ve probed the reality of bookselling can we dismiss any such belief as “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I understand why Lee and Low’s round-up didn’t include voices of booksellers. Chain buyers are a private bunch. Sales data is proprietary. Sales and marketing people at publishing companies (including Lee and Low itself) wouldn’t want to upset their major customers by complaining. And no one in this discussion would want to be the sole voice saying that “multicultural” books are less profitable than mainstream books.

But if the problem is, say, the inequities of wealth and education in a country affected by structural racism and growing inequality, with one result being disproportionately low sales and profits for books that are clearly about non-white children, then we’re not going to find the solution within the profit-seeking corporate sector.