Children's book publishing is a wonderful industry to work in. That sounds like an obvious thing to say - I mean, whenever anyone asks me what I do and I tell them I'm a picture book editor, they comment on what a great job it must be. And they're right. It is. There's something very special about creating stories: about getting that feeling from a text or an illustration; about knowing that you're working on something you believe in; about building relationships with authors and illustrators and working with them to make their stories into books. There are so many parts of my job that I am in love with, and I don't say that lightly.
So I love my job, and I never really switch off from it. I follow lots of conversations about the industry I work in, with varying degrees of interest. People talk about how publishing is in a state of flux. By "people", I mean the media, journalists, professionals, individuals. Books are just like anything else, I suppose: people have an opinion on them, whether that opinion is right or wrong, or somewhere in the middle.
But picture books are unlike any other sort of book. When people talk about eBooks - how cheap they are to make, how easy they are to make, how their sales are doubling publishers' profits - they will not be talking about picture book eBooks. In the same way, when people talk about book sales stagnating, they won't be talking about picture books.
So when it comes to the future of picture book publishing, general conversations about books and publishing can easily feel irrelevant. But it would be silly to think that's actually true. Because there is so much to learn from other areas of the publishing industry, just like there is so much to learn from industries other than publishing. I mean, we all need to innovate, experiment, try, fail, succeed and learn.
If I can rope in some folks to talk to me about changes in their industries and how those could relate to children's book publishing, then I'll be writing about it on here. It'd be a series of comparative essays, in conversational form. Or something. This . . . Well, it's become my mini obsession. So keep an eye out for follow-ups.
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