Once upon a time, a tired novelist, after a long day’s editing and rewriting, was putting his six-year-old daughter to bed.
She still really liked pictures; so, for her bedtime story, he read her a picture book they had been given by a well-meaning relative with no kids and no taste.
It was a perfectly inoffensive picture book, but the novelist (being in novel-editing mode) hated it – to him, it felt too short, bland, and eventless; plus, all the characters were totally interchangeable. Ugh! His daughter was bored, too. So, together, they made up a new story, with dramatic tension, and unexpected but satisfying action, and character development, and an incredibly angry rabbit that ate his own poo, and all that good stuff.
After she’d fallen asleep, the novelist thought, hey, that’s pretty good. It’s like a tiny novel for children. And so he wrote it down ...
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Anyway, that’s essentially the story of how I accidentally shuffled ass-backwards into writing what are essentially tiny novels for small children. Unlike adult novels, however, mine are now beautifully illustrated by the great Jim Field on all 100 pages – because my daughter likes pictures. Which means they are not traditional picture books; nor are they traditional young fiction books (as they’re called in the UK) or chapter books (as they are called in the United States), like, say, Charlotte’s Web or Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
As a result, I’ve now had a lot of conversations with publishers, and parents, and children, and booksellers, about the difficulty so many children have in bridging the gap between reading picture books, and young fiction/chapter books. Indeed, I have become, somewhat accidentally, an expert in this transition. And I have discovered something: there is a profound, yet invisible, industry-wide problem with children’s books. A problem whose roots go back to the slow but steady development of affordable colour printing in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Picture books these days usually have 32 illustrated colour pages, with very few words on each page. Why? Because that format, historically, allowed the publisher to print the whole book in full colour on one very large sheet of expensive, high-quality, often glossy, paper (and then cut it up – 2, 4, 8, 16 – and assemble the book). More pages would have made the book much more expensive. The format had, as a result, became a standard by the mid-20th century.
For most of the 20th century, however, young fiction/chapter books were printed in the normal way, on normal, cheap, matt, wood-pulp paper. As a result, they usually had only a small number of black and white pictures, and often none at all. And they were much longer, often over 100 pages.
This divide, between fully-illustrated picture books of 500 words and text-only books of at least 20,000 words, was purely an artefact of technology. Neither parents nor children demanded this bizarre split; it was simply an accidental consequence of the limitations and costs of early full-colour printing presses.
But this divide, between fully-illustrated picture books of 500 or so words, and text-only books of at least 20,000 or so words, was purely an artefact of technology. Neither parents nor children demanded this bizarre split; it was simply an accidental consequence of the limitations and costs of early full-colour printing presses. (Nowadays, with modern presses, it should be easier, and somewhat cheaper, to print longer, fully illustrated books.)
However, over the years, this accidental divide became deeply embedded inside both the business processes and – maybe even more importantly – the psychology of publishing companies. Once a publisher grew to a certain size, their children’s publishing wing was invariably internally subdivided into picture books, and an entirely separate publishing section, with different editors, that published mostly longer books, with few or no pictures, for older children.
The gap only began to close a little in recent decades, with books like Laura Ellen Anderson’s Amelia Fang series; Swapna Haddow and Sheena Dempsey’s tales of Dave Pigeon; Pippa Curnick’s Indigo Wilde books; and the Toto the Ninja Cat stories by Dermot O’Leary and Nick East. Some of these had as few as 7,000 words, and were fairly heavily illustrated. But that’s still 14 times more words than a picture book! That’s a heck of a jump for the ambitious five- or six-year-old, desperate to read solo. So, though the gap narrowed, it did not vanish.
And it is this small but significant, and entirely artificial, gap which causes so many of the problems children encounter when they first attempt to read for themselves. They are expected to abruptly leap from heavily illustrated books with very few words (where the pictures give you a great deal of unobtrusive assistance in understanding the text), to far longer books – many of them with far less illustrations to help with understanding. No wonder children struggle to make that transition; they simply shouldn’t have to do it all in one leap, it’s absurd. Pictures should accompany them (and on every page) far further on their reading journey.
Because my own background is as a novelist writing for adults, when I accidentally wrote my first book for children with my daughter Sophie, I had no idea how rigid this modest divide was. I wrote the book to be the length it needed to be – which was about five times longer than a standard picture book, but a couple of times shorter than even the shortest standard chapter book. Maybe 2,500 or 3,000 words. The dead zone in children’s publishing!
That book was called Rabbit’s Bad Habits. It was in trying to find a publisher for it that I learned all the above, because the feedback, when my splendid agent Charlie submitted it, was fascinating. Children’s publishers all wanted it to be either much, much longer, or much, much shorter – not because there was anything wrong with the story, but to suit their existing formats.
This was an institutional problem, not a matter of individual tastes. Even when an editor loved the book as it was, their institution rejected it, for reasons that were nothing to do with the actual quality of the book. Right at the start of the submissions process, an excellent editor at a Large Famous Publisher I Shall Not Name loved the book so much, she asked us to stop shopping it around. She ended up holding on to the book for six months while she tried, several times, at acquisitions meetings, to convince the sales and marketing departments to let her buy it.
Eventually they told her that they knew how to sell it as a (much shorter) picture book; and so she finally came back to me and apologetically asked if I could cut it down to less than a third of its length. Oh, and in the process also remove the fact that the rabbit ate his own poo (as all rabbits indeed do); remove the explanations of gravity, and rabbit digestion; et cetera. That is, remove everything which made the book original and good, and turn it back into the short, bland, eventless, characterless book which I had hated so much that it inspired me to write Rabbit’s Bad Habits in the first place. Hmmmm ...
I am a stubborn writer (which can be good or bad, depending), and I said no.
Well that was weird, I thought. But something similar happened at the next Large Famous Publisher. And the next ... Some wanted it much longer; some much shorter. Each time, I said no to their suggested changes, because I liked it just the length it was: a 500-word version would have compressed and simplified the story to death, and a 10,000- or 20,000-word version would have stretched and diluted it to death.
As a result, it took over two years to find a publisher. But, finally, we found a wonderful editor called Rachel Wade at Hodder Children’s Books (part of Large Famous Publisher Hachette), who loved it precisely because it was that odd, in-between length. She was extremely aware that traditionally there had been no bridge between picture books and chapter books, and Hodder had recently had great success with a series by Alex T Smith about a dog called Claude, fully illustrated, but 100 pages long, that bridged the gap.
So I signed a deal with Rachel and Hodder; they got the magnificent Jim Field to illustrate it; and Hodder published Rabbit’s Bad Habits in 2016.
The story has a happy ending, because it is now published in a remarkable 37 languages, has won a number of awards in various countries, and continues to sell extremely well, year after year. Indeed, I’ve gone on to write five more Rabbit & Bear books with Jim: all 100 pages long, all fully illustrated. (The final, and most ambitious, book in the series, This Lake is Fake!, came out earlier this year. The books get a few hundred words longer each time, gently helping the young reader to advance – so we are now up to 5,000 words.)
The point of this story isn’t to shame the Large Famous Publishing Company I Shall Not Name, and the other publishers who rejected it, or to paint myself as the hero who is ultimately right (though the Rabbit side of my nature is very happy to say, I am the hero who was ultimately right!); it is to point out that the ghost of this old publishing model, based on long-obsolete printing technologies, still haunts the high-tech 21st-century headquarters of our big publishing corporations – and that it is causing enormous amounts of unnecessary stress and difficulty for children and their parents.
I am particularly, acutely, aware of this bridging problem because I have received so many messages from parents saying that their son or daughter had always struggled to read, or been reluctant to read – but that a Rabbit & Bear book was the first “long” book they had finally managed to read on their own; that the child was so proud of their achievement (“I read 100 pages!”); and now they were addicted to books. Providing bridge books makes a real difference ...
Anyway, the situation is definitely improving. (Rachel recently got shortlisted for Editor of the Year at the Bookseller Awards, so she is getting recognition for her pioneering work!) More and more long, morally and narratively complex, but fully illustrated books for five- and six- and seven- and eight-year olds are now being written and published. And graphic novels – books in cartoon form, fully illustrated, with the words in speech bubbles, etc – are helping fill the gap. The very funny (and extremely meta) Dogman, by Dav Pilkey, is the most successful example. (OK, that series might not be morally complex.)
But in a world that has a deep back-catalogue of hundreds of thousands of both picture books and chapter books/young fiction books, including many classics (because publishers have been churning them out for a couple of hundred years), there is still a shortage of high-quality work connecting the two categories. Booksellers will tell you, they still have very few options to recommend to kids who have read every Dogman.
This has been an invisible problem for so many years partly because there are no bad guys. No cackling villain decided to shaft the reluctant reader; to cruelly deny them the book they needed in order to move on from picture books. There is also no exciting and topical Culture War angle, to get everybody fired up to solve the problem. It’s a boring, tricky-to-fix, systems and technologies issue. One hundred pages of colour illustration are more expensive than 32.
Poor Jim has a lot more work to do, carefully and lovingly illustrating my This Lake is Fake!, than when doing the same for his picture book classic with Kes Gray, Oi Frog! (Dogman solves the problem of how to fully illustrate over a hundred pages by the brilliant meta-fictive device of having the Dogman books be rapidly and ineptly written and illustrated by two small children, Harold and George, for their own amusement – thus making the incredibly hasty-looking nature of the illustrations part of the books’ charm.)
I spend a lot longer trying to refine the 5,000 words of a mini-novel like This Lake is Fake! than I would a 500-word picture book – or indeed 5000 words of adult novel. Children’s books are far, far denser than adult books; far harder, per line, to write. Every single line in a book for 5-to-8 years olds has to advance the story, reveal character, or be extremely funny (and, ideally, rude). Our editor Rachel thus has a lot more editorial work to do; our brilliant designer Lynne has three times as much layout and design work to do as on a picture book, and far more than on a text-only chapter book.
In fact, books for 5-to-7-year-olds turn out to be weirdly hard to write, for a bunch of subtle reasons. I discussed this issue with my editor Rachel, when researching this piece, and she said “I genuinely think it is the hardest kind of book to write. Not just the hardest kind of children’s book; the hardest kind of book!”
That’s partly because the book has to work for two radically different audiences.
Books for 5-to-7 year olds have to appeal to both parent and child (the parent is usually reading the book to the kid at the start of the series); but it’s extremely hard to appeal to both at that age, because their interests just don’t overlap as much as they will later. (Whereas everybody in the family usually loves, say, Narnia books.)
There’s another weird, non-obvious problem. When adults, even experienced children’s book writers, try to write books for kids of five, six, or seven ... they usually end up accidentally writing books that are, in fact, for older kids. There’s a kind of psychological slippage. Editors commission a book for 5-to-7-year-olds, and a year later get handed a book for 7-to-9-year-olds. Writers simply find it hard to build a world, and pack a satisfying plot, into 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 words. Every line has to be a haiku. It’s technically incredibly hard.
And once the perfect book for 5-to-7 year olds is, somehow, written ... books for kids of that age don’t get reviewed. Kids aren’t old enough to buy them themselves; parents don’t know that they exist. Discovery is a huge problem. Because it’s so hard to write them, authors don’t write them. And if they do, because it’s so hard to break such a book out, publishers are reluctant to invest in them.
That means they might cost one or two quid more than a simple picture book or a simple chapter book (and the profit margin might be less than you think).
But, book by book, the bridge is being built, and reinforced. So if you and your child have struggled to escape the 32-page world of picture books, there is now a way out.
And children and parents can finally stop blaming themselves for something that simply isn’t their fault.
Julian Gough is the author of four novels; six Rabbit & Bear books, illustrated by Jim Field; and the ending to the computer game Minecraft. The brilliant final book in the Rabbit & Bear series, This Lake Is Fake! was published earlier this year by Hodder Children’s Books.
Further reading
The Grimwood series by Nadia Shireen
Toto the Ninja Cat series by Dermot O’Leary, illustrated by Nick East
Pablo and Splash graphic novel series by Sheena Dempsey
Shop of Impossible Ice Creams series by Shane Hegarty, illustrated by Jeff Crowther
Indigo Wilde series by Pippa Curnick
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