The National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Mac Barnett, recently released a new book for adults, Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (Little, Brown). In one of the book’s essays, he touches on writer Theodore Sturgeon’s famous law that 90 percent of science fiction is crud—because 90 percent of everything is crud. Barnett wrote, “I have a nagging fear that children’s literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole … maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.” The children’s writing and publishing community did not take kindly to this opinion and demanded an apology, which he gave. But that has done little to stem the backlash.
The best commentary I’ve yet seen on the situation comes from Afoma Umesi at Reading Middle Grade. She read Barnett’s entire book in one sitting and says it’s starting to “feel like a literary inkblot test in that what you see in it says a lot about where you sit in the kidlit world.” Her take is nuanced and discusses what she thinks Barnett gets right and what went wrong—and concludes the book is worth reading because it does grapple with challenging questions about the current publishing market.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
