In this edition of Canadian publishing news: the Canadian Children's Book Centre provides the same book to 600,000 Canadian schoolchildren, author Anne Michaels launches a new series for kids, a new book highlights First Nation diversity, we look at Cybèle Young's high-concept picture book, and Owlkids focuses its marketing materials for librarians, teachers, and booksellers.
Giveaway Provides Nearly 600,000 Books for Kids of All Backgrounds
It’s an enormous undertaking to provide the same book to every Grade One child across Canada, but the Canadian Children’s Book Centre has done it every year since 2000. With the help of TD Bank Group, this year they’re giving away more than 550,000 copies of the picture book Mr. Zinger’s Hat by Cary Fagan, illustrated by Dušan Petričič (Tundra). And early next month, the author and illustrator will visit elementary schools to read the book to children in person.
According to Charlotte Teeple, the CCBC’s executive director, the books are distributed all across the country, in English and French, to kids of every culture, background, and religion. “The books go to all kinds of private schools, home-schooled kids, kids on reserves – wherever we find Grade One students,” she says.
Every year, a book by a different Canadian publisher is chosen by Teeple, the CCBC librarian, and a committee of teacher librarians to be given away. She describes Mr. Zinger’s Hat as “a perfect picture book with a wonderful story and great illustrations.”
And with nearly 600,000 copies being printed for the TD Grade One Book Giveaway each year by Manitoba-based printer Friesens, Teeple says it’s frequently the biggest print job in the country, only beaten out in the past by the Harry Potter books. The average print run for a children’s book is about 5,000 copies.
More importantly, it’s the only book giveaway program that goes to all kids across Canada. “It’s not just to poor kids, it’s not only kids with low literacy, it’s for every single child,” says Teeple. “It doesn’t really matter what their background is – some kids, for one reason or another, have never had access to books. For some of them, it will be the first book they’ve ever owned.”
Author Anne Michaels Enters the Children’s Book Market
Anne Michaels, the award-winning author of Fugitive Pieces, was appointed earlier this month as the new poet laureate of the city of Toronto – and next month she’s trying something completely different: she’s publishing her first children’s book.
The Adventures of Miss Petitfour (Tundra Books) is a middle-grade book containing five stories about an eccentric red-haired woman who travels by flying tablecloth, and loves to bake and go on adventures with her 16 cats. The author describes it as a transitional book between picture books and chapter books.
It features illustrations throughout, by London-based artist Emma Block, which Michaels says capture the “energy and whimsy” of the book. The language is full of wordplay, from alliteration to highlighting some of the bigger vocabulary words in different colors.
“I wanted to add my voice to the wonderful children’s literature where so much is possible,” says Michaels, who has two children of her own. “I think what we read when we’re young fosters so much about how we think, how we write. I wanted to add my voice on the side of pleasure in small things, and the importance of language play.”
Although Miss Petitfour is a departure from Michaels’s adult work – two novels and five poetry collections – she says the similarity lies in the “great emphasis in this book on friendship and small acts of kindness holding great weight, and a kind of joy in small details.”
Michaels says she hopes young readers will take pleasure in the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of these stories. “In every story, there are little hints about how words work, and how a story can be told,” she says. “I would love it if a reader came away thinking a little bit about those things.”
Urban Tribes Gives Voice to Aboriginal Youth Living in the City
Last year, Annick Press released Dreaming in Indian: Native American Voices, an illustrated anthology that made it onto many Best Books lists last year. Now, the book’s editors – Lisa Charleyboy, founder of Urban Native magazine and host of the CBC Radio show New Fire, and Mary Beth Leatherdale, former editorial director at Owlkids Books – have released a new book. Urban Tribes: Native Americans in the City profiles young aboriginal people who live in urban communities – which, according to Charleyboy, accounts for about half of all native people in Canada.
Rick Wilks, director of Annick Press, said earlier this year that the company decided to publish Urban Tribes because there’s “a whole category of stories that haven’t really been told. There’s lots of myths and legends available, but contemporary issues and contemporary lives, all that is just coming to the fore in the publishing world.”
The new book features graphic design by Inti Amaterasu, and includes an introduction by Giller Prize-winning First Nations author Joseph Boyden (Through Black Spruce; The Orenda). And in Charleyboy’s editor’s note, she talks about how she unexpectedly felt the need to prove her indigenous heritage to a man who asked her at a party, “So, just how connected are you to your indigenous roots if you live downtown?”
“I think it’s really great to be able to create cross-cultural understanding, and the younger you can start to create those bridges, the greater chance you have of carrying that through adulthood,” Charleyboy says. “We wanted to be able to reflect urban experiences because there still are some stereotypes that native people are kind of out in the middle of nowhere. ”
Charleyboy, who says there are already talks about a third book with Annick, adds that another reason Urban Tribes was important to her was because of her experiences attending indigenous business conferences across Canada.
“I wanted to be able to give these leaders a tool, so they can get an understanding of the diversity of urban indigenous youth experiences, whether that be working in the financial district, or doing graffiti in the back alley,” she says.
Cybèle Young’s Oceanic Creatures Aim to Spark Kids’ Imaginations
Cybèle Young’s Some Things I’ve Lost (Groundwood Books) is as much a high-concept art book as it is a picture book meant to spark children’s imaginations. Each page shows, on the left side, a mundane household object – a roller skate, a wristwatch, an umbrella – and on the right side, a sparse bit of text describing it, in a style somewhere in between a crime scene investigation and a science textbook. (“Fig. 1. Object: Roller skate. Last seen: Basement – obstacle course.”)
But when you unfold each page and look beneath, you find images depicting several mutated, artistic versions of the original object, each one following a vaguely oceanic theme. Each of these intricate images was created as a paper sculpture by Young, a renowned Toronto-based artist who has been making art out of Japanese paper for years. She says the oceanic theme in each of the paper sculptures was intentional, as she was interested in the biological history of humans.
“I had been immersing myself in research about our biological history and heritage, and finding out all these things that indicate we started out as aquatic creatures,” Young says. “We have saltwater in our bodies; we cry salty tears, because we carry the ocean within us, which is just a reminder that that’s where we came from.”
Young, who won the Governor General’s Award in 2011 for her picture book Ten Birds, says that she’s grateful her publisher, Groundwood Books, allowed her to explore something unconventional with Some Things I’ve Lost. She adds that children have responded to her new book because they don’t have the layers of logic clouding their imagination, and can relate the transformations in the book to things in their own lives or stories they’ve read.
“The most I can hope for is that they have a doorway or a window into thinking in a slightly new way, or bringing light to something,” she says.
Owlkids Books Focuses Marketing Efforts
Owlkids Books has launched an initiative to aggregate all of its book resources for teachers, librarians, and readers into one place. The Inside Track has been populated with book trailers, Petit Proust Questionnaires (author interviews inspired by the Proust Questionnaire), and other classroom resources throughout the year. Most recently, they released a video called “A Day in the Life of a Political Reporter,” which follows Toronto Star columnist Edward Keenan, author of the new children’s book The Art of the Possible: An Everyday Guide to Politics.
The content that goes into The Inside Track comes together mostly by Allison MacLachlan, marketing manager, and Judy Brunsek, director of sales and marketing. “It’s a challenge when you’re a smaller publisher – just being heard in the fray, let alone above the fray, is a challenge,” Brunsek says.
When Owlkids posted the video “How to Draw a Ninja,” based on Chris Tougas’s picture book Dojo Daycare, Brunsek says the video was then posted by Beth Golay on the website and newsletter Books & Whatnot. That led to it being seen by the organizers of Bookstore Day in California, who approached Owlkids about using the art in a book they were putting together.
“What The Inside Track has enabled us to do is promote all these different aspects of our books and give it an umbrella, and an entry point,” Brunsek says. “It’s a consistent brand that we can keep using, in the same way that we use our own logo, and direct people to the website.”
According to Brunsek, one of the biggest advantages of having all of these marketing materials in one place is the ability to put it on the websites of key wholesalers, such as Follett and Ingram. “They’re reaching the people that we want to reach,” she says. “If we can provide Follett with something like Ed Keenan’s video, that’s great supplementary content for them to help sell The Art of the Possible, and give the teachers who are their target audience something extra to delve into the book.”
