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 You see the stats everywhere: ebook sales are exploding, ereaders are flying off the (virtual) shelves. Everybody’s smartphone has an ereader app. Or two. But not for kids. Not yet.
It’s driving me crazy, but I can’t find the article I read a couple of months ago that broke down ebook sales for kids by age. Suffice it say, among kids in the GRANDPA HATES THE BIRD demographic, in the 6-10 year old range, sales are zero. I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea.
Why don’t young kids read ebooks? Ereaders are expensive; ereaders are fragile, and ereaders are still kinda suckish.
In my opinion, the last reason is the most important one. All the kids I know who have ereaders or parents willing to lend them one start out super excited and then run back to paper once they’re faced with the realities of gray screens, unwieldy devices and generic design.
So why did I do it? Why publish stories for kids that they can’t or won’t read?
Because it’s only a matter of time before they can and will. Ereaders will get cheaper (a basic Kindle is currently $79); ereaders will get hardier, and ereaders will get better. And when they do, Bird will be waiting.
 Guess what? I wrote some more books! And I published them myself. Electronically.
I can’t have been the only third grader with Edward Gorey on the nightstand and Little House on the Prairie in the closet. I can’t be the only person who passed her cherished copy of Very Special People: With 52 Pages of Fascinating Photographs of these Astonishing Wonders by Frederick Drimmer (oh, Ripley, you’ve got nothing on Drimmer!) to her firstborn. When he was five. Surely, I can’t have been the only kid who relished the macabre and reveled in the weird. Right?
For all the kids out there like me, the GRANDPA HATES THE BIRD stories are for you.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you laugh out loud at the mortification of others? (Think any Ben Stiller movie you’ve ever seen – except Greenberg.)
- Do you enjoy watching old men try to kill small animals? (No, not Charlotte’s Web – Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny!)
- Are you a kid between the ages of 6 and 10 or an adult who reads to one?
Then you’ll love GRANDPA HATES THE BIRD.
“These are about as bad as it gets in this age group.” bookalachi
(Okay, I admit it. Bookalachi wasn’t talking specifically about GRANDPA HATES THE BIRD when they wrote this in the “how we review” section of their website. But, hey, they could have been. And GRANDPA doesn’t have any real reviews yet, so I had to be creative.)
There are six uproarious GRANDPA tales. That’s six bedtimes, six car rides, six doctor’s office waiting rooms. Did I mention that each story costs 99 cents – or you can buy all six for $2.99? Take that, Scooby Doo Haunted Road Trip! (Scooby Doo Haunted Road Trip costs $3.99, and it’s only one story, and it’s paper so you have to go out and get it or wait for UPS to deliver it. GRANDPA is obviously way better. Obviously.)
If you have a Kindle or Kindle app, click here.
If you have any other kind of e-reader (Nook, Kobo or those other kinds I haven’t heard of), click here.
Enjoy! (And don’t forget to leave a review.)
 Ferdinand the Bull, Navel Gazer Extraordinaire Did anyone else happen to read Neal Gabler’s opinion piece in the New York Times on August 14th called The Elusive Big Idea? It’s long and worth reading through the end, but the gist of it is that as our access to information grows, our ideas get smaller. Gabler says, “In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world – a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them….Bold ideas are almost passé.”
A couple of days after I read this article, I was hanging out with an English teacher and some librarians, talking about the impact of technology/social networking on kids. It wasn’t the usual sky is falling, kids’ brains are turning to oatmeal conversation. Actually, the thrust of it was that maybe doing homework while IM-ing and chatting is the new way of working and adults shouldn’t stand in the way of progress. But progress always has unforeseen consequences, and when I asked the English teacher what’s changed most in her twenty years of teaching high school students, she said kids are better writers but worse readers. She explained she can’t assign nearly as much reading as she used to and expect kids to absorb it and that kids don’t seem to analyze as deeply. In other words, kids today are better producers (writers) but smaller thinkers.
In response I said something along the lines of, “To be creative you need time to be bored and nobody has that anymore.” I visited a high school last spring and the teacher told me she hoped I didn’t mind if the kids ate while I talked to them – a lot of the kids in her class don’t have lunch so she lets them eat in class. I said, “You mean they use lunch time to go to the library?” And she said, “No, they take so many classes they don’t have lunch on their schedules.” I didn’t believe her, so when the kids came into the classroom I asked how many of them don’t have lunch on their schedules. About a quarter of the hands went up and a bunch of voices called out things like, “I only have it twice a week.”
No wonder kids read and absorb less. They have parents and educators who think it’s ok for them to pack their schedules so tight they don’t have time to eat, let alone think.
How many great novels, weird inventions, important concepts and lazy pleasures do we miss out on when we clutter our minds with endless tasks and sound bites of information?
I tend to write novels that require a lot of research. ESCAPE UNDER THE FOREVER SKY takes place in Ethiopia, and when I started it, all I knew about the country was that it was somewhere in Africa. CAST OFF, my novel in progress, is set in the 17th century. Two years ago, when I got the idea for the book, I knew that 17th century meant 1600s, and that was about it.
 But GRANDPA HATES THE BIRD is different. The character of Grandpa is based on my father, who really did hate our pet parrot. And my dad, like Grandpa, used to devise all kinds of tortures for the poor bird: Birdie in the Microwave, Dig a Hole to China and Send Birdie on a Trip, and my personal favorite, Bird and Coyote Are Friends. One day, when my daughter was about four, she asked, “Mommy, does Grandpa really hate the bird?” And because I believe in being honest (plus I suck at lying), I said, “Yes, Pie, he really does.”
I know. What a fabulous idea for a children’s book.
I adore doing research, but there’s a particular pleasure in writing about what’s familiar. Taking people I know and things that really happened and changing them, bit by bit, until what’s real is unrecognizable but the spirit remains. I love the freedom of not having to worry about accuracy, the fun of just making it all up. Kristin Cashore wrote a great blog post today about what it’s like when writing is hard. I’ve had my fair share of that kind of misery, but not with GRANDPA. Writing GRANDPA has been pure pleasure.
It occurred to me as I was trying to decide what to write for my very first blog post that I remember few of the “firsts” in my life. I don’t remember my first day of school, my first time riding a bike (with or without training wheels), the first story I wrote, my first date or the first time I drove a car. I do remember my first day of college. My parents dropped me off with all my stuff. After I unpacked I headed to the main quad to pick up my registration materials. It was a gorgeous late August afternoon and there was a long line. I waited, alone, trying to look like the kind of person other people would want to be friends with. And that’s when a bee flew up my shorts and stung me where the sun doesn’t shine.
Perhaps I’m not so good at firsts, which is why I’ve decided to keep this post brief. Welcome to my blog. Please come back soon.
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You see the stats everywhere: ebook sales are exploding, ereaders are flying off the (virtual) shelves. Everybody’s smartphone has an ereader app. Or two. But not for kids. Not yet.
