For the Kids

 Susan E. Goodman shared a wonderful tribute to mothers recently, and the coincidence of my youngest son’s upcoming college graduation inspires me to add a note of recognition for children.

Whenever I do a school visit, I include a brief introduction about myself. “Here’s me in fourth grade,” I say, soon after the session begins. “If you’d asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up, the first thing I’d have said was, ‘I want to be a children’s book author.’” It made perfect sense. I loved books. I loved to write. Why not write books for kids? Case closed.

And yet, I tell the school children, I didn’t immediately become a children’s book author when I grew up. Instead I turned, upon finishing college, to what I call “more practical writing,” and then I describe the work I did for ten years with the marketing of books, academic public relations, and the editing of an alumni magazine.

“It was only when I took a break to have kids,” I tell my audience, “that I reconnected with that childhood idea to write for young people.” So I have an easy answer when kids ask, “What made you want to become a children’s book author?”—“My kids,” I reply. Then I show a childhood photo of Sam and Jake “reading” Winnie the Pooh together. Hearts melt.

What came next, I tell the students, is the birth of my writing career. “While I watched my kids grow up, they watched my career grow. Now they’re in middle school/high school/college (fill in the blank depending on what year I’ve been speaking), and I’ve published seven/eight/nine books (add corresponding number of titles).”

Then I show a photo of my two sons at their present ages, contrasted with the photo of them as young children. Kids eat it up, of course, because they can see themselves in such a narrative, and I never tire of telling this story about my life and the lives of my sons.

Sam, Class of 2011, now with City Year

Jake, Class of 2013, Pitzer College

Silly me.

When I first became a children’s author, I thought that my story was unique. Now I’ve met and heard about dozens of authors who were inspired to write because of the children in their lives. Their own kids. Their grandkids. The children they teach. The children who visit the libraries where they work. The 10-year-old child embedded in their own hearts. You know what I’m talking about!

Yet here we are, writing away for the archetypal young while our own original sources of inspiration grow toward adulthood and beyond. This Saturday my youngest son graduates from college, and the narrative of my school visits will have to be updated again. From cuddly boys to grown men. There’s a tale to celebrate!

So it’s no wonder I’m drawn to visit schools, and you may be, too, for the same reason. Instantly we are surrounded by the little people who remind us why we write.

Yes, it helps that our work can pay the bills, and yes, we write because we were meant to be writers, but we write for young people because, at the heart of it, we care about their future. If we can just give them good stories, good history, good science, inspiring knowledge, we will have, we hope, made a difference.

I always say that being a parent was and is the best job I’ve ever had. Probably the hardest, too, but by far the most rewarding. Writing for young people is a very close second! Like parenting, it is a labor of love, born of the idea of passing on the joy of life to the youngest among us.

Thanks, Jake and Sam, for inspiring me to be a better parent and a better writer. While I'm at it, I commend my fellow authors for writing and sharing your hearts and minds through your own works, and we all thank those in the wider publishing community who connect our creations with those smaller hands across the land. All are causes for celebration!

Reminding Myself

I have been traveling much more than usual of late. Travel always sparks new ideas. Perhaps it is because it is spring, or because I’ve been to Italy and Texas and Little Cranberry Isle and back, but my brain is bursting with new ideas. I am always reminded, when I get outside of my own mini-microcosm, how many ways there are to live in this wide world. How many different perspectives, situations, surroundings, events—all shaping the larger cultures, and the smaller ones within. And how many interesting people there are--everywhere!

I remind myself to stop and be grateful. Grateful for all these things, and grateful I had parents and teachers and the rest of the village to remind me to look around and be AWAKE.

It is a marvel, really. A miracle. All of these fascinating things just beyond our own fingertips. Every day brings some new observation, if you’re looking. We talk about research, writing, and revision often, and those topics feel comfortable, like a well-worn pair of work gloves. But it’s the wonder that stops me in my tracks. Those moments when I allow myself to see the world through my own child inside, who is not imposing too much knowledge or point of view on the world. That is when I get my best ideas.

This is a lesson I will remind myself to hold close when I talk with children about writing nonfiction. Or perhaps, I will let them teach me. They are the best at it, after all.

Good Review / Bad Review

   If you write a book, you will most likely get reviewed.  Like it or not.  Some reviews are perfectly nice; some not so nice.  And then there are those reviews which seem to be lazy repeats of the front jacket copy, but that's another story.
   I read all the reviews that I get to see (my first book had well over 200 reviews, every one of them carefully clipped out and mailed to me by my publisher; I saw [maybe] ten reviews of my last book, all via e-mail!).  Because I always blame myself for falling short, I study every line of the reviews, trying to figure out how to make future books better.  I was thinking about my process with reviews a few weeks back and how both the good and bad ones have helped me to re-evaluate and change how I write.
   The Good Review:  Way back in another time and dimension, I wrote a history of tractors (brilliantly titled -- wait for it -- TRACTORS: From Yesterday's Steam Wagons to Today's Turbocharged Giants, available as we speak at Amazon used books for $0.70).  I may have told this story here before, so I'll make it brief.  I was telling my Dad about this wonderful, innovative, amazing book about tractors I'd just revised and was ready to mail back to my publisher.  After I stopped yammering, my Dad sat back, smiled knowingly, and said: "Jimmy, that'll be a big hit in Russia."
   I thought that line was brilliant and laughed out loud.  But later I started to wonder who, in their right mind, would actually want to pick up a book about tractors, let alone read it.  Panic set in.  The package with the manuscript was sitting on a table, very neatly wrapped and ready to go out.  But I hesitated.  I had to do something before the published book was banished to the far away remainder Gulogs, but what?  Which is when I remembered that almost all of the early steam tractors blew up at some point or other, and that the inventors and on-lookers often wrote about these unexpected and exciting developments.  I opened the package and spent the following days putting in quotes, many of them offbeat and funny (what's not to laugh about when a giant metal tank of steam explodes?).  And guess what; it not only received very positive reviews, but School Library Journal gave it a star (and this was when starred reviews weren't very commonplace).
   The thing about the SLJ review is that it mentioned the quotes.  Not in any depth; more in passing briefly over what the book was about.  I didn't think much of that little phrase until a few years later I began doing research on underage boys from both sides in the Civil War.  As I gathered in more and more research, I began to wonder how I would present the information.  Happily, I remembered the SLJ review for TRACTORS and decided to let these young soldiers tell their own stories, using pieces from their letters home, diaries, memoirs, and company histories to describe their enlistment, training, battle experience...in short, their stay in the army start to finish.  This wealth of firsthand accounts also provided the book's subtitle.  THE BOYS' WAR: Confederate and Union Soldiers Talk abop the Civil War received very nice reviews (and it didn't hurt that it was published the very same week that Ken Burns' Civil War documentary was first aired!). 
   The Bad Review:  Okay, this should be 'reviews.'  So I was able to have several nonfiction books published and the reviews were encouraging.  But one review source, while saying very positive things about these books, also tacked on a brief complaint.  They wanted citations for my various sources.  Please remember that this was a very different time (the 1980s); most nonfiction books then, even the most serious, usually had a brief bibliography and little else.  So when this review source said this, I was troubled and wondered what to do about it.
   Here's a bit of publishing history.  I'm sure there were people around back then who championed having more sources, but I never came across them.  Not in person, that is.  When I spoke to editors and other writers, just about everyone thought the idea of extensive notes and sources was a bit, how to say this, excessive.  It would take up a decent amount of space in the book (which could be used to add text or illustrations) and would enough kids really use them to justify this?  I know, this seems like a silly question now, but back then it was real and we were all trying to puzzle out what to do (or not do).
   When the first negative review like this appeared, I had another book at the binder about to appear and another in galley pages (yes, it was a different era).  I dithered a bit and both books were published sans notes and sources.  And, yes, that review source criticized both titles for this lack of information.
   What to do? I wondered.  I had another manuscript ready to go off and I was wondering if I should ignore my colleagues and just put in the info.  Which was when I happened to have dinner with a friend, Jim Giblin.  We spoke about this emerging notes and sources situation (me feeling a bit put upon and undecided about what to do).  Jim's response was characteristically practical.  Why risk having a negative sentence or phrase soil an otherwise good review.  Put the notes in!
   Fine, I said.  But most backmatter is a bunch of ids and ibids and such that even adults find boring and difficult to interpret.  His answer: Have some fun with them.
   Which is what I've tried to do ever since.  I try to play with and change up the backmatter in every book, shaping it in a way that makes it not just possible for young readers to know where my information came from and how to access it, but easy and non-threatening as well.  Every time I do backmatter, I learn new things about how to communicate this to the readers (a quest that will probably never end but keeps me on my toes and having some fun).                 
   Good Review/Bad Review.  Each kind is trying to tell me something besides whether the book works or not.  Sometimes it takes a while for me to see exactly what it might be, but if I stay open to the reviewer's emotional response and hints, in time it'll register and lead me.  

Happy Mother's Day

I was going to write about something entirely different for this month’s blog but when I typed the first line on Sunday morning, out came, Thanks, Mom.

Yesterday, of course, was Mother’s Day.  At this point in my and my family’s life, I am the mother who is celebrated with gorgeous flowers, chocolate (two of my great pleasures) and, if I feel like it, an extracted promise to do some odious chore.

My mom died in 2006, so she isn’t here to be included in gift giving. Or phone calls, although we affectionately and impulsively tucked her favorite, well-used red princess phone into her casket.  She was a wonderful mom for many reasons.  Given I.N.K.'s focus, I'd like to celebrate how she helped me become a writer just by being who she was.

We always had books in the house.  We were always read to.  

I had a lot of nightmares when I was a kid.  So I slept with my door open and the hall light on, which threw a swatch of light into my bedroom that was perfect for sneak reading.  Let’s just say, I took advantage of it.  I think my mom knew.  She never said a word, doubtlessly realizing that forbidden fruit is always more delicious.

Once I had a pajama party, maybe in fourth grade, and late into the night when we went into the kitchen for snacks, we found it had been invaded by a stream of ants.  Our squeals brought Mom downstairs.  I frankly can’t remember if she dealt with the ants first—or, not at all.  All I can see is the picture of my mom standing in the kitchen in her nightgown, reading The World Book entry about ants to a bunch of girls waiting for their Swanson’s chicken pot pies to come out of the oven.  She always liked to look up things.

When she could afford it, she bought us/her an Encyclopedia Britannica.

A year or two later, I was enthralled by reading Gone with the Wind.  I got in trouble when my teacher found that I was using my textbook as a shield to camouflage my open copy.  When Mom found out, she laughed.  But her favorite GWTW story was when I burst into my parents’ bedroom a few nights later, waking her up with the tearful accusation, “You didn’t tell me it was going to end like that.”

Fast forward--about two years after I got a master’s degree in psychology that my parents paid for, tried it out and realized the job wasn’t for me, I decided to become a writer.  Somewhat arbitrarily.  Then it was what Mom didn’t say that was important.  She didn’t say, you have never shown much interest in writing before or how will you make money or is this practical.

And when my first article came out in the Sunday edition of the Boston Herald American, she called the paper to get a dozen copies sent to her in Detroit. She wanted originals, not xeroxes. When my first book came out, she just might have put me in the royalty plus column all by herself.

Thanks, Mom.

Balance

At critique group this week, four of us sat around a table, crunching on nuts, sipping iced tea, and talking about balance. All four of us work at home, which can be great for things like having a flexible schedule. (Critique group meetings at 2 pm on Tuesdays? No problem.)

But working at home can have its drawbacks, as well—and that’s where the conversation wound around to after the critiquing was done.

Working at home can be lonely. If I didn’t have a dog, there might be days when I never left the house.

Working at home can be sedentary. If I didn’t get up for snacks, I might hardly move at all.

Most of all, working at home can be non-stop, if you let it. With no time card to punch, no daily commute defining the parameter of the ‘work day,’ you really could work all the time. Writer friends confess to me all the time that they feel guilty taking time away from their desk to meet a friend for lunch, take a walk in the park, go out with their husband for coffee.

But they shouldn’t, and if you work at home, you shouldn’t, either.

A story a few weeks ago on npr discussed several studies done on keeping your brain healthy and your memory strong—two things that come in handy when you’re a writer (or do anything else, for that matter.)

The studies looked at people over 80 and how they fared as they aged. But the conclusions apply to us all, especially those of us who work at home:

Physical exercise is key.

Social contact is essential.

And you need to leave your house and get out in the world, on a regular basis.

So, while I could work all the time, taking the long view of a productive career (not to mention a happy life) suggests that I shouldn’t—and I shouldn’t feel guilty about it, either.

I just joined a gym class full of neighbors I’d like to get to know.

I start today.

When Facts Change...Again!

New information can be tough to swallow at times. I wrote previously on I.N.K. about my picture book based on the USDA Food Guide Pyramid that had to be updated due to a change in the graphic (see middle image, below). It happened again in 2011 when the MyPlate program was introduced. Actually, I prefer the plate graphic to the pyramids, which were visually awkward to work with.

My ever-alert editor at Holiday House, Mary Cash, sent me an email the day the news appeared in the New York Times. It was a surprise, but there's no sense crying over spilled milk, right? Obviously my 1994/2007 book The Edible Pyramid, which was set inside a pyramid-shaped restaurant, was instantly defunct. Or was it? More about that in a second. 

A new approach was needed, so I began to noodle on it. For some reason, the idea of having big images of various foods with a small main character popped into mind. Have bugs as characters? Hmmm...obvious downsides to that. How about if the food is accidentally put into a machine that enlarges it...sounds implausible at best, or just plain dumb. Oh! I know who it's gonna be: that classic character Jack, who climbs up the beanstalk! So I wrote the story, yada yada, made a dummy, yada yada, digitally painted the illustrations, and yada yada, here it is:

Or will be, soon. It's technically a Fall title, but books have a way of getting around before their official birthday, you know? The story starts out like the traditional fairy tale, but instead of eating Jack, the giant cooks him a healthy meal. The giant, Waldorf, is definitely a good egg.

The book is designed to be a fun introduction to MyPlate and hopefully to a lifetime to healthy eating for kids. The goal for the illustrations was to show an abundance of fresh, appetizing foods, the best starting point for good meals. No processed factory foods here, except at the end under the Empty Calories section.

What about the leftovers, the existing copies of The Edible Pyramid? I was surprised to find out that some educators are still using the pyramid system, because the main difference is the presentation rather than the content. It can take awhile for some organizations to make the transition, apparently. So it's still selling, if not like hotcakes.

In any case, I'm looking forward to cooking up some activities to go with the book. Okay, I'll stop with the food and eating sayings now. Stick a fork in me, I'm done!

ARE WE HAVING ANY FUN YET? TEACHING TO THE TEST

So today (I’m writing on Monday) I was supposed to do a 9:00 AM test call for an upcoming video conference with some seventh graders.  Lo and behold, at 8:30 AM, my screen lights up and a harried-looking tech person appears amidst stacks of boxes.  “Sorry,” she says, “but we have standardized tests all day long today so I’m in a hurry.”  Since our upcoming video conference is based on a book I wrote about the Revolutionary War, I ask her if the students have studied that period yet.  “Not much,” she says.  “All we do in this state is test, test, test, so the kids don’t learn a thing.”

Hmmmm….I think she was in such a hurry that she was accidentally thinking out loud in front of a total stranger.  But she’s definitely not alone.  I hear this same complaint from teachers all the time when I visit schools. 

Ever since the No Child Left Behind Act first reared its head in 2002, kids in have had to take tons of standardized tests, and if they don’t do well, their schools pay the piper.  They stand to lose federal funding and free tutoring and worse.  These tests cover a very narrow part of the curriculum, but they supposedly show whether kids are learning or not, whether their teachers are any good, whether students have to take even more mind-numbing skill-and-drill classes in summer school, and whether they will stay awake long enough to pass to the next grade. Cheating is common—even some teachers and principals cheat by upping the test scores because teachers and principals can get fired or get a fat raise depending upon the results. Kids are bored to death or stress out over these tests. And nobody is having any fun. 

The worst part is that so much invaluable class time is spent teaching to the tests at the expense of every single thing that can get kids excited about learning.  Who wants to sit in a chair all day long and study from some dry-as-dust standardized test prep book just to keep their school out of trouble?  And as updated more “interesting” tests get progressively harder, even more test prep is in the works. 

 

Ahem. Ladies and gentlemen, there are better ways to teach and there are better ways to learn.   Why would anyone want to give up creative hands-on activities or ignore great music and art and foreign languages and amazing stories from history just so that they can mark the right box on a test form?  Who want to cut out class trips, whether they’re to the school library (to find some great nonfiction books, of course) or to some outstanding museums or to the great outdoors?   What is happening to young peoples’ health when physical education and even recess give way to studying for the tests? What if a class wants to explore a certain topic in depth?  In many schools, plenty of such worthwhile and beloved activities are on the chopping block.

Even the best teachers have trouble raising test scores under certain conditions. In some places kids can come to school hungry. Some neighborhoods are like revolving doors where students come and go all the time. Plenty of parents are overworked or jobless or have other problems that keep them from getting involved with their kids’ education in any way. If students have recently moved here from foreign countries and are not fluent in English, they will fare poorly on the tests no matter how smart they are.  But the tests reflect none of this.  They don’t show a thing about individual student progress or whether kids can think creatively or whether they have good critical thinking skills or whether they love to learn. 

But at least someone is thinking creatively out there. I loved this article entitled Eighth grader designs standardized test that slams standardized tests. Its your homework, so of course you have to read it.

Happy Birthday

I experienced another birthday recently (celebrated is no longer appropriate; endured is over-dramatic, at least for the time being). Without quantifying too much, let’s just say I can remember Sputnik but not the Korean War.

Why bring it up? My life has, coincidentally, been concurrent with the last half of the 20th century. Plus a bit of the 21st. And this period has been a remarkable one for science. I 've read persuasive arguments that for all the amazing advances in medicine, communications, and transportation that the past 50 or 100 years have witnessed, the greater paradigm shift happened during the industrial revolution. The telegraph, the steam engine, and the transition from farm to factory had a bigger impact on most peoples lives. This may be true, but our understanding of the natural world wasn’t changing at the same rate. The universe described by Newton in the 17th century was the same universe people inhabited at the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, we’ve come light years, literally.

One of the most commonly encountered criticisms of a scientific world view is that science, as a tool for understanding the world, is no more legitimate than almost any other mythological or investigative methodology. On the left, this manifests itself as relativism — the idea that there are no absolute truths, only truth relative to some cultural or intellectual frame of reference. On the religious right, science is sometimes positioned as an antagonist to Christianity or Islam, and is often characterized as a religion itself, especially evolutionary theory. To quote the Institute of Creation Research (I know, I spend too much time looking at sites like this): “Evolutionism is thus intrinsically an atheistic religion.”

I think much of the misunderstanding about science has to do with a focus on conclusions rather than process. This is partly a function of the way science and scientific ideas are reported in popular media. When some finding — margarine is better for one’s heart than butter — is accepted as dogma only to be discredited later, it appears that the scientific method has failed.  But the fact that science can accommodate new information and change its conclusions to provide a more accurate description of something is one of its strengths. Science thrives on failure. This is in contrast to many of the belief systems science now finds itself in conflict with, most of which have not changed the explanations they offer (if any) for hundreds or thousands of years.

So, back to that birthday. It’s offers a good excuse to think about a few of the important scientific concepts that have been accepted as mainstream science only during my lifetime. Many replaced earlier theories that had to be discarded or completely revised. 

An incomplete list:

• By deciphering the structure and mechanism of DNA in 1953, Watson and Crick explained the mechanism of heredity and showed that life is digital, not analog.

• In 1964, Wilson and Penzias discovered the cosmic background radiation, which allowed other scientists to confirm the Big Bang as the universe’s origin and relegate the steady-state theory to the dustbin of cosmology.

• Continental drift. What is obvious to a second grader — the continents fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and must have been connected at some point — was proposed by a few geologists but resisted by most until the 1960s, when symmetrical magnetic anomalies on the seafloor showed that the continents were separating along the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Continental drift explained not only the shape and position of the continents but the existence of many geological features, such as the Himalaya mountains and the Marianas Trench.

• Until the 1970s, it was widely accepted that all multi-cellular life on earth is dependent on the sun, either directly or indirectly. In 1977, hydrothermal vents were discovered in the Pacific Ocean. These “black smokers” are surrounded by ecosystems that get their energy not from the sun but from dissolved chemicals in hot water emerging from the vents.

• In 1980, Walter and Luis Alvarez discovered a worldwide layer of the element Iridium in strata dating from the end of the dinosaur era 65 million years ago. They proposed a large asteroid impact as a key event in the extinction of the dinosaurs (and many other forms of life), an idea that is widely accepted by earth scientists.

• A few scientists proposed the idea of human-caused global warming as long ago as the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that an overwhelming majority of climate scientists accepted the idea of androgenic global warming. As in the case of evolutionary theory, political and cultural factors have resulted in large segments of the population in this country dismissing what is an almost unanimous consensus among scientists.

• In 1998, cosmologists determined that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, probably due to dark energy, something we still don’t understand but which apparently constitutes almost 70% of the mass-energy of the universe.

These are just a few of the new ideas that science, by its own rules, has had to accept over the past 50 or 60 years. I say “had to” because each new idea displaced existing theories that, in many cases, represented the life’s work of other scientists.

But what, one might reasonably ask, does all this have to do with writing non-fiction books for children? It’s a reminder that science is a dynamic, messy affair. It rarely deals in absolutes. Its crowning achievements often turn out to be incorrect or incomplete. Keeping this in mind as we write can help us give young readers a more accurate picture of what science is and how it works.

The Road Not Taken

Bergen County Court House, Hackensack, NJ

When I was in high school, I fully expected to grow up to be a lawyer. It seemed to be an honorable and exciting way to make a living, at least based on the exploits of the legal shows I watched on TV. I didn’t actually know any lawyers. My family circle included loads of CPAs, some doctors, and a bunch of store owners. But that handsome, young Ben Caldwell on Judd for the Defense sure made the law look interesting.

I’m flashing back to my childhood plans for a few reasons. First, I’m on jury duty as I write this. Once every three years, the citizens of my county get themselves to the courthouse to watch a “You the Jury” film and spend one day in the lottery that plucks jurors from the general population. This time, the film struck a chord because it was introduced by Stuart Rabner, Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Back in the early 1970s, when both of us were teenagers, our dads were undergoing medical procedures at the same time. I remember the future Chief Justice from the hospital waiting room.

Today there were four possible trials needing jurors, three civil and one criminal. I got called for the criminal pool, but was excused after I informed the judge about my approaching book deadline. (Fortunately, I didn’t even have to make a lame joke about how my editor might turn up on his docket for murdering me if I was too late with the manuscript.) It was a gun possession case with two defendants and three lawyers. From my vast experience watching The Good Wife and the various incarnations of Law and Order, I know that the more lawyers you have, the longer the trial will be.

That’s not the only reason lawyers are on my mind. I also recently attended an alumni conference at my college alma mater, where about 80 percent of those present seemed to be lawyers. Some were corporate attorneys, to be sure, but the vast majority were involved with social justice issues like marriage equality and sexual abuse in the military. I admit I was envious at their abilities to not just talk (or write) about change, but to do the nitty-gritty work of making it happen. While I don’t regret my ultimate career path, I kind of respect my younger self for my good intentions.

So what happened to my aspirations to the law? I took a constitutional law course sophomore year in college and realized that legal reasoning didn’t seem to have much in common with actual logic. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the extent to which semantics dictated the outcome of a case. The “letter of the law” seemed to depend so much on the actual wording of a statue that common sense was lost in the process. I preferred to use words to inform, rather than to debate. So I switched my major from Politics to History and never looked back.

Paperback Writer? -- Guest Post from Karen Blumenthal

In the world of nonfiction for young people, California librarian Jonathan Hunt is one of my gurus. His reviews and essays are always incredibly insightful, and his latest article in Horn Book is no exception. 

His thoughtful look at readers of children’s and young adult nonfiction comes on the heels of two recent experiences, the Texas Library Association annual conference and the upcoming paperback publication of my book Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition.

I was at TLA because Bootleg is part of the new Spirit of Texas Middle School program, which recognizes authors with a Texas connection. In addition, my book Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different is on this year’s Lone Star list for middle-schoolers, and I had a chance to visit with some of the amazing librarians who devote their precious spare time to reading and picking books for these lists.

One of them surprised me with her description of her readers. Her middle school students are “insulted” by heavily illustrated nonfiction and almost shun them, she told me. Instead, they gravitate to smaller books like Steve Jobs because it’s neither too thick nor too thin, and it is sparingly illustrated.

Hunt said almost the same thing in his essay, noting that “too many photographs can rob author and reader alike of the opportunity to exercise their imagination.”

As an avid nonfiction reader who would appreciate more photos and relevant images in adult books, I always assumed illustrations brought a greater depth and visual dimension to a true story. But they have another side effect: To properly display images, nonfiction children’s books are somewhat larger than fiction books, which gives them the appearance of either picture books (babyish!) or coffee table books (and who wants to actually read those?)

In fact, Hunt makes the case for smaller “novelistic” book sizes for factual stories, saying that they circulate easily in his library, without any special selling from him.

That’s encouraging news for Bootleg, which is the first of my four books for young people to go from hardcover to trade paperback.  (Steve Jobs was published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback.)

Lauren Burniac, who oversees the paperback imprint Square Fish, says the Bootleg paperback, which will be out in late July, will be smaller in size than the original, which itself had a smaller trim size than many contemporary nonfiction books.

Paperback edition

While many young adult and children’s novels are published in paperback about a year after their hardcover publication, few nonfiction books make the leap. But with Common Core Standards calling for more students to read nonfiction and with school and library budgets tight, Burniac says that roughly a quarter of her paperback list is now nonfiction, up from just two or three titles before.

“We’re making a real effort to bring nonfiction into paperback,” she says, with the hope that a lower price will bring the books not just into libraries, but also into classrooms.  (And, I hope, maybe on to home bookshelves!)
            Will a paperback nonfiction book in a smaller size attract more buyers and more readers?

Or does that old publishing saw hold, that people choose fiction for the authors and nonfiction for the subject?

What do you think?