No alcopops here, only teddies: why do we want children to read, after all?

Children’s editor Emily Hardy on publishing  for children and the snobbery that all too often surrounds series books.

Like a lot of people working in publishing, my first foray into the commercial reality of the industry was as a bookseller. Selling books is tough work, and where your personal passion and advocacy for an author can generate a few extra sales here and there, the feeling is pretty special. But as often as not, bookselling is about letting the books that sell themselves do just that: sell themselves. This is especially true of children’s books, where the predominance of series and branded publishing can make retail buyers’ choices of stock (after a useful glance at previous sales figures) little more than no-brainers. The new Darren Shan gore-fest? Tick. Another instalment of the Wimpy Kid’s escapades? Yes please. And was there a bookseller on earth who didn’t splash displays of Harry Potter’s farewell tome all over their windows? I doubt it.

There’s a reason for this, one that goes beyond economics and takes us right back to what is most important: children – their independence and their passions. Kids know what they like; and when they find it, they quickly – and often obsessively – want more of the same. (Until, that is, they notch up a few more inches on the great doorframe-inscribed measure of change.) For at least a year of my brother’s youthful existence he subsisted on almost nothing more than the same meticulously prepared meal of Shreddies cereal with sultanas, shovelling them into his mouth every single day while he thumbed prized copies of Janet and Allen Alberg’s many, many storybooks. The next year, it was ham sandwiches and Match magazine. He’s now a (basically) well-adjusted thirty-three-year-old – a happy reader, and with an evolved culinary palate.

In the children’s literary world, we’ve accepted these cycles of popular series and genres as a fait accompli. And they are met with remarkably little intellectual resistance; all broadsheet press literary editors happily commission review pieces of not just Phillip Pullman’s stunning Northern Lights trilogy, but also the fifth book, say, of Charlie Higson’s Young Bond franchise. This year’s longlist for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize – a brilliant, serious prize that each year brings to greater prominence the very best of children’s writing – features no fewer than seven books from firmly established series and branded authors. As publishers, we seek out the newest popular trend, hoping to catch a wave before it crashes and fizzles back to sea. And why not? Those industry commentators who do sometimes cry foul and accuse children’s publishers of derivativeness, or even cynicism, often seem to overlook the fact that we children’s publishers love young fiction with the same passion as our authors’ young readers do. The general picture does adjust itself as different trends come and go because the truth is that we’re as bored of vampires as you are. It is through a combination of imaginative acquisition and constant dialogue with our readers that the magicians give way to spies, only to be bitten by werewolves, before fairies are having their day in the sun. In the meantime, in the spaces between such transitions, as young readers rush back to what they love again and again, they are having great, great fun. This matters, and we seem to have accepted it to a large extent, happy to see children making their own choices and reaping huge personal reading pleasure.

But. There is one significant, and massively successful, subsection of children’s publishing where long-running series are often met by booksellers, parents, teachers and librarians, with vague and ill-defined uncertainty, queasy resistance, and, in some extreme cases, moral outrage. I’m not talking about the risqué subject matter of sex-fuelled young adult romantic fiction, or the gruesome, blood-soaked horror of much boys’ adventure storytelling. I’m talking about the books published by every major children’s publisher in the UK for an utterly rapt readership of five-, six- and seven-year-old children about worlds of fairies, ponies, dinosaurs, lost puppies, magic kittens, dancing unicorns and other such apparently offensive creatures.

One of my most vivid memories of working as a bookseller is of a five-year-old girl storming into the shop, seemingly out of nowhere, all on her own, screaming: ‘I need another one! I need another one! I need another one! I need another one NOW!’ Here was a child on a personal mission. After a minute or two foraging in the children’s section she ran to me at the till, placed her chosen book down and was met by an exhausted mother who had by this time caught up with her. The book in question was number seventy-something in Orchard Books’ series, Rainbow Magic. She had, she told me with a puffed out chest, ‘read all the rest. THREE TIMES!’ Rather than express any pride in her young daughter’s demonstrably prodigious literary commitment, the mother turned to me and said tiredly and with cringing embarrassment that she was ‘ashamed’ to be buying these books. Ashamed to be buying books; we’re not dealing in alcopops here.

Why is this? I think the answer lies in a knotty tangle of issues about literary snobbery and authenticity, often with some class anxiety thrown in for extra tense fun. (The bookshop I was working in was in an extremely affluent residential area of London; such comments among parents were not uncommon.) But none of these notions really make any sense, and the type of unexamined resistance they produce can have a retrograde effect on the long-term reading habits of children. Rainbow Magic is an astonishingly popular series of stories about different magical fairies, well into the hundreds of titles now, and which have sold nearly twenty million copies in the UK alone. I make no claims for their status as contemporary classics, but they are sweet, familiar, good-natured fun, and they are clearly adored. It is the creation of a specialised company called Working Partners, a group of passionate, brilliantly skilled children’s editors and writers who have similarly produced a succession of wildly popular and ubiquitous series of fiction for young boys and girls. Working Partners’ footprint and track record in the UK children’s publishing trade is very large indeed, and for no other reason that they are brilliant at what they do, care deeply about children’s books and culture, and understand exactly the types of books that children really want to read, with very little sense of precious anxiety. Contrary to any perception that books are somehow written by factory line, contributing to each series is a group of highly talented writers, all of whom are among the most experienced and accomplished authors working in children’s books.

For the last year and a half I have had the great pleasure to work alongside Faber’s children’s team with Working Partners to produce a fresh and original series as part of our list branching out to publish for younger readers aged between five and seven. We initially approached them with some possible avenues to explore – we loved the idea of teddies, almost instinctively, and without quite knowing why – and, after a series of brilliantly fun creative discussions, the Hoozles were born, a delightfully motley group of handmade toys that come magically to life when they form a bond with a girl or boy, their special friend. Throughout the creative process we were continually referencing tropes of classic children’s fiction – from the escapism of Narnia, to Lyra’s demon, from Hilary McKay’s sense of contemporary childhood experience, to Philippa Pearce’s lovely rendering of magical transformation, to name but a few. Our Hoozle stories are of course completely different sorts of books – intentionally so. But they have been created with real care and, yes, love, and with absolute attention to the myths and themes that sustain and lift all children’s storytelling.

The result is a series of books, beautifully illustrated by the artist Penny Dann, that I am especially proud of – proud, also, that Faber is publishing these stories alongside our legendarily outstanding list. The Hoozles hit the shops at the end of this month and so far the response among children – the one that really counts – has been a total joy to witness. But some eyebrows have been raised, with a few grumbles being voiced by some independent retailers. One sales rep told me recently that a bookseller was ‘shocked’ that Faber – Faber – was publishing these sorts of books. Books that sparkle! The horror! This strikes me as a largely pointless notion for so many reasons, not least because Faber’s children list is home to a stunning array of writing of the highest literary quality, writing that not even the fuddiest of fuddy-duddies could take issue with.

I don’t intend to advance the blanket, over-rehearsed argument that as long as children are reading, it’s all good. We all have our own tastes and sense of ethical propriety, and publishers of children’s books do have a responsibility to tread these lines sensitively. Many publishers have certainly been guilty in the recent past of selling books that raise seriously troubling issues, particularly around the subject of gender. I have absolutely no time for books that suggest it’s a good idea for girls to be sexy at age six. Faber is proud to be a publishing house where the covenant and trust that exist between us and our readers are valued, and we take these judgements seriously, always.

But, in insisting on a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ children’s fiction, whatever such categories might mean, if anything, we risk suggesting to young people, perhaps unconsciously, that simple pleasurable entertainment and reading are mutually exclusive experiences. This can only be bad news for publishers, parents, teachers, booksellers and children alike. Those who are seriously troubled at the idea of very young children reading stories about baby animals and teddies (as opposed to what exactly? Proust?) should ask themselves whether their expectations of their kids’ tastes, not to mention literacy abilities, are entirely realistic. The last thing any of us should want is for children’s earliest reading experiences to seem like work – difficult, stressful and anxiety-inducing. These are patterns that can bed in, particularly at a young age.

If we want children to read voraciously, especially at the period when they are making the often difficult transition from lavishly illustrated picture flaps to more challenging, text-heavy chapter books, the key, surely, is to make books accessible, undaunting and, yes, visually appealing. After all, most adult men and women regularly indulge in the aesthetic pleasures of personal grooming, wearing attractive clothing and living in nice-to-look-at homes without feeling it compromises their ability to hold a conversation or live intellectually fulfilling lives. My friend Kate makes a really valuable point here, saying: “Surely the objection is that they appeal to a radically different aesthetic – these adults haven’t decked their homes out in pink satin and presumably wouldn’t object to the Hoozles if they looked like a Jigsaw dress. I think what’s at issue is parents forcing their own tastes on children – I don’t personally love the way these books look, but that’s presumably as it should be and I hope as a parent I’d see that my own tastes and that of my child don’t have to coincide. Perhaps it’s because books and culture are so personal to us; we can accept that children are different to adults in a million different ways (they go to bed at 8, like Alton Towers etc) but somehow we can’t stomach that our children might make their own choices in something so ‘important’.” I agree.

What is more, as the range of competing media – film, television, gaming, music, online activity and the digital evolution of publishing itself – is changing the ways in which children choose how to spend their time, it’s more important than ever for books to be made available with relaxed expectations, and as entertainment, if they are to choose the written word at all.

I want children to read so that they read some more, and then some more, and more after that, endlessly. And I want them to be making these choices of what to read for themselves. Then, whether they’ve grown into horny teens grabbing for The Rachel Papers, slick cynics going all Brett Easton Ellis, romantic idealists inscribing ‘Reader, I married him’ in exercise books, or sentimental footballers with hearts at Fever Pitch, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief (our own tastes hands off) that they could just be on their individual, independently navigated rocky road to Eng Lit after all. And with any luck, they might not even have noticed.

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