The second annual Global Kids Connect conference, organized by Publishers Weekly and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and held on December 7 in New York, brought together members of the book industry and beyond to discuss the future of global children’s publishing. While the morning sessions surveyed such topics as China’s fast-growing market for picture books, renewed foreign rights sales in Spain and Latin America, and challenges to the rights marketplace post-Brexit, the afternoon sessions shifted focus toward building on global blockbusters, translating from page to screen, engaging with YA audiences, and answering the children’s book industry’s most pressing questions.
The first post-lunch panel, “Translating Books to Screens: Industry Insiders’ Perspectives,” found the panelists digging into the current trends in adapting children’s books for the screen. Dan Yaccarino—author, illustrator, and television producer whose work includes the book The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau and Nick Jr.’s Oswald—noted that, over the past 15 years, he’s seen intellectual property become more and more important than a single work. Now, he said, he needs to be aware of, for example, the marketability of his characters as toys as much as he needs to be worried about the story in which those characters operate.
The panel made clear that wearing multiple hats has become an industry standard. Eddie Gamarra, literary manager and producer at The Gotham Group, hammered this home with one of the afternoon’s best lines: “I’m a used car salesman. I’m a priest and confessor. I’m a mommy,” he said, referring to his work with creators. He added: “We try and work 360, planning every medium and figuring out what’s the best path creatively, financially, and legally.”
Gamarra has also seen the market change its focus over the past 12 years from big feature films to series produced by companies like Amazon, and noted that many YA series are aged up for screen audiences. As proof of point, he cited the film adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, which turned the novel’s teen characters into “sexy twentysomethings.” Lisa Fragner, who heads the East Coast feature development department of 20th Century Fox Animation, concurred. “I don’t pass on young protagonists,” she said.” What I do is try to age them up.”
That said, page-to-screen adaptations of all sorts are in demand more than ever. Fragner said her company has been on “a big book-to-screen buying spree.” Some properties are purchased because of the name behind the book or author; others are bought just for the story, and Fragner noted that Fox has been more willing to take risks on these sort of IPs of late. She added that often, filmmakers and brands are as important as stars in attracting audiences, and that she sees genre works—science fiction, fantasy, horror, and action/adventure in particular—continuing to strongly attract audiences.
Fragner describes the film industry as being at a “crisis point” of sorts, needing to “figure out what makes a filmic experience” that will get consumers out of their homes to see movies. Tara Sorensen of Amazon Studios, meanwhile, underscored the need to create content that leaves a “lasting mark” on kids, whether on the big or small screen. “I don’t want to regurgitate stuff that’s already out in the marketplace.”
The next panel, “Creating—and Building Upon—Global Book Successes,” focused on turning books into global bestsellers and maintaining success abroad. Knopf Books for Young Readers senior executive editor Erin Clarke noted that, while a lot of global success comes from lucky publicity breaks—for example, when the host of Good Morning, America happens to personally open the package containing your book and request an interview with the author (as when Charlie Gibson discovered Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief)—the work really begins at home, within the publisher. Once the publisher and rights department are fully behind a book, Clarke said, the push to rope in foreign agents can begin in earnest, adding that it’s important to continue to nurture a book once it proves a success. That said, Clarke added that there’s no one true formula, either for marketing or for content. “What I love is being able to encourage my writers to take those chances, to explore the world,” she said. “To not write the same book over and over again.”
Writers House’s Cecilia de la Campa, co-director of subsidiary rights, noted that the key to finding global success is to find the right partners to work with on the world stage. That means, she said, going to book fairs and reaching out in person. “Even having just a few licensees around the world can mean a global success,” she said; international publishers will often decide to buy foreign rights when they see success happening in other countries. She also noted that sometimes, small things make a big difference: color-coding volumes in a series, for instance, makes it easier for readers to remember which book in a series they own when they head out to the bookstore to buy the next.
“You need to get a book right for the readers you know, and the other readers will fall into place,” said Christopher Franceschelli of SmartInk and Handprint Children’s Books, regarding the idea of creating a book with a local audience in mind while still keeping an eye toward publishing globally. Franceschelli, who had a breakout hit when he brought Hervé Tullet’s Press Here to the U.S. in 2011, also discussed the advantages of managing a small, nimble press (albeit one with the support of a larger house, Chronicle) when competing domestically and internationally. “The larger the giants grow, the larger the crumbs they leave behind,” he said. “I can live on those crumbs.”
The “YA Is Interactive: A Conversation About Community, Connectivity, and Opportunity” panel turned the conference’s eye toward building communities around books and intellectual properties. In many cases, that starts with the author. “We really encourage our authors to develop themselves as brands,” Joelle Hobeika, v-p of book development at Alloy Entertainment, said, noting that brand—especially on social media—should be “easy and fun” in order to get readers to engage. “We love working with debut authors,” she added, “because they’re among the most hard-working for us” in terms of branding and social outreach.
Hobeika sees technology and innovation primarily as a boon, not a curse, noting that companies like Wattpad are making content more accessible in a way she doesn’t think is taking away from traditional publishing at all. She added, however, that “the market is flooded,” and “the overall reader pool is getting a little bit smaller.”
Wattpad’s Ashleigh Gardner, who heads the company’s partnerships division, noted that her audience is a bit outside the traditional readership box. “They don’t define themselves as readers,” she said. “They see what they’re doing online as entertaining themselves or socializing.” That said, she sees lots of writers now joining Wattpad because that is where their readers are; in other words, cross-platform publishing and heavy social media presences for authors aren’t going anywhere. This means, she continued, putting a real effort into social accounts, and not simply using their accounts as tools for sales; too many other authors are too generous with their time for that strategy to work. “There’s more opportunities to speak to your audience [now], to get to know them, to interact with them directly,” she said—but with the opportunity comes an expectation too.
“You can’t look at the success of something like Wattpad and not see that there is a hunger for a more social experience,” Goodreads author marketing director Patrick Brown said. And yet, Brown also believes that the books themselves remain equally important as a marketing tool. “Books are one of the rare products that… if you get enough people talking about it, it can do the work for you.” he said. “The second a book is announced… there will be hundreds, sometimes thousands of people marking it as ‘want to read’ [on Goodreads].” Brown also noted that marketing techniques including hashtag campaigns help to bring in audiences, and “provide a unique reading experience for the reader.”
For the day’s final panel, “Answering the Hard-Hitting Questions,” Guardian children’s books editor Julia Eccleshare sat down with three of the biggest names in American children’s publishing to tackle some of the sector’s most vexing questions: What changes might be in store for publishers in the wake of the election of right-leaning populists in the West? Are publishers still willing to take risks? What happens to publishing if Barnes & Noble dies? What happens if the e-book dies?
For her part, Random House Children’s Books president and publisher Barbara Marcus remained mostly optimistic. Though she noted that there is a “reticence about publishing and rights” in a global sense and a general concern about “what kind of publishing will travel,” she concluded that “one beautiful thing about publishing is the camaraderie that exists in our little world. We publish things together. We try things together.”
One concern Marcus did voice was regarding the willingness on the part of big retailers to stick out their necks for a book. “In some ways, our retailers have gotten a little less flexible in taking a chance, and I think it’s actually more true in children’s than in adult,” she said. That makes it hard, sometimes, on the publisher—which can’t always pivot toward the retailer’s needs in the midst of a busy production schedule. She continued, however, to note that mass retailers like Target are “making a huge commitment to children’s books, in their way, in a way that serves their customer.”
Suzanne Murphy, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, brushed off the possibility of a B&N collapse by saying, “We’re not thinking that way at all.” Marcus concurred. Murphy also noted that children’s publishing has a built-in bulwark against risk due to many larger houses’ typically strong backlists. “I think we are able to have our backlist be very healthy, and that helps make us be less afraid of what we might think of as risk,” she said, before noting that children’s publishers still don’t typically take the same sorts of risks as adult publishers. “I think children’s publishers probably do have more in their tool kit [in terms of promotion],” she added, naming children’s librarians and parents as two vital sources of promotion.
Amy Berkower, chairman of the Writers House literary agency, however, wasn’t so optimistic about B&N’s perceived durability. “I think it would be tough, and there are signs of weakness,” she said. “Maybe another chain would open up, but it wouldn’t be good.”
Berkower also worried that, in spite of having strong backlists to fall back on, publishers are not doing enough with those lists to promote them in a way that gets them on the shelves of retailers like Barnes & Noble. “They can’t just spend thousands of dollars on a brand-new novel,” she said. “They need to focus on how they can promote the midlist.”
The three panelists primarily agreed on e-books, with Marcus asserting that “we are a print business” and Murphy adding that the e-book is simply not a novelty for this new generation, which has grown up with digital content. Berkower, looking at the falling numbers in e-books, sees a new trend: “E is down in adult, but [only] adult trade,” she said. “If you look at self-pubbed books published on Amazon, and you add them to the e-books [numbers], e is not down.”
But numbers, Berkower noted, can only go so far. “Real trade books—I don’t think algorithms are going to really help,” she said. While acknowledging that “they’re important in terms of data,” she emphasized that in a business such as publishing, data isn’t everything. “I don’t want to belittle the fact that we now have a lot of this information,” she said, “but I think that’s what makes this business so interesting. It’s an art.”
