From Publishing Perspectives:
Among the two days of B2B sessions programmed for the inaugural season of our Publishing Perspectives Forum at Frankfurter Buchmesse, an October 20 discussion called “What Young Readers Need Today: Children’s Publishing CEOs in Conversation” drew a strong audience of trade visitors and exhibitors.
Frankfurt president and CEO Juergen Boos led the wide-ranging conversation with Scholastic president and CEO Peter Warwick and Ravensburger CEO Clemens Maier.
Scholastic, based in the States but with deep international-market penetration, is about a century old and is widely recognized as the largest publisher in the world of its kind. Ravensburger was founded in 1883 and, at 139 years old remains focused on a range of products, not just on books, its first product actually having been a wood chip basket sold in 1884.
“Where I think we’re united and a little bit difference from many publishers,” Ravensburger’s Maier said early in the discussion, “is that [we’ve each] actually built a brand, a company brand, a recognizable brand” which may, in fact, be understood differently according to which consumer you ask about it.
“‘The parents know ‘Ravensburger,’” he pointed out, while youngsters for whom those parents are buying educational content may be more familiar with one of the company’s brands such as ThinkFun or Brio.
Warwick pointed out that there’s a parallel in the brand discussion for major companies like Scholastic and Ravensburger and the author-illustrator relationship.
“In illustrated children’s books,” he said, “it’s always a marriage” between the work of the author and the illustrator,” although he agreed with Boos that by the time a reader may be getting into the YA range of the market, there’s a good chance that she or he will be starting to recognize authors’ names, perhaps as readily as a favorite illustrator.
This creates a kind of shifting market dynamic for young readers’ work, and especially for major houses like Scholastic and Ravensburger.
“We always try to analyze as much as we possibly can,” Warwick said, “to understand exactly who is the customer: is it parents, is it the teachers, is it the child? In different circumstances, it can be it can be all of them.”
This question of market analysis and consumer insight prompted Maier to talk about “huge advances in technology and artificial intelligence that we can use in our industry, I think it’s super-exciting.
“We’re looking at things like text-to-image,” he said, “where through simple sentences, you can create images, it’s quite fascinating.”
While “the human hand is still very, very important, we see technology enabling us in many respects, with all the data analysis” that goes into good marketing by taking into account consumer reaction to products.
“Even a company of our size has to be pretty technologically savvy at this point,” Maier said.
And that, as Warwick had pointed out, is itself complicated in the children’s sector by the fact that the buyer and the reader frequently aren’t the same person. Just how text and image may affect the “consumer” can vary according to who that consumer is.
. . . .
“We do a very significant part of our business actually on the school premises,” he said. “We weren’t able to operate [Scholastic’s] book fairs. And we weren’t able to operate our book clubs. There was nobody around for quite a few months to significantly buy educational books, either. Those, our trade books, and what we sell internationally,” Warwick said, “are the core of our business.
“So the timing of the pandemic was pretty serious,” he told Boos. “What happened was that instead of being able to do commerce, as it were, on the school premises, we did a lot more business with the booksellers and the trade, and a lot more business with direct-to-parents—being able to deliver bookshop choices to parents rather than schools. It’s now reverted back to pretty much where it was before, which is to say 85-percent book fairs,” he said—”and the fairs’ revenue is higher than before the pandemic, so that’s very satisfactory.”
On the other hand, he said, “Our trade sales have cooled a little because those books the parents might have [bought] by going to a bookstore, the kids are now getting through the book fair. So we’ve seen the switch and the switch-back.”
Warwick added that the supply-chain effects had been substantial for Scholastic, as well. Having seen a lot of books come in later than expected a year ago, “We wanted to make sure that [now] we have everything. That’s been a change from last year to this year, a fundamental change in the way our business has been organized.”
. . . .
“With families staying at home,” Maier said, “there was a lot of time to play and a demand for those products, semi-educational products. A good chunk of our business is puzzles.
A lot of people” who might not normally advertise their fondness for puzzles “now started puzzling and were very vocal about it. We found ourselves on the front pages of American newspapers like the Wall Street Journal. I think it was the Australian prime minister who said that puzzles are ‘a product of national need’ and that you were allowed to leave the house for that.
“In that sense, COVID was kind to us. Obviously that’s changing now. Some of that extra time is going away and we do feel supply-chain challenges that many people fear. I get the sense our whole modern global supply chain has been built for 2-, 3-, 4-percent swings, not for the 20-percent swings we’ve been seeing over the last couple of years.”
Warwick concurred with Maier on this: “The whole basis of the supply chain for many years was ‘just in time.’ And it’s now become ‘just out of time,’ really because if you’re working on a just-in-time basis, that will really have to change.”
. . . .
Maier made a aside that in Ravensburger’s GraviTrax interactive construction apps, “Lots of people play it, but what we don’t do—or very rarely do—is try to mix the product experience.
“So when the issue was new, everybody was saying, ‘Wow, that is so cool.’” Some elements of the app’s operation could make it appear that an iPhone was broken, although this was simply a messaging effect built into the media.
“What we all realized, Maier said, “was that joining the experience of digital and physical in-app is not a great idea. Going with the same brand into both worlds we do think is a great idea. And then of course there’s exceptions to that because there’s some things where the screen for learning, as a supplement makes a ton of sense.”
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
Perhaps it’s just PG’s mood today, but none of the participants in this discussion sounded particularly intelligent, insightful or innovative.
Exhibit A: “The whole basis of the supply chain for many years was ‘just in time.’ And it’s now become ‘just out of time,’ really because if you’re working on a just-in-time basis, that will really have to change.”
Duh! Covid shutdowns disrupted manufacturing and shipping for virtually all major industries all over the world, a fact which most intelligent business executives took on board months ago.
Exhibit A is the equivalent of saying, “Trees used for printed books take too long to grow.”
Exhibit B: “In illustrated children’s books,” he said, “it’s always a marriage” between the work of the author and the illustrator.”
Oh, really? It takes an author and an illustrator to created an illustrated book? Who would have thunk that?
Presumably, Publishing Perspectives picked the highlights of the statements of these corporate drones to include in its article summarizing what was likely at least a one-hour session.
There was one key indicator Publishing Perspectives didn’t include in its reporting — How many audience members walked out during the session to look for something that was less tedious and more interesting.
But…but we’re adults, and we know what’s better for them so much better than they do that we shouldn’t even consider asking them such a question, because then we might find out that they’re less into Moral Improvement and more into Good Story, and the purpose of children’s literature is Moral Improvement. /s
It’s been that way since Victorian times, and it looks like that isn’t going to change.
What young readers need?
Maybe start by asking what young readers want?
If it was intelligent, insightful, or innovative, it couldn’t be about children’s books. Staff at children’s book imprints is so inundated with the need to dumb down, to keep unthreatening, to sell the same thing as last time in the content of their wares that it seeps into their management and business thought processes. If, that is, what they do can be called “thought processes.” As Ursula Le Guin said half a century ago:
(“Dreams Must Explain Themselves”)
On all evidence, there’s been no improvement.
The last time I went to a scholastic book fair at our local school I browsed the tables and noted that for almost all grade levels – through G6 – the books were ‘picture’ or ‘gimmick’ books. I even asked the librarian, who I know, “where are the books with words?” – and she said “yes, I know, right?”
It could have changed in the (mumble) years since I was a Board member at my daughter’s parochial school, but they weren’t a “one size fits all” affair for the book fairs. You assembled the shipment from a variety of “packages” for different grade levels, with at least a half dozen different “themes” per level. You could also include books from their general catalog, even if they were in a different package, or not in any packages.
We worked it as “librarian recommends, Parent’s Association and Board approve.” I don’t recall a single time that we overruled the librarian, we’d approve one of the three that she recommended.
Now, what we got depended on which fair was next – we had a Fall and a Spring fair. More of what you call “gimmick” books in the Fall fair, because parents were also shopping for their younger, pre-K children. The Spring Fair always had all of the books that were on the Summer reading lists (that Scholastic published, that is).