In November, I spoke at the For the Love of Reading conference in Midway,
UT. I was excited by how enthusiastic attendees were about my keynote session
“Creating Passionate Nonfiction Readers.”
During the presentation, I saw many nodding heads in the audience. And
afterward, educators and librarians shared amazing anecdotes about their own
experiences with students who show a strong preference for nonfiction books. They saw
evidence of the statistics I provided every single day.
I pointed out that, in the adult publishing
world, year after year, nonfiction books outperform fiction titles. This is
strong evidence that when readers can choose their own books, they often choose
nonfiction. I also asked a series of questions for the audience to ponder:
–Why would children’s reading preferences be any different than those of adults?
–Why do most adults assume that children prefer fiction?
–Why do parents tend to choose fiction for bedtime reading?
–Why do educators favor fiction for read alouds, book talks, book clubs,
and even language arts and content-area instruction?
–Why is there an implicit bias against children’s nonfiction, and how can
we begin to change adult attitudes?
After the presentation, an attendee asked a great question: How big is the gap between adult
nonfiction sales and juvenile nonfiction sales?
Over the next few days, I searched for ways to answer this question. And eventually, I stumbled upon this Publisher’s Weekly article with total sales for the first half of 2022. And by
doing a little bit of math, I came up with some percentages.
Then, I looked for comparable data in PW articles going
back to 2015. It turns out that (except for the pandemic years when juvenile
nonfiction sales were artificially inflated because parents were purchasing a
record number of educational workbooks) the percentages have been surprisingly
consistent—and truly depressing:
Adult
publishing:
Nonfiction
accounts for a whopping 63-65% of all sales.
Juvenile publishing (children’s and YA):
Nonfiction accounts for just 21-24% of all sales.
In other words, two-thirds of all adult book sales are nonfiction,
but only one-quarter of all juvenile book sales are nonfiction.
Year after year, juvenile fiction sales are three times greater than
juvenile nonfiction sales.
And so I return to my final question above: Why is there an implicit bias
against children’s nonfiction, and how can we begin to change adult attitudes?
It’s an important question to ask because the research is clear:
#KidsLoveNonfiction
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One Response
This goes along perfectly with a PD I'm sharing next week. I'm adding this blog post to my resource handout! The questions are so similar to the ones I shared. It drives me crazy that book lists and read alouds and even "Read any book and tell about the character" assignments ignore nonfiction.