Hi,
I’m just back from a lovely break in West Cork. I’ve thrown myself straight into editing Amy Green 2 – Summer Secrets. It’s going well so far. I’m off to Annaghmakerrig next week, a writers’ retreat in Monaghan, so I’m hoping to get lots of work done there too.
I have 2 books to edit and then 2 more to start – but I’m not complaining. It’s fab that publishers want my books at all. Times are not easy for writers starting out these days. But good stories will always find a home.
So if you are chipping away at it – keep going! Never give up.
If you are interested in the world of children’s books and children’s publishing in Ireland in particular, this may be of interest – an article from last Sunday’s Business Post. See below.
Keep the writing faith.
Sarah X
First Impressions (from the Sunday Business Post)
Sunday, April 12, 2009 by Catherine Cleary
Once upon a time, a Dublin woman sat down to write a novel about the Famine for children. Two decades and 28 editions later, the books are still selling in Ireland at a rate of around 1,000 a month. Marita Conlon-McKenna’s Famine trilogy, which began with the publication of Under the Hawthorn Tree in 1990, is one of the extraordinary success stories of Irish writing.
Today, the Irish children’s publishing industry is a tale of new dawns, stellar successes and dogged struggle.
Irish children’s authors have gone global, with writers such as Eoin Colfer, Darren Shan and, more recently, Derek Landy hitting the jackpot. But many more authors writing children’s books set in Ireland earn less than they would in a minimum-wage job. And while a successful Irish writer of adult fiction can expect to be interviewed regularly on radio and in newspapers, most children’s authors work quietly in their studies or at their kitchen tables, undisturbed by reporters.
So why do it at all? Perhaps it is the chance to see their work become a classic in their lifetime. Their words might make a lasting impression on young minds, turning children into readers for life. Like all writers, they struggle to produce something good, but when it really works their efforts straddle both commercial and literary camps. Publishing children’s books in Ireland is a tough game, and the facts about how much an average children’s writer can expect to earn are sobering.
Mags Walsh, director of Children’s Books Ireland (CBI),an advocacy group funded by the Arts Council, agrees that the shadow of a certain boy wizard hangs over all discussion of the business of children’s books. ‘‘Harry Potter transformed everything,” she says.
‘‘He made children’s books a very attractive proposition for publishers, who started giving them really strong marketing support in that quest for world domination. Children’s books have gone from being a niche to the bread and butter of a lot of publishing houses.”
The Eoin Colfer success story has a familiar plot. An Irish writer starts their career with an Irish publisher – in Colfer’s case, O’Brien Press rejected his first book, so he went away and wrote Benny And Omar, which O’Briens subsequently published. But to get the big deal, Colfer got a London agent and flew the nest. There are no hard feelings; it was a pragmatic decision.
‘‘The lure of London is difficult to resist when you’re a writer,” Walsh says. ‘‘We need an indigenous publishing industry. I think Irish readers need to see themselves in the books they are reading. Thirty to forty years ago, they were reading about ginger beer and boarding schools, now they need Sean and Maura reflected. Young readers particularly need that.”
Because of the impression that writing for children is easier than writing for adults, it is harder to get a children’s book deal, according to Walsh. ‘‘There is such an amount in the slush pile, and to do it very well takes an enormous amount of skill. Having said that, some incredible manuscripts are still rejected.”
The rewards for the success stories are more than financial.Last October,Walsh helped to host an event forDerek Landy, who will this year publish the third book in his Skulduggery Pleasant series. ‘‘We had 350 kids in LibertyHall, and it was like a rock concert,” she says. ‘‘The kids were cheering and roaring.”
But while some of our children’s writers have built world-wide reputations and global audiences, literary Ireland has been a little more sniffy about their success. ‘‘A really clear example of that is that Aosdána [the Irish artists’ group honouring literary work which has made an outstanding contribution to the genre] has never given membership to a children’s writer,” Walsh says. ‘‘The work is seen as not as important.”
This is despite the fact that, for many booksellers, children’s books can be an economic lifeline. Aideen Brady, chair of the Booksellers’ Association and owner of Abtree Books in Lucan, says that without the sales of one particular book she would have had a ‘‘disastrous’’ January.
She is not the only small bookseller who was kept afloat by Stephenie Meyers. The American author of the Twilight series (lonely girl meets vampire in high school and falls in love) has been keeping bookshops open since word of her work spread like wildfire through teenage circles in Ireland, and elsewhere. ‘‘Every third or fourth sale in January was a Stephenie Meyer,” Brady says. ‘‘Since last November it’s been phenomenal, and the films are coming out now, so it’s going to continue.”
Like many small bookshops, Abtree’s trade in children’s books is strong – and seems recession-proof. The Horrid Henry series sells to boys, and ‘‘anything Princessy’’ is mainstream girls’ fare. For teenagers, it’s all about the vampires.
Brady believes that the quality of Irish children’s writing is getting better and better. The arrival of authors of adult fiction such as Roddy Doyle into the genre have also brought new respectability to children’s books.
There is a long literary tradition of adult fiction writers turning to children’s books, according to Celia Keenan, senior English lecturer in St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra. Graham Greene wrote stories about trains, while Ian Fleming invented a flying magic car .Oscar Wilde and TS Eliot wrote for children and, more recently, so did William Trevor.
‘‘I don’t think there is a formula for a successful children’s book – when you have a formula, the writing is never as good,” says Keenan. ‘‘Yes, there are common factors – get rid of the parents and you do free up the children. But then you look at something like Little House on the Prairie, where the parents were a huge part of a story that is still loved.”
Teenage fiction began as a genre, Keenan says, with JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. She also said that ‘‘if Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls was published today, it would be a teenage book. It’s got all the ingredients.” The growth in teen fiction and crossover books (read by children and adults) is expanding the market, and Keenan believes that there is an increased appreciation of children’s books.
‘‘People are working very hard in the area, and there’s the financial success of a number of high-profile children’s writers,” she says. ‘‘What’s been happening for a little while is that writers are published in Ireland initially, and then get taken up by a British publisher at the point at which they’re becoming financially successful.”
In the book-lined study of her Dublin home, Siobhan Parkinson is frank about the realities of moving between the publishing worlds of Dublin and London. After 15 years, numerous awards and 12 children’s books, she is now dipping into her savings to pay the bills as she waits for word from Puffin Books on her latest novel. ‘‘There was a point in the late 1990swhen I was getting very good royalties from O’Brien Press. When I say ‘very good’, I mean about €10,000 to €12,000 a year. That’s absolutely mega-royalties,” she says.
Around 2004,s he approached a London agent, who got her a three-book deal with Puffin. ‘‘It wasn’t huge by any means, but it was a three-book deal and I did publish three books with Puffin. Two of them are already out of print; one of them was out of print within a year,” she says.
‘‘So there’s the other side of the coin – you get the deal upfront and you get the advance, but if your sales don’t make it, within a year you’re dead.”
So what about the fairytale ending of the single mother writing her ideas in a cafe and ending up the wealthiest woman writer in history? ‘‘Well, that does happen. But it happens to one person,” says Parkinson. ‘‘Even someone like Eoin Colfer will tell you it’s not what it looks like. You might get a good deal – but that goes over a five-year cycle. It’s good money, but it’s not JK Rowling money.”
Parkinson describes her work as something that is ‘‘not loud. It doesn’t make a big splash. In fact, the last book I published was in Irish’’.
She is working with New Island Books to set up a children’s imprint, to be called Little Island. ‘‘We’re hoping to publish in 2010,” she says. Several other Irish publishing houses also seem to be ready to dip their toe in the children’s market again.
So is writing for children easier than writing for adults? ‘‘It is easier in one respect, in that the books are shorter. I can sit down to revise a novel and can have the whole thing read before lunch,” Parkinson says. ‘‘But it’s not easier in any other way; it’s exactly the same process. I don’t see this huge distinction in writing for children and writing for adults.
‘‘I tend to work at the upper age range, so it’s more like writing for adults. The gulf between writing for four-year-olds and 12year-olds is much bigger than the gulf between 12-year-olds and 20-year-olds.”
A big success for an Irish published children’s book would be to sell 5,000 books in the first year, Parkinson says. Royalties are lower because book prices are lower, so that could realistically represent an annual income of under €5,000.
‘‘Children’s books are probably too cheap, and that’s why publishers find them difficult to manage,” she says. ‘‘I don’t buy into this theory of the big, bad publisher; in general, everyone is struggling here, but people continue to struggle on because they love the work.
‘‘I’m optimistic about the writing, but I’m more concerned about the publishing. The writing is happening and there’s talent. The Irish market is being served very well by O’Brien, but there’s always the problem for the writer of sticking with an Irish publisher and making very little money, or going to Britain and making some money, and then finding that it’s all gone very quickly.
‘‘It’s very tricky. I think the best solution is to try and keep in with your Irish publisher, do some books in Ireland and also have a British publisher. That gives you a bit more volume.”
Sarah Webb worked as a children’s books buyer for 17 years before becoming a fulltime writer. Her first three books were for children, and she then moved into the world of chick lit. It was ten years after she started writing before she was able to make a living from her fiction.
‘‘A lot of people are looking for that instant success and in some cases that does come, but most people are chipping away for years,” she says.
On a writer’s visit to her son’s school three years ago, she had a conversation with a schoolgirl that sent her back into children’s writing. ‘‘This girl said: ‘My mum loves your books and I’ve read some of them, but she won’t let me finish them. Will you write a book for me?’ “
Webb sent the girl her first three chapters; she loved them, and encouraged Webb to keep writing. Webb’s agent secured a preemptive bid for a three-book deal, and Amy Green, Teen Agony Queen, was sold to Walker Books for a six-figure advance.
‘‘It’s the difference between making a living and doing it as a hobby. You can’t make a living writing children’s books for the Irish market. The average good advance for a children’s book here is €1,000,’’Webb says.
‘‘All writers want is readers, for as many people as possible to read what they’ve written.” Webb estimates that there are as few as 20 people making a living in Ireland from children’s writing or illustrating, but she believes there is space for new talent, and points out that children’s book sales have been steadily rising.
Living writers will also, this year, begin to benefit from the library lending fee, a small amount paid to theme very time their book is borrowed from a public library. ‘‘It’s not huge; in Britain it’s around 5p per book loaned, but last year I got a stg£3,000 payment from Britain,” says Webb.
In Michael O’Brien’s office in Rathgar, three large oil paintings by award-winning children’s illustrator PJ Lynch depict the children of Conlon-McKenna’s Famine trilogy.
The lavishly detailed paintings are the artwork for the books’ new covers, which are going into shops this month.
Re-jacketing books and keeping them in print is what O’Brien does, he says, to keep his authors earning money. He also insists that the theory that an Irish children’s writer has to go to London to make it big is no longer the case.
‘‘Our new talent, Celine Kiernan, defies that. Hers is a remarkable story,” he says. The Dublin woman had planned a medieval trilogy called The Moorehawk Trilogy, and approached O’Brien Press with the first book, which had been written in the spring of 2008. ‘‘It was one of those rare cases where you read something and you absolutely know that this is a new talent. I had a feeling in my own gut that we hadn’t had anything as significant as this since Eoin Colfer walked in the door,” says O’Brien.
He decided to actively sell the first book, The Poison Throne, at the Bologna Children’s Books fair a few weeks later. On the basis of the first edited chapters of the first book, two major European publishers bought it.
‘‘She didn’t have to go to London,” says O’Brien. ‘‘We’ve subsequently done a deal with Little, Brown for American and British rights, excluding Ireland. We’ve had a Polish offer, one from Russia and Australia, and we’re negotiating in France.”
He also believes that, while the rewards may be higher with a bigger publisher, the pitfalls are also more drastic. ‘‘Some of the writers who jumped ship have been dumped, not only by their agent but by their publisher as well,” he says.
The experience of discovering and then losing Colfer to London has been a steep learning curve: ‘‘We learned lessons and we put things in place so that, if we had a talent, we’d be able to exploit it.”
Without Arts Council funding of roughly €60,000 a year, O’Brien Press would be unable to publish its 20 new children’s titles a year, and reprint between 80 and 100 of its other children’s titles.
Like everyone else, O’Brien is frustrated about the pricing of children’s books. ‘‘There’s no logical reason why children’s books are half the price of adult books. It takes the same amount of money to publish them, and they generally sell fewer copies,” he says.
One of O’Brien’s most successful authors, Judi Curtin, would usually command a first print run of 10,000 copies for her Alice and Megan books. ‘‘But she’s an absolute exception,” says O’Brien. ‘‘Before, we would never have printed fewer than 5,000 copies. Now, with the recession, we’re looking at 3,000.”
O’Brien’s attitude to children’s books embraces commercial fiction, as well as more literary efforts. ‘‘Books should be literary where it’s appropriate, but they don’t have to be as long as the kids get a kick out of reading them, and the parents get a kick out of reading them with the kids,” he says.
‘‘One of the things I find very exciting is the rich talent we have here. I don’t think it’s the same in every country. In Denmark and the Netherlands, it’s much harder to get children’s writers to write books, because there’s far more money in film and TV and other competing media. I think, in Ireland, the book as an icon is still hugely respected and revered.”
As a publisher that sells direct to schools, O’Brien is upset that the schools’ library budget has been slashed recently. Schools’ book budgets have traditionally sustained writers working in Ireland, giving them a guaranteed modest starting point for their income.
One of the most critically acclaimed children’s writers working in Ireland is Kate Thompson, a native of Yorkshire who is based in Kinvara, Co Galway. Since 1997, none of her children’s books has been out of print in Britain. ‘‘As far as I’m aware, all three of my books for adults are now out of print,” she says.
She gets irritated by the constant references to the Harry Potter phenomenon. ‘‘I have nothing against JK Rowling or her writing. . . [but] it’s equivalent to referring to Dan Brown every time literature is mentioned.
There is a new phenomenon out there, of publishers looking for ‘the next Harry Potter’, but most publishing continues as it always has,” she says.
‘‘Very few people make a living from their royalties, whether they write for children or for adults and, in my experience, even fewer set out to write in a particular genre because they see a passing bandwagon and expect to make money from it.”
For Eason’s children’s book product buyer David O’Callaghan, the biggest thing since Harry Potter has been Meyer’s vampires.
‘‘Atone point recently, she held the top five positions in the Nielsen Books can, which records retail sales in large chains and supermarkets, with four different books and a movie tie-in,” says O’Callaghan, adding that, at Bologna this year, ‘‘you couldn’t move for falling over vampires, werewolves, fairies or angel books’’.
O’Callaghan sees the next big wave coming on the back of The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which its American author, Jeff Kinney, first self-published online before securing a book deal. ‘‘It’s the biggest thing in the States since sliced bread.”
His hero of the year is an Irish self-publisher, Eoin Benji Bennett, whose picture book, Before You Sleep, written after the death of his four-year-old son, has sold over 10,000 copies. The Dublin man sold 8,500 copies through Easons alone, O’Callaghan says.
‘‘I don’t know where he keeps the books, but it’s an amazing story to sell so many copies of a self-published book. Only one or two other picture books, like the Gruffalo or Oliver Jeffers, would ever have those kind of sales.”
