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The spectres of Brexit and Trump faded as a bullish mood prevailed at the Nielsen Children’s Summit in New York, with the kids' sector boosted by sales of Harry Potter and Pokemon Go titles.
Despite continued e-book erosion in the children's sector, 2016 is shaping up to be a “great year” for kids book sales in the US, according to Nielsen. Higher sales of board books in the past three years is also a reassuring indicator for the future of the sector, the conference last week heard (27th October).
Kristen McLean, director of Nielsen new business development, explained that children’s fiction is up 5% to $122m (£100m) in the year to date, largely due to a boost to the Harry Potter franchise following the release of The Cursed Child playscript. However, she warned that going forward, fiction sales may be challenged because the genre is less discoverable. Meanwhile, sales of non-fiction titles have leapt up 6% to $38m (£31.2m), thanks to Pokemon Go books. Sales of Young Adult series have dropped off, but this year has seen a return to classics and early childhood books from authors such as Dr. Seuss.
Cross-platform media tie-ins have also been popular and fantasy has performed well. BISAC codes show fiction activity books have had the highest unit growth, but percentage wise, the fastest-growing juvenile fiction is books on the theme of robots.
Non-fiction was the biggest growth story of the day, though. Tapping into kid-centred interests, acitivities and empowerment, such as satisfying a cultural trend for “girl power”, is a key tool for success, the conference heard. A case in point is Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, funded by $1.44m (£1.18m) raised via Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Another healthy sign is that the market for kids’ non-fiction is growing in the independent store sector, now accounting for 11% of sales.
Meanwhile, sales of comics and graphic novels are “exploding,” in the US, both in fiction and non-fiction, for boys and girls, Nielsen said, with Raina Telgemeier’s Smile & Sisters series and “hybrids” like the Wimpy Kid series cited as examples.
Part of the empowerment is kids producing their own graphic fan fiction, noted comics journalist Brigid Alverson in a panel devoted to the genre, adding that “diversity, diversity, and diversity” of every kind is the trend for the future.
Although the children’s sector is highly concentrated – the top five publishers control 64% of the market - McLean emphasised that the real opportunities for strategic investment were in small and mid-size houses. She pointed to Parragon Books’100% growth from 2013-16, while Sourcebooks c.e.o Dominique Raccah, in a later session, estimated that there were more children’s start-ups today than ever before.
Still, as David Kleeman, senior vice president of global trends at Dubit showed, looking across media, discoverability is getting harder and harder and the biggest brands are taking more and more of the oxygen as consumers become “paralysed” by too much choice. One piece of advice is to “use old models with new platforms to help overwhelmed audiences”. He also advised publishers to remember that YouTube has jumped to the top in the influencer list; it is to kids what Google is to parents, “as important as their peers in shaping preferences”.
A panel about the intersection of big tech and publishers emphasised that Lego or Minecraft is a platform as much as YouTube or Google. C J Kettler, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's (HMH) chief of consumer brands, cautioned that when you partner, “every platform requires a different approach – you can’t create content for everywhere anymore”. She spoke of the costs involved in HMH’s own subscription start-up, Curious World. “It’s a long game, not for the faint of heart.”
Betsy Loredo, executive editor at Sesame Workshop, increasingly sees platforms as “a way to throw spaghetti at the wall and see which characters and stories stick”. She and others emphasised that the app world is too crowded – suffering from the choice paralysis Kleeman spoke of.
Nadine Zylstra, head of family entertainment at YouTube Originals, said that one strength of non-fiction was parents and kids using a platform to do things together, for example a family blogging its own stories. Another takeaway was using video as reading: the idea of putting a picture book up on TV, which won’t cannibalise print.
A conversation between Sourcebooks’ Raccah and Knopf Books for Young Readers publisher Jenny Brown echoed the optimism but also the challenges. In a world where every family member has his or her own device, the discussed how publishers can enable shared common reading and storytelling experiences. It's also harder to reach teachers in effective ways to help them find new books, the panelists said.
Among the upsides, both Brown and Raccah see greater access to readers via social media platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, greater diversity and better data. However, challenges exist around issues such as how to sell a book in 20 words and how to design a cover for screens of all sizes as well as paper.
On e-books, Brown thinks they won’t die, but digital won’t have the same impact for kids as for teens and adults. Raccah’s view was rosier: “We’re just now at the beginning of thinking about it in the right way. Our thinking has been wrong until now,” she said. One hint of her vision of the right way: a Sourcebooks series called Dragon Brothers, that makes use of a book and app and augmented reality.