As booksellers settled in to the kickoff luncheon at this year’s New England Independent Booksellers Association fall conference, which ran from Oct. 6-8 in Providence, R.I., the bustling children’s book scene was evidenced by Harvard Book Store marketing manager Alex Meriwether’s latest event. The night before, Meriwether and his team hosted Rick Riordan for the author’s Magnus Chase launch party, which had a huge turnout, selling out a venue of 1,100 seats in the author’s newly adopted hometown of Boston. Meriwether added that Harvard is hosting more children’s-related events this season than any other season before, with Chelsea Clinton, Tavi Gevenson, Jason Segel, and more heading to the store this fall.
The impact of children’s books in the industry was at the fore during Tuesday’s keynote luncheon, where Nielsen Book’s Kristen McLean shared that in book sales, “kids’ is the bright spot,” particularly in the category of board books. McLean closed her address with the statistic that children born in the current generation, what she deemed “generation next,” are born in an increasingly diverse world, with race split 50% white, 50% non-white, underscoring the importance of more diversity in forthcoming children’s books.
Tuesday’s programming closed out with the New England Book Awards, where Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey acted as master of ceremonies, who remarked to the audience that they weren’t his usual crowd, as they were all “wearing shoes.” Marika McCoola and Emily Carroll for their graphic novel Baba Yaga’s Assistant (Candlewick) won for the children’s book category. McCoola accepted the award, and shared slides of her previous NEIBA badges, worn when she attended the conference as a bookseller at both Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., and Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Lois Lowry received the President’s Award – which the author’s editor, Margaret Raymo of HMH – accepted on Lowry’s behalf.
Villainy and Delinquency for Breakfast
Sara Pennypacker took the stage at the children’s author breakfast on Wednesday morning to talk about the genesis of her latest novel. “Pax is probably the book of my career,” she said. The novel is about a boy who has raised a fox, but when war breaks out, his father forces him to abandon the fox in the woods, because they are relocating. In her book, Pennypacker said she sought to investigate the “amazing bonds of radical empathy that children and animals can form.”
Author Marie Lu then showed slides of her earliest writing projects with the audience, including “wanted” posters she’d drawn up for fictitious villains, including one villain who committed the most heinous crime to young Lu: murdering “one thousand parrots.” She shared her early interest in villains to segue into a discussion of her latest series, the Young Elites, which is told from a villain’s perspective, an important story for Lu to tell as she feels “lady villains are in short supply.”
Newbery Medalist Jack Gantos also offered slides of photos from his childhood, well documented in his many autobiographical and semi-autobiographical books. In support of his newest novel, The Trouble in Me, Gantos talked a bit about his infamous coming of age. “Once you get too far out of your own skin,” he said, remarking on his young friendship with “the most amazing juvenile delinquent” who lived next door, “the moral compass, well, you begin to disregard it.”
At the NECBA Annual Meeting
At the annual meeting of the New England Children’s Book Advisory Council, held on Wednesday, New England children’s booksellers and book buyers got together to discuss their latest handselling challenge, a friendly competition with their West Coast sister organization, NCIBA. Booksellers in New England will compete with Northern California booksellers to see who can handsell the most copies of Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson’s picture book Last Stop on Market Street through the holidays. Participating bookstores will be entered into a lottery, and the winner will receive a store visit from de la Peña. The NECBA booksellers traded marketing strategies to get the word out about the book, including special event ideas, social media promotions, and window displays.
The topic of diversity, which is reflected in the title Last Stop on Market Street, drove the discussion at the annual meeting, and Sara Hines of Eight Cousins Books and Robyn Sung of Porter Square Books, both from the NECBA advisory board, shared resources to find backlist titles that highlight diversity. Publishers have started to compile backlist catalogues via Edelweiss and spreadsheets that they were sharing with NECBA booksellers, and Baker and Taylor offered a special discount for orders including select diverse titles to supplement the meeting. Hines and Sung also collected feedback from the audience about possible additions to the NECBA website, and offered other online resources, that would help support booksellers in discovering diverse titles to include in their stock and in displays.
Trading Favorite Handsells
Following the author breakfast on Thursday, at which Sesame Street actress Sonia Manzano spoke about her new coming-of-age memoir Becoming Maria, booksellers filled the exhibition floor, discovering galleys that would become their new handselling favorites.
Anne DeCourcey, sales rep at HarperCollins, was eager to share with booksellers the forthcoming My Life with the Liars by Caela Carter (HarperCollins, Mar. 2016), a middle grade novel about a girl rescued from a fundamentalist compound, who has conflicted feelings about her new life. Other in-demand forthcoming titles on the exhibition floor were Illuminae, the beginning of a new sci-fi adventure by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (Knopf), and The Nest (Little, Brown), an unsettling middle grade novel by Kenneth Oppel, illustrated by Jon Klassen.
Current favorite handsells in children’s ran the gamut from picture books to YA nonfiction. Yooree Losordo, owner of On the Dot Books in Dorchester, Mass., particularly loves to share The Day the Crayons Quit and its follow-up, The Day the Crayons Came Home, both by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers (Philomel). Another popular book in her store is the bilingual picture book The Great and Mighty Nikko by Xavier Garza (Cinco Puntos Press).
Kathleen Kemp, the new children’s buyer at Open Door Bookstore in Schenectady, N.Y., plans on handselling many copies of M.T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad (Candlewick), a book she shared with her 14-year-old son, who has lately been interested in military books. Her son was so taken with the book, she found him listening to the entire Shostakovich symphony. “It was such a pleasure to see him not only read the book,” she said, “but bring in the music.”
Next year’s conference will be held September 20–22, 2016, in Providence.
