Children’s Book Council Looks Ahead to 2009

By Diane Roback, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 9/25/2008

Bill Tancer, author of Click (Hyperion),
was the featured speaker at
Wednesday’s CBC annual meeting.

In the 2008 annual meeting of the Children’s Book Council, held on Wednesday, September 24, executive director Robin Adelson called the CBC “dynamic,” calling the increased activity during the previous year “a sign of things to come.” The CBC has gone “back to basics,” she stated; the staff has been reorganized, and the sales of printed materials have been discontinued, resulting in a profit for the first time in years, of more than $90,000 for the fiscal year that ended in June 2008.

CBC chair Suzanne Murphy reviewed the highlights of the previous year, including the naming of the first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, in conjunction with the Library of Congress; holding two Children’s Book Weeks within six months of each other (to move the official week into May, going forward); reactivating the Every Child a Reader program run by the CBC Foundation, which is chaired by Lori Benton; continuing and expanding initiatives such as the co-sponsoring of bibliographies; overhauling the CBC Web site, and growing the Early Career Committee, aimed at younger publishing staff.

Jon Sciezska reported on “what’s been going on in Ambassador World.” In addition to having Adelson work on getting him “those little flags for the front of my car,” Sciezska said he was widening his original mission of reaching reluctant readers, to focus on getting the word out about how many “spectacular” books are being published for kids. His message from the trenches was encouraging: “People do want to buy books for their children.” A new Web site for the National Ambassador post, www.childrensbookambassador.com, has just gone live.

CBC executive director
Robin Adelson, with Tancer.

Plans for the coming year, Adelson said, include relaunching the Children’s Book Council’s Web site in early 2009, both to convey the CBC’s mission to consumers and to convey information to its members; holding the annual Trivia Challenge (on November 6); and planning the organization’s second gala, to be held next May 12.

“We’re busier than ever,” Adelson told CBC members. “We’re very excited about the direction we’re currently heading and we’re thrilled you’re along for the ride.”

The meeting’s featured speaker was Bill Tancer, author of Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters, a self-described data geek. “I love to talk about data stories,” he told the crowd. And then he did just that, relaying many instances of how the analysis of search engine data can lead to interesting conclusions about human behavior. Predictions are both an art and a science, he said; it’s important to look behind the search terms to discover the intent and then make an analysis based on that. For example, he said that while book publishers tend to release their books on baseball in March, interest in the books, as shown through search engines, peaks in July each year.

He also turned his attention to book publishers’ Web sites. Only .055% of Internet traffic is heading to publishers’ sites—less than 6/100 of 1%. That percentage more than triples, though, when author sites are added in. Fan fiction, he pointed out, can account for 30% of the book-related traffic on any given day.

Tancer said that children’s sites are generating the highest traffic among all categories of publishers, and he credited children’s publishers with creating Web sites that are “more interactive and engaging” than other publishing sites. “There’s a desire to interact more,” he said, “and publishers will have to deal with this desire.”