Don't Write the Obit For Picture Books Yet (cont.) page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

No one is disputing that times are tough. "It's true that the picture book business at Barnes & Noble has been on a slow and steady decline for about a year," said Mary Amicucci, v-p of children's books for Barnes & Noble. "[But] I, for one, really believe in picture books." Barnes & Noble is ordering just as many picture books as ever, she maintains, but has reduced its "inventory depth" on titles with softer sales.

Sales are down at some smaller stores, too. At the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vt., picture book sales have been decreasing slowly since peaking in 2007. "The [decline] keeps widening, which is distressing," said the store's co-owner, Elizabeth Bluemle, who is also president of the ABC. Parents are using the library more often and buying paperbacks—both picture books and chapter books—instead of hardcover picture books, she said, adding, "If you can get a paperback book with 175 pages for $6.99, or if you can get a 32-page paperback picture book for $6.99, you might lean toward a chapter book."

Many in the industry pointed out that kids read picture books over and over. "If you think of it in business terms, when you amortize your investment, they turn out to be inexpensive," said children's book historian Leonard Marcus.

That's one reason some booksellers say they're still able to move picture books, just fewer of them, even in a bad economy. "Instead of somebody buying six, they're buying three," said Sally Oddi, owner and manager of Cover to Cover Book Store in Columbus, Ohio. But she is still selling a lot of picture books. "You get these blockbusters in fiction, like Twilight and Wimpy Kid, and they give a skewed view of what the sales actually are," she said. "Picture books are still the strongest selection of our sales." A new fall picture book, There's Going to Be a Baby by Helen Oxenbury and John Burningham, for example, is selling well for her; "we love it and we reorder it weekly."

When times are tight, consumers—and publishers—have less money to spend on everything, including picture books. After all, jacketed hardcover picture books are costly to produce and to buy. Simon Boughton, publisher of Roaring Book Press, said, "The overall kids' book category has grown, but picture books have stayed flat." Parents often feel they can't afford them. "There's no question that the economy has a lot to do with people not buying books for $20," said Nicholson.

What Goes Around Comes Around

"Publishing is cyclical, and I think it's correct to say that publishers overpublished in the picture book genre several times in the past," says historian Marcus. "That happens pretty much every time there has been a spurt in the birth rate, which usually corresponds to a time of prosperity." (These boom eras brought gems: the 1920s had Wanda Gág, the 1950s had The Cat in the Hat and Little Bear, and the 1980s had William Steig.) But it's easy to overdo it with lesser quality titles, too. "There's no centralized decision maker in publishing," Marcus pointed out. "There's no way of knowing what the right number is. It's natural in a time of economic expansion and population growth to do more in children's books."

In the 1920s, publishers first created dedicated departments for children's books. "They were seeing a new market open up that they were very eager to capitalize on," said Marcus. At the time, libraries were the big customers. During the Depression, publishers shut down some children's departments. "In the 1930s, when people looked back, they saw there had been too many books," said Marcus. The silver lining: they started making better choices. The postwar baby boom brought Little Golden Books and Dr. Seuss, and Congress approved money for libraries and schools to purchase science books in response to Sputnik. In the 1980s, highly educated baby boomers wanted to get their kids into Harvard, "and books were seen as one of the keys to doing that," said Marcus. "The '80s were a time of prosperity, and books were more accessible." Then came the boom in big-box stores, and overexpansion by publishers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The current downturn in the market, Marcus said, "isn't the first one, and it probably won't be the last one. There's no reason to think picture books are a dying genre."

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