What the clerisy think children ought to read versus what children actually read

On the reading related list_servs to which I belong, there is a strong orientation to talk about what advocates want children to be reading and very little or no discussion as to what children are actually reading. Part of this is explainable by the presence of many authors on those list_servs. It is not unexpected that their interest is in children reading what they are writing. But the interests of authors and the interests of children often do not coincide.

It is hard to address this because there is so little publicly available robust data on reading, sales, etc. You have to make do with snippets here and there, knowing that it is not the whole story but that it might possibly be indicative.

List_serv conversations tend to be dominated by YA, by the front list (books published within the past year), by literary fiction (as opposed to series and genre), and by social justice issues (gender, race, LGBT, individual and familial disadvantage, etc.). The publisher surveys show the readers of this small slice of children's books to be primarily middle-aged women (80% according to PW). What is missing is nonfiction, series, action, plot, etc.

My estimation of what is discussed would be something like:

* Frontlist 80%, Backlist 20%
* Social Justice issues 75%, all other issues 25%
* YA 65%, Middle Grade books 25%, Picturebooks 10%

So what are children actually reading? Hard to tell. There are a couple of sources I looked at just to put at least a smidgen of data on the table.

One source is Publisher Weekly's annual list of bestsellers. These are books that sold more than 100,000 copies in the past year. PW tracks this information by hardback (HB), paperback (PB), frontlist (FL) and backlist (BL), and e-books (which I have omitted because the numbers are so small). There were 461 children's best sellers in 2013.

* 461 best seller titles
* 87,038,495 individual books sold
* These 461 titles out of some 25,000 new titles constitute approximately 50% of the revenue for the children's books section of publishing
* There is an incredibly steep declination gradient. Just 35 titles, 8% of all bestsellers, are responsible for 31% of all best seller sales.
* Front list is 41% of the market (25% hardback and 16% paperback)
* Back list is 59% of the market (33% hardback and 26% paperback)
* YA is 25% of the market (by unit sales), Middle Grade 35%, Picture Books 40%
* If you assume the that publisher survey information is correct and remove adult YA readers from the counts, and assume that adults do not constitute a material population of MG and PB readers, you get substantially different numbers for what children are reading.

* YA 7%
* MG 43%
* Picture books 50%

* Only 16 of the 461 titles are nonfiction (NF). This constitutes 3.5% of the titles and 2.4% of the units sold.
* The distribution of NF is different from fiction with 56% being frontlist and 44% being backlist.
* The average bestseller title sells 219,000 units. The average social justice related titles struggle to achieve 5,000 unit sales in a year.
* The top five back list titles are from within the past five years.
* Number 6 on the backlist is Green Eggs and Ham, selling some 950,000 copies a year, 54 years after first being published.
* Other old time favorites include Dr. Seuss's ABC at Number 10, and Goodnight Moon at Number 11 with 770,000 copies being sold each year.

So there is something of a mismatch between what list_servs are interested in discussing versus what children appear interested in solely based on bestsellers.

* List_servs tend to focus on the frontlist 80% of the time whereas readers are about half that rate at 41% of their reading being front list
* List_servs tend to be dominated by social justice concerns 75% of the time whereas only about 5% of what children actually read (among bestsellers) have a social justice element.
* List_servs focus on YA 65% of the time whereas YA is only 7% of what children read, Middle Grade books get discussed 25% of the time when they are about 43% of the market, and picturebooks are discussed 10% of the time when they are 50% of what children read.