Publishing Trends in Children’s Literature

Though publishing trends keep changing, it is clear and heartening that, in the category of children’s literature, beautiful, whimsical books are still being written, illustrated, and published.  In our modern world, in which children tend to look at screens more often than on printed pages, we can and should still nurture an appreciation of books as a source of entertainment, wonder, and magic.

Children’s classics such as E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are will likely remain perennial top sellers to be loved forever by each new generation of young readers – whether they are obtained instantaneously as electronic downloads, or they are printed books passed on like treasure from generation to generation.

Celebrities have begun increasingly entering the children’s literature market, publishing appealing new books that have generated strong sales. Chelsea Clinton recently wrote a book titled Don’t Let Them Disappear, which explores a very timely issue that both we humans and our animal friends must now face up to  the danger of certain species becoming extinct. Clinton’s book, which is filled with facts about whales, sea otters, and pandas (to name a few), which will be especially interesting to children, tells of animals that share our planet and what we can do to help them thrive. The United States Senator Kamala Harris also recently published a children’s book. In  Superheroes Are Everywhere, Harris explores all sorts of heroes and how we can be heroic in our own lives as well.  Even Madonna is a published author of children’s books.  Her titles for children include The English Roses, Mrs. Peabody’s Apples, Yakov and the Seven Thieves, and The Adventures of Abdi.

Embrace the Technology

Even though sales of physical books are increasingly supplanted by electronic books on screens, we should all – authors, publishers, parents, and readers alike – look at this as an opportunity: Books are more readily available than ever.  We live now in a miraculous new world in which we can order printed books via the Internet, instead of visiting a local bookseller, and have the books delivered to our doors within hours; or, if we can’t even wait that long, we can download for our children amazing classical stories such as Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the blink of an eye.