This isn’t such a relevant topic anymore but, dammit, it was when I started it. So here goes:
I love kids’ fiction. I really do. I love how much more imaginative they are than most adult books and how, in a surprising number of cases, how much more readable they are. What I don’t like, however, is that despite the thousands of new titles published every year the best sellers are utterly predictable. And, in almost all cases, will be bad titles. Anthony Horowitz? Awful. Darren Shan? Dreadful. Stephenie Meyer? So, so dull and with dreadful writing to boot.
What annoys me most about this is the unwillingness for parents’ to try new books for their kids. Of late, I’ve been attempting to sell the work of Chris Wooding, an utterly wonderful author, whose books really ought to sell a lot more than they do. However the fact that a large number of people have never heard of him or his books before, combined with the utterly horrible covers his publishers have slapped on them (curse you, Scholastic) has left me being almost entirely unsuccessful in my quest.
But this reticence in trying new things hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last year the Publishers Association enacted a new initiative to have age banding on the back of all kids’ fiction, with the aim being to help parents choose books that would be more suitable for their children. Of course, this wouldn’t help consumers who shop at most book stores, as the majority already have their children’s section sub-divided into different categories such as ‘Teen’, ‘9-12’ and ‘5-8’, and any that have swearing or adult themes are stickered as containing such. With the age banding guidelines being along the lines of ‘13+’, ‘9+’ etc, you can see how it really doesn’t affect a thing. And, if the shopper is still unsure about the suitability of the book, there are booksellers available in-store to direct enquiries to.
So what’s the point then?
The answer, I fear, is to enhance the ease of book buying in supermarkets. I have nothing against supermarkets, they are a convenient place to acquire delicious groceries, but as a place to buy or, more appropriately, browse for books they are just not a good place to do so. The range they stock is limited at best, and the staff will, on the whole, simply not know as much about various books as the average book shop employee. I realise that the previous statement might appear to be derogatory, but it’s not intended to be. Of course, there will be staff who work in ASDA, Tesco or whichever supermarket you happen to be shopping in, who know a lot about books, in some cases more than the people running the book stores (I’m looking at you here, Gerry Johnson), but on the whole I reckon not. And this is without the fancy tools that booksellers have to find out the answers to your book-related queries.
So, it’s the supermarkets that come out the rosiest from this age banding scheme. Supermarkets who, with their spending power, have the ability to undercut every book shop that exists in Britain at the moment. Just look at the ‘Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows’ debacle – ASDA sold it for just £5, whilst everyone else was selling it for £9.49 which was still half price! This is something that book shops simply cannot compete with.
If age banding takes off (there is a sizeable petition against it, featuring such luminaries as Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett), it will strike a blow against books shops. And that, I feel, is a bad thing for everybody. Because the likes of Waterstone’s, Borders et al are good for the country. Reading is important and discovering new titles and authors is a magical feeling, and it’s the ability to enable that which makes, among many other things, book shops a far better place to buy your books than supermarkets.
