“Book on the Charles” in Belmont through 17 May

The Belmont Galley of Art is featuring an exhibit of work by local children’s-book illustrator for the local children’s-book publisher Charlesbridge.

The Boston Globe reports:

“Books on the Charles – 25 years of Charlesbridge Picture Book Illustrators,” which [Rebecca] Richards cocurated along with Watertown artist Leslie Evans, celebrates 15 New England-based picture book artists who have created art for Charlesbridge Books, a children’s book publisher located in Watertown.

“I’ve always wanted to showcase original works from children’s books in a gallery setting, so people could admire the work for the fine art that it is,” Richards said. “I think this exhibit brings back that sense of fun and wonder we had as children visiting a world of imagination created by picture book illustrators.”

Among the artists featured are Alan Witschonke of Natick and Wayne Geehan of Acton. There will be an artists’ reception and book-signing on the afternoon of 13 April, and the exhibit will be up through 17 May.

Penguins of Doom—Tastes Like Barbecued Chicken!

I spent a very pleasant afternoon celebrating the official publication date of Greg Fishbone's epistolary farce for young people, The Penguins of Doom: From the Desk of Septina Nash. There was a catered cookout, lovely views of wedding and quinceanera parties getting their photos taken at the nearby pond, and good company of all ages.

The only problem was that the other guests of honor besides Greg--the Penguins of Doom themselves!--hadn't shown up. We had to make do with a Happy Feet balloon, some advance reading copies, and individually autographed limited-edition pages of the manuscript. Mine, shown above, is page 91. Yes, I'm that special. (Enter here for a chance to win your own!)

Penguins of Doom is being publishing by Blooming Tree Press, a young, small press that's conserving costs by printing books in Singapore. And that means they're subject to delays that don't affect books printed in North America, such as storms in the Pacific. So it all comes back to melting icecaps.

Two More New J. K. Rowlings

Tuesday’s Guardian enthused:

Publisher claims to have found Potter successor

Editor who was first to spot the potential of JK Rowling's boy wizard tips fantasy tale about boy archaeologist as next big thing

That editor would be Barry Cunningham, now of the boutique imprint Chicken House, and he was touting Tunnels, originally self-published in the UK by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams.

But on this side of the Atlantic another "new Rowling" was seeking to become the latest big thing in British-isles children's fantasy. Sunday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer gasped:

'The Alchemyst' could be the start of something Harry big in young-adult fantasy

Irishman Michael Scott is touring North America for The Alchemyst, the first of six books in a series he's mapped out and sold to Random House.

Meanwhile, after an anemic holiday period and several months of sales below last year's levels, the US bookselling industry gazes desperately to 14 July and the publication of the old J. K. Rowling's seventh Harry Potter novel. The clouds within that silver lining are that each book in this series has sold a larger percentage of its total during the first week or so, and that there's no eighth novel in the offing. In other words, after the end of July it's downhill for the foreseeable future.

But of course Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows won't be the last book from Rowling, given her imagination and storytelling talent. Four years ago she told the BBC that she's worked on other manuscripts that she might well publish under a pseudonym, a sentiment she repeated two years ago. Rowling wants her books judged on their own, not snapped up simply because she wrote them nor dismissed because they aren't like her Potters.

Which means that one of these days the new J. K. Rowling could turn out to be...J. K. Rowling.

Seeking Help for the Bottom Line

From the children's publishing world come news releases of three new ventures--two involving book/film combos offered over the web, the third a plea for funds.

The Associated Press picked up this announcement from Scholastic:

Scholastic is officially launching BookFlix, an educational Web site pairing short films based on popular picture books along with nonfiction e-books that allow early readers to follow the text online.

And the syndicate paired that with similar but different news from Disney:

Meanwhile, the Disney Publishing Group plans a similar project later this year, making favorites such as "The Jungle Book" and "Cinderella" available online. While Scholastic, for now, is sticking to the school and library market, Disney will offer books to general consumers, charging a fee, still to be determined, for downloads.

One company offers nonfiction ebooks on an "educational" site. The other promises a new channel for enjoying its narrative brands. That, my friends, is the difference between a company with its roots in school book fairs and school-library publishing, and a company with its roots in the movie business.

Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly brings a story from the Southwest:

The University of New Mexico Press has initiated a "Friends of the Press" campaign to establish a $5-million endowment that will be used to fund two new series of children's books...a multicultural children's series and a children's science series.

Now this fund is also supposed to help the press's "future growth and development," so it may be pushing the children's series front and center because people are more willing to give money for cute kids than for editor's offices and another dozen scholarly monographs. Once again, that approach to increasing revenue shows UNMP's roots, as a non-profit organization.

Jacob and Jonah Do BEA

Last weekend Michael Cader’s Publishers Marketplace website offered a kid's-eye view of the Book Expo America convention through the blog of sons Jacob and Jonah. These guys were early on the Eragon bandwagon a few years ago, as I recall. So for better or for worse, what J&J find exciting in fantasy might be well worth knowing about.

The blog contains occasional gushing, as in the end of a report titled “Interview with Holly Black (famous author)”:

Spiderwick is an amazing bestselling young readers' series. I loved the first series and I hope the second will be just as good. It was awesome to meet Holly Black. Reading a series and then meeting the author and asking her questions was just amazing.

But it also has occasional signs of a clear-eyed, almost cynical understanding the symbiosis between marketing departments and the press:

After we were enticed by HarperCollins' great pitch to us involving food and titles that went with them, ("We wanted to make them hungry for good books," said Nicole Mathieu of Harper) it is only fair to talk about some of their upcoming publications.

I don't know which attitude from young people is more unsettling.

But finally I came down on a third candidate for that designation, the young gents' report on MiYu Magic Stones:

This is extremely big in Holland right now. It’s a collection of stones that come in a pouch or a small chest-like box. Most people want to try and collect all three of their birthstones first, and then you want to collect all the rest -- 40 in total.

Yes, those crazy Dutch, the world's tallest nation. Whose idea of entertainment includes collecting rocks and watching endurance contests between people hanging onto bluejeans over a canal.

Changing with the Demographics

The good news is that today's Nashua Telegraph published an article on our SCBWI New England conference (from which I've just returned). The not-so-good news is that the paper quoted me this way:

John Bell, a presenter and regional advisor for SCBWI, agreed that the picture book genre is booming.

“There’s a lot going on in the industry,” he said.

“Things are always changing with the demographics. It’s the end of the (Harry) Potter era.”

The words between quote marks are accurate, but I apologize to anyone who be misled into thinking on my authority that publishers are seeing a boom in picture book sales and want more manuscripts. I'm not sure how that came to be on paper. It's still pretty much a doldrum there, and most big publishers just want funny.

My actual thought on demographics and picture books goes like this. There was a boomlet for picture books in the mid-1990s; a burst of interest in middle-grade novels in the late 1990s through 2000, coinciding with the explosion of Harry Potter; and for the last three or four years a flowering of publishing for teens.

Those are the same kids growing up! There was a little blip in the US birth rate that's moving through the years like a hamster inside a snake. You know what's next? A lot of books about being in college and searching for meaning in one's early twenties. Get on that bandwagon now!

Publisher Does Market Research - AMAZING!

Speaking of SCBWI New England, over at the organization's blog, I've posted comments about the recent launch by the British publisher Egmont of an imprint called 2Heads.

What Not to Write

Author Darcy Pattison went to an Arkansas SCBWI meeting and took helpful notes on Dial editor Liz Waniewski's most-often-received picture book topics. They should look familiar to anyone who's handled the slush pile at other children's publishers, or newcomers' submissions at an SCBWI conference. To whit:

• First Day at School
• Cleaning up your room
• Tooth fairy
• Christmas/Halloween
• Wanting a pet
• Dealing with a disability
  
• "Hi! My name is. . . and I am seven years old!"
• Visiting Grandma and Grandpa
• New baby
• Barnyard stories
• Bedtime stories
• Personal hygiene

Darcy responded cheekily by naming classic picture books on each of those topics. But the fact that there are classics out there just raises the question of whether we need more. If every American family already owns a copy of Goodnight Moon and every Canadian family a copy of Love You Forever, don't we have a lifetime supply?

What I find most striking about this list is how boring most of the topics seem, not simply from the perspective of a junior editor shoveling away the slush, but also from the likely perspective of a preschooler. "Daddy, why can't I read about personal hygiene? All we have are princess and pirate books." "Trucks are boring, Mama! I want a story about cleaning my room!" "I don't care about talking to Grandma on the phone. I want you to read to me about visiting someone else's Grandma!"

Of course, there are still plenty of good, entertaining stories that would fall under Waniewski's topics. Darcy's own Nineteen Girls and Me happens to be about starting kindergarten--but it's an exaggerated, imaginative tale, and the hero has an unusual reason to be anxious that stands for more common kindergarten anxieties. It's not "what exactly will happen and how much fun you'll have when you start school next week."

Even such dramatic topics as wanting a pet or not wanting a new baby (never seems to be the other way around, does it?), which hold great interest for kids at particular times, seem to stem from the lessons that adults want to impart. And the appearance of barnyard stories on a list created by a largely urban society hints that people are submitting stories based on what they think children's books should be about.

Honestly, grown-ups, when was the last time you enjoyed a book on dental care, the first day at a new job, or turning thirty-five? How often do you browse the Animal Husbandry section at Borders?

The True History of Harry

Back in December 2005, Publishers Weekly reported:

Earlier this week, members of the child_lit listserv have been having a lively conversation about the Harry Potter books. The discussion began with questions about how many times Rowling’s first manuscript was rejected before it got published, then went on to cover when and under what circumstances the U.S. rights were sold. Members are now discussing how the books became so popular--was it marketing and hype, or word-of-mouth among children that grew to reach adults? As one poster wrote, he's looking to sort out the historical truth of Harry Potter.

Well, reader, that poster was I. On the 15th I’d sent a message to Child_Lit with the subject line “Rowling’s US rights sale - how significant?” It noted:

...the US rights deal occurred and was publicized just as HP1 hit stores in the UK. Those news stories brought unusual attention to this unknown author and her new book. How much, I wonder, did that attention itself influence the first book’s early success? In other words, how much did Scholastic's big gamble on US rights turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Since then, the Potter fan site Accio-Quote.org has archived more of the early British press attention for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the summer of 1997. And it’s even more obvious how little of that ink was expended on reviews, and how much of it on Rowling’s sudden financial turnaround. The earliest stories are:

• "Happy ending, and that's for beginners," 24 June in the Glasgow Herald
• "Volumes of choice for the holidays," 28 June in The Scotsman
• "Tales from a single mother," 29 June in the Sunday Times
• “£100,000 success story for penniless mother,” 7 July in the Telegraph (for some reason Accio-quote.org dates this as "spring," but the newspaper’s website states the July date twice)
  
• "Book written in Edinburgh cafe sells for $100,000," 8 July in the Herald again
  
• "First Attempt at Fantasy becomes a $100,000 reality," 8 July in The Scotsman again
  
• “Debut author and single mother sells children's book for £100,000,” 8 July in the Guardian
  
• "£60,000 for novel written in cafe," 8 July in the Western Morning News

This is how Harry Potter made its newspaper debut, in the Glasgow Herald:

THREE years ago Joanne Rowling landed in Edinburgh with a baby under one arm and a dog-eared manuscript under the other. Apart from the proverbial battered suitcase, she owned nothing else. . . .

Rowling recounts those dark days as she sits in a sunlit cafe in Nicolson Street, and already they have an aura of long long ago. In the previous few days two American publishing houses had been bidding for the American rights to that manuscript, now her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, published in Britain this week by Bloomsbury at £4.50. The bidding was well into six figures.

Dollars not pounds, says Rowling in that sort of wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) manner which also characterizes her writing. OK, but this is still very big bucks indeed for a first book, a children's one at that, written by a lone mum for whom less than three months ago, the prospect of a £2500 grant from the Scottish Arts Council was manna from heaven. . . .

If this sounds like the stuff of fantasy, it is and it isn't. Joanne's own story is for real, even if just now it feels like a dream she is afraid to wake from. Harry Potter's story is a fantasy but one leavened with enough everyday life to give it an authentic feel.

The Scotsman started its article with a rave review for Harry’s story, but then it quickly got into that rags-to-riches backstory for his creator:

IF you buy or borrow nothing else this summer for the young readers in your family, you must get hold of a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowley [sic] (Bloomsbury, £4.99). This is a book which makes an unassailable stand for the power of fresh, inventive story-telling in the face of formula horror and sickly romance.

The story of the book's origins is a fairy-tale all of its own. This first novel from an Edinburgh-based author has just received a six-figure advance in America. Yet it was written in snatches by an unemployed single mother. Joanne Rowling arrived in Edinburgh penniless following the break-up of her marriage.

The other articles’ headlines make clear how they focused on Scholastic’s six figures (“dollars not pounds”) and Rowling’s status as single mother. Thus, most British newspaper readers learned about her book primarily not as a great story for kids, but as a source of sudden wealth for an adult.

Why is this significant? Because Harry Potter came out with an aura of magic. Not the physical magic that appears in many other fairy tales for kids. Rather, the financial magic that people dream of when they play the lottery. Harry Potter had made someone rich overnight (or so the articles implied, not noting how slowly money moves in publishing).

In contrast, the stories behind most other books are quite similar, and quite boring: a rather quiet person typed for a very long time, and then some other people read the typing and liked it. That was how Rowling earned her book contract. That was how Arthur Levine of Scholastic and several other US publishers came to bid on her manuscript. But then the ground shifted, with the concatenation of the US rights auction and the UK publication date. After that, people didn’t have to read J. K. Rowling’s words to believe that there was something magical about them.

Little House in the Doldrums

Publishers Weekly reports on booksellers' mixed reaction to HarperCollins's reissue of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder with new, photographic covers and no interior art.

What was the problem with Garth Williams's drawings? Apparently, they betrayed the fact that these books take place in...history.

The magazine quotes Kate Jackson, Editor-in-Chief at HarperCollins, as saying, "But Laura Ingalls was a real little girl, not a made-up character. Using photographs highlights that these are not history but adventure books." Hence the series sell line at the bottom of the cover: "Little House • Big Adventure."

So photographs = real = adventure, but real ≠ history.

What's really "real," I suspect, is that after years of selling the Little House books and then reselling them through abridgments, prequels, sequels, anniversary editions, and every other type of spin-off, HarperCollins has seen sales drop. Fantasy has pushed aside historical fiction as the way young readers--even girls--prefer to try out different societies.

But eventually that will change.

Fair Credit for Both Words and Pictures

Over at the Cybils Fantasy/Sci Fi nominations page, author Alex de Campi commented today:

Hey, I hate to be a pain (I've just posted a similar request for a book I wrote in the Graphic Novel nominations) but AGENT BOO is really a co-effort between me and the illustrator Edo Fuijkschot, and I was wondering if you would mind putting his name on the nomination as well?

Agent Boo is a graphic novel. (Though the label may irk some Oz and Ends readers, Fuijkschot's page at the Word-Factory website describes it as one of "a series of manga chapter books" from an Australian artist now working in China and an English writer now working in, um, England.) So I assume it's a nearly equal creation of author and illustrator.

Most of the Cybil-nominated titles are novels, so there's a natural bent toward giving primary credit to their authors. However, writer-artist collaborations long predate graphic novels. W. W. Denslow was such an important part of creating two best-sellers with L. Frank Baum, Father Goose and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, that the two men shared the copyrights. (That income stream came in handy for Denslow when he drank himself mad on a Caribbean island, but that's a story for another day, children.)

Baum never worked that closely with an illustrator again, not in creating his books and certainly not in sharing his royalties. And the law was on his side. In the early twentieth century, Peter Hanff once explained to me, the law presumed illustration to be derivative of the text it illustrated. As a result, John R. Neill's illustrations for Baum's later Oz books were treated as legally part and parcel of the text. They went into the public domain based on Baum's death date, not Neill's. (In England, the system was already different; H. R. Millar long outlived E. Nesbit, so his artwork for her Psammead novels is still protected there while her texts are not.)

I suspect that this legal situation is why books--even picture books and graphic novels--continue to list authors before illustrators, even when the illustrator is a bigger name. That doesn't necessarily reflect the creators' economic value, but then that's what advances are for. (Royalties still tend to be split down the middle for those formats, though in theory creative teams can split royalties to as many decimal points as their publishers' royalty systems could accommodate. When I was a book editor, I had a pair of authors who seemed to enjoy devising ways to share their money that would stymie the Accounting Department.)

This doesn't come up, of course, when a single talented person creates both text and pictures, whether the format is an illustrated novel like Monster Blood Tattoo (in which the full-page drawings are mislabeled as "plates") or a literate graphic novel like Age of Bronze.

But what will happen as books become more multimedia, with art, online, audio, and even video components? Usually that requires several collaborators. If they eventually all work together instead of in sequence, how many of them will share credit, copyrights, and/or royalties? Will the writer retain primary credit or, as in movies, will someone else become the auteur?

And now that I'm muttering about such things, why is the biggest photo on most audiobooks the actor who recorded the words, not the author who wrote them? I presume the actors' head shots are more convenient and more attractive, but I'd still like to see the principal creators get equal visual billing.

Where was I? Oh, yes. As for Agent Boo, I'm sure its Cybils listing will be updated in a reasonable time.

A Lifetime Supply of Koontz

Bantam is getting a fair amount of industry press for advertising Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas series during the CSI TV shows. Given the price for a commercial during a top-rated series, that advertising effort is probably well beyond the entire marketing budget for an average trade title.

Of course, Koontz is already a bestselling author, and has been for years. We might say he doesn't need the advertising dollars, but in fact he's one of the few authors for whom high-expense advertising might make sense.

Among the biggest challenges in marketing an individual book is that a family can buy a lifetime supply of that product for $10-$40. In fact, a well manufactured book can last for generations. That severely limits the potential return from advertising an individual title.

The return on investment in advertising can be higher for big-price items, like cars, and for products that people buy and replenish over many years, such as a particular soap or cereal. With soap and cereal (and cars as well), marketers try to build "brand loyalty," in which the same family keeps buying the same product. An individual bar of soap costs much less than an individual book, but a few bars every few months over several years builds up into real money--while that individual book sits on the shelf, just as satisfying as it was before.

Which brings us back to Koontz. He writes lots of books, and they're rather similar. Not identical, of course, but more like different scents of detergent than like a bottle of detergent and a bottle of antifreeze. As a result, Bantam has lots of Koontz books it can sell to the same customers. That's how I think these TV ads are meant to work: they aim to create Koontz "brand loyalty" so that one or two or even three books won't be a reader's lifetime supply.

Another interesting aspect of Bantam's ads is that they don't make clear until the end that the product they're selling is (gasp!) books. They might thus intrigue people who like stories, but feel nervous around books.

Someone Will Take This Man's Money

Folks who work in publishing know that book reviews are important, but book advertising is even more rare and therefore often more revealing about companies' priorities and plans. Today's New York Times Book Review included its pre-holiday roundup of top children's picture books for the year and a fine crop of ads. Among them:

• Adam Gopnik's recent essay collection about raising kids in New York City--not a children's book, of course, but the ad placement's a great way to reach the adults reading these pages.
• A two-page layout from HarperCollins--count the celebrity picture books! the movie tie-ins! the repackaging of successful titles. Yes, it's Christmas time in the city.
• Candlewick congratulating M. T. Anderson on his National Book Award nomination while it awaits the revision for Part 2.
  

And then an unusual ad caught my eye: a quarter-page notice inviting editors and agents to HenrySparks.com, a website offering an unpublished fantasy manuscript for middle-grade boys. The author, Keith Lewis, seems to be a natural entrepreneur--former sports trainer and financial executive. And he seems to have jumped into the children's-book biz with the same gumption and willingness to invest up front.

Unfortunately, his synopsis--or maybe his manuscript--doesn't offer much plot to sell. As far as I can tell, ingenious eight-year-old Henry builds submarine with "slow," seventeen-year-old Homer. They meet an electric eel named Ernie, who proves telepathic and chummy. Then they all go back in time to encounter the most red-hot adventurers of recent years, pirates! But not to fear, there's also a pirate chaser with an allegorical name slightly more subtle than a John Bunyan character.

What drives Henry? What are his foibles? What challenges does he face? What defines Homer apart from his fondness for Henry? What motivates Ernie's friendliness? What conflict will grab readers' interest? Where are the moments of suspense? What do Henry's family, the space program, and fuel cells (which pop up in the synopsis's last paragraph) have to do with everything else? And what does it say about our society's class aspirations when "Plebian" is the name of a villain?

Lewis's ad invited serious inquiries only, so obviously it's not for me. But looking at how much money he's willing to invest already, between this website and the NYTBR ad, I suspect he'll get a lot of inquiries from people who are very serious about offering their services. Self-publishing services. Manuscript marketing services.

Nevertheless, just like publishers' ads, this ad might be revealing about the future. In the current slushy environment, we authors may no longer be able to let a manuscript speak for itself. We might have to be entrepreneurs while publishers act as venture capitalists with the money and manufacturing and marketing expertise. But we still have to have an excellent idea for our start-ups.

Booksellers and Baristas

From the London Times, via POD-dy Mouth through Bookseller Chick through Fuse #8, comes Brian Appleyard's essay on how print-on-demand technology will affect bookstores. Appleyard, a journalist, critic, occasional novelist, and all-around opinionator, offers this vision of future bookselling:

You will go into Starbucks, slip your credit card into a machine, order a book and grab a latte, which you will finish just as your book completes its printing and binding process.

That particular convergence of paper and coffee has been happening for years now. No respectable large bookstore can open in North America without a coffee bar. Even new public libraries, like those in Princeton, New Jersey, and Watertown, Massachusetts, have small bakeshops built into their architecture. On the other side of the equation, Starbucks has its own publishing program.

Just today, Publishers Weekly reported that Lightning Source, the almost monopolistically dominant print-on-demand manufacturer, is adding capacity. Once books were digitized, they started to fall under Moore's Law, meaning the price of storing and transfering their content gets cheaper and cheaper.

The only thing holding back the total book-coffee convergence Appleyard describes is, I suspect, the smell of the book-production process. And maybe the coffee will cancel that out. (I'm a tea drinker myself.) Back in July I wrote that "within our lifetimes I predict that most novels will be printed" with POD technology.

Studying the eighteenth century helps remind me that the bookselling environment we're used to is a recent invention. Back when Thomas Hancock (shown above) and Henry Knox were selling books in Boston, they:

• carried many other goods in their stores, and
• bound books as customers requested them instead of filling their shelves with finished inventory.

Nostalgia for our current system of pre-printed books arrayed en masse might turn out to be like nostalgia for the Linotype machine, or hand-set type. Will the changes Appleyard describes really matter to the reader?

A store built around the print-on-demand model can offer advantages for readers, in fact. For instance, stores (and libraries) usually shelve all their inventory of one title in one place, unless they create a special display (charging the publisher for the privilege). But what about books that appeal to both adults and kids? Or touch on both business and spirituality? Or have large portions of both history and biography? Online listings don't have to be as limited as shelf space: one title can pop up in many searches.

The main problem I see in the POD model is how we readers would find the wonderful book that we don't yet know to look for: the new title by a familiar author, the additional book on a subject that turns out to be better than the one you came in for, the impulse buy, the gift for someone else that you'll know once you see it. But you could probably work around that problem once you have a cup of coffee.

Too Many Pies

I received a nice response to an essay I posted to the Child_Lit list last week [thank you, Jim Thomas!], so I'm posting it here, too, in the interests of widening the exchange of thought and, of course, saving myself work.

Having become dismayed after reading such recent fantasy novels as D. J. MacHale's Pendragon and Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's Beyond the Deepwoods, list member Fairrosa wrote:

Is there hope for a better future of fantasy novels for young readers? I wanted more fantasy for years since there was such a dearth of this genre, but then now we have opened the floodgate and the pearls are now being washed away or buried under the large quantity of junk-like substances.

And I replied...

Painful as it can be for us literary types, it helps to think of these trends in terms of economics. Imagine you're a publisher. In the US, that means you're working within a capitalist system. Your job is to produce profitable books for your employer. Along the way, you hope to create lasting literature, but you can do that only if you pay the electricity bill.

For complex and perhaps unfathomable reasons, children's fantasy novels suddenly become the books that sell more than any other kinds--more even than adult thrillers and love stories. In fact, some of those novels rewrite everything we knew about publishing, such as national boundaries, sales patterns, and how much a ten-year-old is willing to read at a sitting.

So naturally you look for more children's fantasy novels to publish. You see higher potential for profit in books that in other years you might have passed over. Some of those books are okay but not great, others very complex, others very long, etc. In the new environment, a lot more children's fantasies get a chance. This produces both some wonderful breakthroughs and some dross.

Meanwhile, other types of books aren't doing so well, so you become more choosy there. You pluck only the most likely to be profitable: those from experienced authors, from celebrities, the very best, and the very easiest to sell.

Now imagine that you're an author or hopeful author. You see fantasies for children earning much more respect, and much more money. Even without crass opportunism, you can't help but see more potential in that field, too. Where ten years ago you might have filed away a fantasy idea in the back of your mind, now you think it sounds like a fun project to work on. So we have children's fantasy novels from experienced authors in other genres like Adam Gopnik, James Grippando, Rick Riordan, et al. And we have a lot more first-time authors, or hopeful authors, of fantasy.

There's a rule for small business: "You always have one of these problems: too many customers or too many pies." (This is a rule I heard from my mother, who learned it from her business professor Neal Yanofsky, who's now President of Panera Bread and putting his bakestuff knowledge to good use. In a mind-twisting turn of events, Yanofsky and I turned out to have had the same first-grade teacher. But I digress.)

Right now there are so many fantasy customers that publishers don't have enough pies. So they're shipping some pies that aren't quite as good as they could be, or simply aren't quite as good.

At some point, the cultural tide will flow away from fantasy for young people and toward some other literary genre or form of entertainment. And then pretty good fantasy manuscripts will go begging for publishers, and very good ones will go begging for readers. There will finally be enough pies--in fact, the field of pies might on average be much better than before--but there won't be enough customers.

So the sad economics answer to Fairrosa's question might be that we'll see publishers be more choosy and demanding about fantasy novels when all those kids she tells about good fantasy books have for a while been insisting on something else.

Velveteen Rabbit audiobook with extra foam

In 1984 the already Academy Award-winning Meryl Streep read Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit for an audiobook company called Rabbit Ears, with music by George Winston.

This week Random House and Starbucks issued a press release announcing that that book-audiobook package will make a "long-awaited return-to-market," with a four-month exclusive at Starbucks coffee shops in the U.S. and at Starbucks's music website.

Publishers Weekly's email newsletter describes this audiobook as part of the "lauded and long-out-of-print Rabbit Ears Collection of celebrity-narrated recordings," to be brought back at last through Random House's Listening Library.

In fact, there was a 20th-anniversary rerelease of Rabbit Ears's Rabbit less than three years ago. Sure, it came from a Japanese label and has a correspondingly high price tag, but this is a global webbed economy. What we call "not available on the market" increasingly means "not available at a price I think is reasonable." Starbucks and Random House know that as well as anybody.