Kids, says Vicki Palmquist, are “very discerning about what they read.”
Yeah, right, you might be thinking, if you’ve got the kind of kids who will chew through whatever reading material you leave lying around the house, whether it’s at, above, or below their reading level. Or maybe you were that indiscriminate kid yourself.
But, I think Palmquist means something a little different from that: Sure, a reader is a reader is a reader. But that voracious young reader is also going to have opinions about what she reads, opinions that are almost entirely unblemished by the writer’s celebrity status. So Madonna wrote that, so what? John Travolta, Bill Cosby – who’re they?
It’s too bad the kids aren’t the ones buying the books.
Palmquist, who is one of the founders of the Children’s Literature Network (read more about it on page 11), says that a sad trend in the world of children’s books has publishers relying more heavily on celebrity authors because they’re a lot easier to market.
“What the publishing industry is finding is that parents, bewildered by all the choices, will pick up a celebrity book faster than they will pick up another one because they’re familiar with the name,” she says. “Even though people in the know will point to perhaps two celebrities who have written good books.”
That means that the backlists – the stalwarts like Marion Dane Bauer, who has been writing for decades and just won the Maud Hart Lovelace award, and the talented newbies like Julie Jersild Roth, who just published her first book – are on their own when it comes to bringing attention to their work.
Which is too bad. Because it almost seems silly to call terrific writers and illustrators like the ones in our Summer Reading Special “hidden gems.” They’re the sort of gems that hide in plain sight, right here in Minnesota.
For even more help in digging out some of the locally grown good stuff on the book store shelves, be sure to check out our list of the Minnesota Book Award nominees and winners on page 30.
Happy reading!
