A special emphasis at Bologna this year: empowerment in children’s nonfiction. What about girls who aren’t superheroes?
At Italy’s sprawling Bologna fair this week, the main emphasis on nonfiction in children’s books this year is self-esteem books for girls. On one hand, there’s the “great women” type of content, exemplified by Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women from Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, drawing acclaim and strong sales in the States.
But the UAE’s Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi—herself a mother, kids’ publisher, and advocate for women in publishing’s leadership roles—spoke of establishing new maturity in inspirational nonfiction literature for girls: it may be time to move past the adulation books about heroic women of history and into more accessible evocations of gender roles for readers. Bodour said the topic is important “not only for us as publishers but as conscientious parents. … What happens in the brains of little girls who can only see two sets of female characters in the books they read: either grannies and caretakers or superhero girls and women? … What kind of future will they see when they don’t find ordinary women like them or their moms making headlines?”
An example of real-world heroics for girls is found at Kids Can Press in Toronto, where author Ashley Spires’s bestselling The Most Magnificent Thing has just been produced as an animated short. It’s about a child who overcomes frustration in her creative endeavors, learns to see successes within her failures, and ultimately prevails in creating the most magnificent thing.
In Bologna, Maria Russo, children’s books editor at The New York Times, told a packed room that “In the United States, today, on the adult side, the bestseller lists are full of many, many political books, reflections of our current president … all very angry and intense and quick.” But on the children’s side, Russo said, “What you find is books about women, compendiums of biographies.” She positioned it as “the equivalent of what’s happening on the adult side. These books [about great women] are political; they represent on the children’s side the anti-Trump books” for adults, she said. Later, the author Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara quipped that Trump is doing a great deal for the women’s movement.
Bottom line: Nonfiction is currently a strong and growing segment of the children’s market—and particularly important given that, overall, US children’s sales were flat in 2018 compared to the year before, and fiction is on the decline, according to NPD BookScan. (The market peaked in 2016 with The Cursed Child by JK Rowling.) Other growth areas in children’s nonfiction include natural history, personal and social issues, and science and tech. Expect to see more books that help children understand themselves and their world—and also expect more unicorns. (Unicorns are the most popular creature in children’s lit at the moment, with dinosaurs, dragons, mermaids, llamas, and narwhals also claiming a piece of the market—again, according to NPD BookScan.)
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.
