Every time I think I’ve pondered the diversity-in-publishing issue from most angles, something new pops up. Sometimes, it’s something so incredibly simple I can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to me before. The newest realization was this: someone said to me recently that diverse books don’t sell, and I replied jokingly, “Heck, MOST books don’t sell.” And it’s true. Many, many books don’t earn out their advances, but we don’t say about them, “Gosh, books about white characters and/or by white authors just don’t sell.” That would be absurd, right? Well, when you have only one title on your list per season that’s diverse, and it doesn’t sell, and you say that therefore “diverse books don’t sell,” you’re saying something equally absurd. Absurd, and a logical fallacy, to boot.
Sales success is a mysterious formula. Sometimes no matter how much a book is pushed and hyped and marketed, it just doesn’t catch on. Other times, a book expected to sell modestly hits it big (Pioneer Girl, most recently). There is no sure-fire way to know. And you absolutely cannot create an entire, vague category called “diverse books” (especially based on so few samples), and decide that you can accurately analyze the success of that category.
There’s just no way to truly evaluate the sales of diverse books until there’s a real marketplace full of them. Imagine evaluating those books with the same ruler that we treat the rest of the publishing list — looking at a list of, say, 50 titles, hoping that two or three will really break out, that another 20 or 30 will at least earn out or better, and that the rest will probably putter along somewhere near or below that earn-out line. (Publishers, correct me if I’m wrong about this generalized distribution of sales expectations for a season’s list.)
And while you’re pondering that, please take a look at Malinda Lo’s fabulous essay on the subtle and subconscious ways that people’s own assumptions, cultural backgrounds, and experiences come into play when reviewing books, especially those by authors (and/or main characters) with backgrounds, experiences, and surroundings different from their own. It’s eye-opening, insightful, and full of helpful concrete examples.

Recommending a book outside a customer’s comfort zone is a high-risk, high-reward proposition for a bookseller. Most of the time we adopt the Wooster slogan, “safety first,” and steer clear of crossing that line. There are times, however, when we encounter a book of such power that the irony of staying in our own comfort zone as a bookseller seems markedly unworthy.
I have never felt that quandary more strongly than I did after completing Henry Turner’s debut novel, Ask the Dark, a first-person account by Billy, a rough and roughly used boy, for whom safety is a luxury which he cannot afford. When he perceives that a serial killer, targeting at-risk children, is operating virtually unnoticed in town, Billy finds himself in the unexpected role of being a detective. The extremity of Billy’s circumstances make him an excellent observer of both character and behavior, while, ironically his own character and behavior are deeply misperceived by all of the adults in his life.
In short, Ask the Dark is extraordinarily good. Everyone over 14 should read it. Yet, I am concerned that some of the very people who get the most out it, adults who harbor biases against children like Billy, and who would therefore benefit greatly from reading the book, might be put off by its dark themes, and the presence of a serial killer, thereby misperceiving the book in much the same way as the adult characters in Ask the Dark misjudge Billy. Can we, as booksellers skulk in safety when Billy showed such exemplary courage? To get some perspective on this I asked, well not the dark, but rather the author of this sensational book, Henry Turner.
KB: I’m pretty sure David Hume would have loved Ask the Dark, given its exploration of the fallibility of undeveloped first impressions. Even if dead philosophers weren’t your primary audience, was faulty epistemology something you wanted to connect with your readers about?
HT: Good question! I’d say yes – and no. I never intended any specific message with Ask the Dark –I never had what people call an agenda. What motivated me to tell the story was what I felt about Billy – how excited I got seeing him come through in the end and do what was right, no matter how badly things had been going for him. That said, I’ll tell you what I, personally, think. I think the world has dumped on Billy so much that his whole life has become one big reaction to the crummy way he’s been treated. His neighbors basically blame him for the life he’s born into – poverty and ignorance. And so far he’s been a delinquent, kicking against the world, blindly fighting back. He’s not really a criminal, because he is simply reacting; he’s not really in control of his behavior – or responsible for it. And that scares people. Because if he is not responsible and in control, then maybe nobody is! The whole fabric of society is undermined by the behavior of one kid! He seems to be saying, all you people who pick on me, you control things because of privilege, not character. But in the end, he proves he has character. Tons of it. Maybe more than anybody else!
KB: Many people seek out or choose to have experiences that have an element of extremity that suspends illusion, rock climbing, winter hiking, and so forth. Billy lives perpetually in a situation of extremity that he does not choose to have, but which nonetheless has a similar effect. He cannot afford illusions and is a very accurate observer of both character and behavior. For example, he perceives Jimmy’s character in leaving him behind in the house much more accurately than Jimmy’s father did. Is Billy’s own character separate from the extremity in his life, or is it a byproduct of it?
HT: A by-product in many ways. Poverty makes his life precarious. But social instability is the worst form of excitement – so he seeks fear and danger as an alternative. It’s his way to provide for himself – danger is his toy. He thrives on “maybe getting caught.” Fearlessness is his prized possession. Most boys envy guts, and Billy is all guts, because he has little else to keep him from dwelling on his real problems. The benefit is that he can still think clearly and make close observations while under extreme pressure!
KB: I found myself thinking of him as a detective. Is that intended?
HT: I definitely thought about the boy-detective genre when I wrote it – but I tried to emphasize that while he is not intentionally a detective, going through the motions of being one staves off the pressure he feels coming at him from all sides. Billy is naturally curious, though, and he has all the instincts and abilities of an achiever – but he was born into a life where he prematurely falls through the cracks. In his own way, he loves to learn and even study  – see his expert knowledge of hardware supplies and the proper use of tools. And finally, he has to confront right and wrong with a detective’s sense of justice.
KB:  Have you considered the potential dark irony that some readers, particularly adults who harbor biases against children like Billy, and who would therefore benefit greatly from reading the book, might be put off by its dark themes, and the presence of a serial killer, thereby misperceiving the book in much the same way as the adult characters in Ask the Dark misjudge Billy? As a bookseller who feels that adults with biases against kids like Billy, who discard and discount children they are uncomfortable with, absolutely should read Ask the Dark, I am thinking hard as to how to bridge that gap, bearing in mind that pushing against a customer’s biases via handselling is a touchy, high-risk, high-reward, proposition for a bookseller.

HT: I think they are in for a great discovery, those parents who might distrust him just for what he is. They are like the adults in the book who judge him by first impressions. I wrote the book with them in mind – the people who might reject him because of how he talks or what’s he’s done. And I was very much interested in what creates a hero. Billy represents an essential aspect of human nature – the impulsiveness people have that can go either way: to good or evil. Are heroes good? Are they socially acceptable? Billy has a knack for seeing evil where others cannot. The book’s dark themes are essential to illuminate these questions. Boyhood is a tough time, and we mustn’t run from honest descriptions of it. Boys can learn from Billy – and maybe their parents can, too. Billy is a courage-teacher, teaching us the courage to change. You see, I don’t want Billy’s antagonists to merely accept him. I want them to love him.
KB: Given that Ask the Dark is most likely a stand-alone, is there anything surprising you can share with us about Billy’s future?
HT: He has long-term health problems. He gets married. The fruit stand is a success. Oh, I know all about him! I even cut some scenes that I’m thinking of putting on my website, which give a few clues about the girl he falls in love with. I am definitely going to write more about him!

It’s been two or three years since I’ve been able to get to Winter Institute, the American Booksellers’ Association’s conference dedicated to bookseller education. Publisher sponsors also attend, sharing their top picks for spring releases and giving us sneak peeks ahead to the fall season. Let me tell you, there’s something uniquely wonderful about being in a room filled with booksellers from all across the country. These are people who, when the official sessions about books end, pick up with personal conversations about — books they love. Bookselling is one of those professions that draws enormously dedicated, passionate people who work very hard for little money. Well, maybe some of them make lots of money, but I don’t know any of them. Booksellers are smart, funny, interesting people with a depth of knowledge, a breadth of interests, and the courage of their convictions, and I am honored to call so many of them friends. (In case it sounds like I’m complimenting myself in this paragraph, I’m wearing my blogger hat, not my bookseller hat, when I say all of that.)

Author John Green was one of this year’s keynoters, and he teased the room about booksellers’ notorious pessimism (then again, he doesn’t have to balance a bookstore’s accounts at the end of the year). He gave a terrific talk, appreciative of the importance indies have played in making his own books — and so many others’  — so successful. In addition to discovering new talent and creating blockbusters by word of mouth, indie booksellers also keep backlist alive through continued handselling long after publisher marketing campaigns have ended and the promo machine is quiet. “Indie bookstores are what make evergreen books evergreen,” said John Green. He said he and his brother had always only toured indies, which I hadn’t realized. Go, John Green!
One of the best things he said was about why he thinks his books and online videos have been so wildly popular with millions of teens. “Marketing to teenagers is not pretending I know stuff I don’t know about Snapchat, but sharing what I do know and am passionate about. .. They LIKE passion and unironic enthusiasm.” He left us on our feet, applauding.
Before we leave John Green, I have to mention Diane Capriola and her bookstore crew from Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, GA, for their introduction to his talk. The guitarist struck a chord, and the bookseller singers growled out, to the tune of “Wild Thing:”
John Green
You make my heart sing
You make the register ring
John Green
I love you
But seriously, dude, when are you going to write another book?
Come on, move me.
It was hilarious and JG called it the best introduction he’d ever had.

The rest of Winter Institute was a whirlwind of sessions on bookseller education, most very useful (on topics ranging from diverse books to wringing 2% more margin from our stores to planning for succession after retiring) and lunches with publishers large and small who shared their favorite spring titles and asked booksellers for feedback on a variety of matters. The huge Grove Park Inn resort in Asheville, N.C., kept us in good shape going back and forth to workshops held in opposite wings. And the author receptions — one evening for the major houses, one evening for smaller publishers — were wonderful, festive, and celebratory.

One of the highlights of any trade show or conference is the chance to go to dinner with authors and publishers and fellow booksellers. I met a whole new group of bookstore people at Random House’s fete for Chris Grabenstein in honor of his new book, The Island of Dr. Libris. It was such a fun dinner, and I read the ARC on the way home, finishing it on the plane where I happened to be sitting next to one of the world’s great 10-year-olds, a preternaturally articulate, funny snowboarding fiend from Nashville. He was SO delighted to be given a free book, one that telegraphs fun from the very cover. When I showed him it had also been autographed by the author, his jaw actually dropped. I live for moments like that.
My other favorite thing about Winter Institute was meeting the energetic and brilliant Ilene Gregorio, a.k.a. I.W. Gregorio, author and v-p of development for We Need Diverse Books, and getting to be on a panel on diversity in our field and in books for young people with fellow bookseller Cynthia Compton from 4 Kids Books & Toys in Zionsville, Ind., and fab moderator Joy Dallanegra-Sanger. My cold had taken residence fully by the time of this panel, so I’m not sure my offerings were as meaty as I’d have liked, but the room was chock full of booksellers (so heartening!), and I did get to invite everyone to participate in the 2015 50/50 Read, where for every book about white main characters I read, I’m reading a book featuring main characters of color (ideally by writers who are also POC). (Side note: this project has made reading so FABULOUS again! Booksellers love books and reading, of course, but it is also necessarily work. This 50/50 Read project has made reading fresh and new again, an unexpected and marvelous side benefit.)
Winter Institute was my third back-to-back conference, so I was ready to come back home to my bookstore and my own bed. But it reaffirmed that the community of booksellers across our country is as dedicated and creative, as thoughtful and passionate, as ever, if not more so. I do love my profession and am so lucky to be part of it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I’m not certain what’s going on in the rest of the country, but Vermont has been hit hard by the flu, one of the worst colds folks have ever seen and a stomach bug. When you have a small staff, illness can be a real problem. It’s not just an issue of having someone to actually work, but staying healthy is a challenge. 
Conveniently, we all waited to get sick until after the crush of the holidays. I’m sure it was because the pure adrenaline of the season kept all the bugs at bay. I got it first when we came back from annual week off. My fits of sniffling and sneezing for days was preceded by a very bad sore throat. It’s been a month, and I’m still coughing. Sandy got it next, pretty much the exact moment I felt well enough to work again. She was really sick with the flu and had a fever and chills. We had to force her to stay home. Then,  just as Sandy was rounding the corner to better health, PJ got the nasty cold that sidelined her for a few days. And now Elizabeth is deep in the heart of the worst part of the flu.
Every day now begins with the same ritual. The first one in disinfects everything at the register. The phone, the keyboard, the mouse, the credit card machine, etc. Pretty much anything that can be touched gets wiped down with an antibacterial Lysol wipe. I’m not sure what good this actually does, but it sure does make us feel like we’re taking action against the bugs. We have a ready supply of tissues and antibacterial hand sanitizer for use after we use the tissues. We are trying very hard to stay healthy, but it’s a struggle. The world of retail is practically designed to throw the maximum number of germs at you. Parents stop at the store to load up on books before they go to the pediatrician with their obviously sick kid. Adults are not as careful about their germs as they could be (not many folks over a certain age have embraced the “cough into your elbow” strategy that kids employ) and touching money and credit cards all day can is just asking to get a bug. Usually I feel like working retail builds up my immunity, but as I sit here writing this, coughing and sneezing anew, I can’t help but wonder if I’m now starting round two of the cold.
The only thing that’s good about being sick is having unfettered time to read without guilt. I used my downtime to read the new Dennis Lehane galley, World Gone By,  which I thoroughly enjoyed. I sometimes feel like adult mysteries are my guilty pleasure that I don’t indulge in that often because the kids’ books are stacking up on the bedside table. I spent all day reading and napping when I was sick and just loved it. I think we’re all so busy that it’s really hard to just take a day and not do anything, so when we’re forced by illness to slow down there’s a luxury to it, even with the irritation and discomfort of a nasty cold.
Readers: what do you choose to read when you’re home sick? Is there anything that you’re drawn to that helps you feel better?

We can probably all agree that packaging a blender in a box that is labeled as being for a toaster is not a good marketing decision. If attractively designed and reasonably priced these boxes will move off retail shelves as people who want to purchase a toaster buy them, it is true. One can easily see, however, that difficulties will ensue after the box is opened. This clear principle does not appear to commend itself uniformly to books, however, particularly for children’s fiction, where the nature of both the content and audience is very precise indeed.
Unfortunately, one often finds books whose covers are successfully designed to appeal to a set of customers other than the customers who would want to read their contents. While it will perhaps take a bit longer to determine the discrepancy than it would for the toaster purchaser who unpacks a blender, it won’t take that much longer and the result is much more insidious, because it is more far-reaching. The end result of the customer’s dissatisfaction will not result in a simple return but rather bad word-of-mouth and diminished long-term sales which negatively effect the author and the publisher, and a bad customer service experience that harms the bookstores relationship with its customers.
Here are two examples. Six Feet Over It, a delightful debut novel by Jennifer Longo. Let us look at the cover for a moment.

Here are the issues. The protagonist of the book is 15, not 23. She always wears the same pair of jeans and never wears anything else throughout the book. The book has a reader range of 11-15 and is humorous and snarky in tone, not angsty and dramatic. In short, the cover is designed to appeal to an entirely different audience in terms of both age and temperament than the story does.
Our second example is Donna Gephardt’s Death by Toilet Paper.

This cover would have been well designed if the book were a book of potty humor hijinks for 7 to 10 year olds. It is a good design for that. Though the book is humorous it also has a lot of depth and deals with a serious issue: the impact of economic downsizing on a middle grader, for whom the cheap toilet paper at home is emblematic of tough changes in the family fortunes. It’s an absolutely charming book and very painful to imagine it disappointing eight-year-olds who had been expecting to experience what the cover promised.
We feature both these titles at DDG and I can say that the charm of explaining to customers that the cover misrepresents the contents and why – which must be done every time we handsell the book – fades rapidly.
There is an easy fix for this. If the illustrator, or someone else integral to the cover art process, does what the covers are asking buyers to do – read and take the book to heart – this particularly unfortunate brand of failed cover art would likely disappear.

At Winter Institute, I shared a cab and a great long conversation with a bookseller I’d never met before, James from Half Price Books. We covered a range of bookselling topics, from used books to multiple-store ordering processes to sharing recent titles we’d loved, During that last bit,  there was at least one title the other mentioned that caused us to exclaim, “I wanted to read that, but it expired!”
I suspect we are not the only bookseller who encounter the sorrow of an expired Edelweiss or NetGalley ARC in Adobe Digital Editions. I do understand that publishers don’t want ARCs to replace book sales, and so expiration dates for some categories of readers might make sense after a certain point in the book’s release life. But booksellers have tall, tall piles and we purchase multiple copies of the books we fall in love with. It’s especially incomprehensible to me when a digital ARC expires before the book’s release date. We really do want to sell your books; why would you want to make that harder?
What is the purpose of having such short (30-day, 45-day, 60-day) expiration dates for booksellers? Giving us several months to read your titles seems like a win-win; you wouldn’t be losing sales — we aren’t your typical potential retail customers. We wouldn’t NOT buy a book because we’ve read it already. We are MORE likely to buy it if we’ve read it already. And we purchase multiple copies.
Please let your books live longer in Edelweiss and NetGalley for booksellers. Sure, we learn about great reads from our sales reps long before the release date, but we can’t always read all of the ones that catch our attention, at least not right away. They take their place in our queue. Sometimes it just takes a little while for a bookseller to catch up.
Oh! And for those of us who double our page counts by also listening to audiobooks, is there any chance you’d consider digital audio ARCs?
 

Little kids are used to seeing me in one place: the bookstore. When they see me out and about running errands they get a shy smile and just look at me. It’s as if they had no idea I existed outside of the store. Really young children have been to call the store “Josie’s house,” which is adorable, but does speak to the number of hours I can be found there. I had a very funny exchange with one of my favorite three-year-olds on Saturday.
Stella and her family had been to the bookstore and gotten heaps of books. I’m off on Saturdays, so I missed her smiling face. But this day found me helping out friends who own a restaurant down the street from the store. I was working the counter during the busy lunch rush, taking orders and making coffees. Young Stella came in for lunch with her parents. She saw me at the counter and a very curious look crossed her face. It went from confusion (she kept looking back towards the bookstore) to laughter. I greeted her warmly and asked if I could take her order. Her parents and I were chuckling over Stella’s attempts to wrap her head around why I was at the cafe. “You work at the bookstore,” she said. I told her, yes, I did, but sometimes I worked here, too. “Why? How many jobs do you have?” I was just so charmed by her smiling face. I could almost hear her brain working trying to figure out why I wasn’t where she was expecting me. I said that the owners of the cafe were friends and they needed help today, so I helped them.
She came around and gave me a hug. Then she asked if I was in charge of the chocolate chip cookies. “As a matter of fact, today, I am,” I said. Her face lit up. I checked with her parents and they said she could have a cookie after lunch. Stella started pouting until I did what I do with kids who want a book: I asked her which cookie she wanted and we wrapped it up and put it in a bag which she retrieved at the end of lunch. It was the equivalent of putting a book on the special order shelf or noting it down in the wish list book.
As if seeing me out of context weren’t enough. PJ, my co-worker, came to the cafe to pick up lunch for herself and Sandy. Stella’s eyes just about popped out of her head when she saw her. “You’re here, too?” She asked. PJ said yes, Stella literally scratched her head and said quite simply, “My parents are here.” And she skipped back to her table. Every time I looked over while PJ and I were chatting, I noticed she was looking at us, taking it all in.
I think it’s good for kids to see shop staffers in other places, even if it rocks their little worlds. And I must say, Stella’s reaction to me working behind the counter was tame compared to adult customers who came in for lunch, saw me and then leaned in and whispered, “Are things bad over there, that you’ve taken a second job?” I just burst out laughing when I heard this and said I was just helping my friends out. But I’m sure the small-town rumor mill will be rocking with this info and I’ll spend much of next week assuring folks that things are just dandy at the store.

Earlier this week, we hosted Kate Messner at our local school and at the bookstore for her new book, All the Answers. To say that Kate puts on a great event is an understatement. She is a force of organization to reckoned with, and seems to possess boundless energy, even at the end of a long day. One very shy girl joined the event while her mother shopped and by the time she had to leave, she was beaming and happily clutching a copy of the new book.
I went back through my emails to see when Kate started planning for her book tour and was astounded to see the first email went out last May!  She’s been planning ever since, and making my life as a bookseller so much easier. She created an email that I mailed to my local schools in May and then the schools and Kate hammered out the details of the visit. One of the really great things about working with Kate is she really tries hard to get indies as much business as possible, by setting up local book sales through independent stores. She also created her own order form that the schools could copy and give to all students. This form was part of the letter. Really, the only thing we had to do was coordinate the book orders and advertise the store event.
Once we got about a month out from the visit, Kate was tweeting and posting on Facebook about the event. She even created a Facebook event that we could share. I mean really, she made it so easy for us. We had a good turnout for the event and Kate’s calm was great. She started the event and people just started to lean forward in their seats. Kids quieted down and were rapt the entire time she was speaking. Kate used to be a teacher and it’s clear she understands kids and how to get them engaged in a presentation. Listening to her speak about her writer’s notebooks made all of us practically start twitching to jot things down. One of the things I love about author visits is how they can inspire kids to start writing. To hear her talk about the evolution of this book and how it all came from one thought that she jotted down in her notebook more than two years ago was a gift of a moment. Kate made writing a book sound so doable that all these kids left thinking about becoming writers.
The other thing that was wonderful about Kate was she book-talked three books by other authors  that she loved and was inspired by. That kind of generosity was not lost on me.She spoke with passion about Bigger than a Breadbox, The Red Pencil, and The Case for Loving. Kids were just as enthused by those books as they were by Kate’s. And, she gave us enough notice about this that we had plenty of time to get in those books so we could sell them. She even had giveaways. I left the day energized by the success of the event and vowed that I would try to be half as organized as Kate for my next event. Finally, Kate tweeted about the bookstore when she got home, with a photo no less!
 
 

Waiting for books to come out, either the next in a series or an overdue book by a favorite author, may build, or at least strain, our character. Good for us, I’m sure, but binge reading is much more fun. Let us therefore leave the soul-testing labor of locating the Holy Grail to Sir Gawain today and turn our attention to the shallower quest of finding the perfect binge read.
Binge reads can center on a single series of  books all of which are already out, or on the works of a single author. One could go on a binge genre read too, of course, but we are seeking the perfect binge read and an astute observer once rightly defined it as “a finite number of great books.” Genre binging is clearly too open-ended and voluminous to meet our definition. Our first task, then,  is to determine whether the discovery of a single already completed series rates higher than the discovery of a newly beloved author with an established backlist.
From the standpoint of both a bookseller and a reader there is a great deal of satisfaction to be found in a single series that ends well. It should be noted, that even the very best of series written by a living author can be undone by unlooked for and unhappy additions. The classic Earthsea trilogy is a good example. The original trilogy could launch one off on a great binge read only to leave you to crash and burn in the pages of Tehanu, that ill-considered fourth book. Even when later books are only lesser than their predecessors, as opposed to abominable, as in books five and six of Chrestomanci, it still removes the series from being the perfect binge read.
For this reason Fablehaven, The Amulet of Samarkand, and Chaos Walking exemplify great binge reading, because they end cleanly and strongly. Such series are close to perfect but not quite. They are still subject to both waiting for future series by their authors and or possible disappointment with their authors’ backlist.
Given that the most perfect binge read would be “a finite number of great books,” I submit to you that the most perfect binge read is the lifework of a deceased novelist who produced a manageable body of work of uniform excellence. I submit that an example of the ultimate binge read is the complete works of Jane Austen.
One can easily form the wrong opinion of unread classics. Once the mistake is revealed the results can be truly sublime. In the case of Austen she had the foresight to write the perfect number of great novels, just enough to provide complete satisfaction. One is not left in want of any more or any less. Even the original misperception of the character of her novels is rendered amusing and ironic to the binge reader, who encounters similar foibles in the lead characters of the novels themselves.
Agree? Disagree? What do you deem to be the greatest binge read ever?

Before I get into my blog post, of course I need to jump and shout for the books that took home medals and honors at the ALA Youth Media Awards yesterday! Congratulations, all of you wonderful, talented writers and artists!! I was in the audience for the awards announcements in Chicago and was overjoyed to see many of my own personal favorites celebrated. Since everyone in the children’s literature blogoverse is likely to be writing about the awards, I will not, except to say that I was gratified to see a more diverse list of winners across the award spectrum than we have perhaps ever seen before. Thank you, dedicated ALA committees!
******
I was fortunate enough to attend the Day of Diversity sponsored collaboratively by ALSC (the Association for Library Service to Children) and the CBC (Children’s Book Council). I can only imagine the amount of time and effort that went into planning this event! Thank you, ALSC and CBC, for taking this important step toward action for children and children’s books. The event was the first of its kind for these organizations, and as such there was a limited number of attendees. It felt like a kickoff to what I hope can turn into a two- or three-day conference for hundreds of participants.
(Note: I will recap the presentations in a future post. For those who would like to read up on the day sooner, Debbie Reese did a nice job of presenting the day and her own perspective here, Zetta Elliott posted some of her thoughts here, Edi Campbell posted here, and Sarah Park Dahlen has posted here. Now that everyone is returning from ALA, you can also use a search engine and type in ALA, CBC, and “Day of Diversity” — several blog posts should crop up this week.) If you’re impatient to get to the “what one thing can I do now?” part of this post, it’s at the end.
Every attendee brought a different perspective and range of experiences to this conference. The speakers were eloquent and moving, and the moderators were fabulous. There were some deeply personal stories told and some grim statistics and urgent pleas shared that I will carry with me always.
What I appreciated most was the focus on action, not just talk. This conversation—about the appalling lack of diversity in children’s books and its severe life- and culture-altering consequences—has been going on for decades, and yet little has changed even as the urgency has grown. In fact, some numbers (for both literacy achievement and for diverse representation of ALL of our nation’s people in children’s books) have gotten *worse* over the past several years. With so much conversation happening in the mainstream, especially over the past couple of years, especially with the advent of movements like #WeNeedDiverseBooks and other social media efforts, how can that be?
It can be because the power structure itself, the race and class make-up of the decision makers and gatekeepers, hasn’t changed much at all. It is not inclusive, not by a long shot, not yet. There are hard conversations to be had and radical shifts to be made.
We all know by experience that large-scale social change can grind all too slowly. So what can we do now, each one of us, right now, to create change in our own communities and spheres of influence? “Moving Into Action” panel moderator Satia Orange challenged us at the end of the day: What will you personally do to create change? What will you do by the end of this week? by February 28? and by the end of August 2015? “Do something dramatic!” she said. People were invited to come to the guest microphone and share something specific that they will do to make change happen.
This challenge is such a good one! Specific, concrete steps are the ones that stick and end up leading to long-term, big-picture goals.
So, what can one person do?
Here are a few possibilities, ideas that came out of discussions during the day. I invite you to choose one, just one, to do this week. And one (maybe the same one, expanded, or a different one) to do in February. And then inspire yourself to plan a little bigger to begin by August.
The ideas below are all things one person can do. Really.
1) Adopt a classroom and send the children a book (or books, if you can afford it) every month to enrich and diversify their collection. For ideas on titles, check out The Brown Bookshelf, the CBC Resource Page of book lists, the book lists created for Pat Mora’s Día de los Niños programs, my own World Full of Color diversity database, SLJ’s list of culturally diverse books, Debbie Reese’s recommended lists (one of which is here) and any number of great lists that can be found online. This idea was shared by Crazy QuiltEdi blogger Edi Campbell. It’s so simple and so helpful an idea that it knocked my socks off. Just about anyone reading this post can do this, and spread the word. Gather friends together to sponsor an underserved school! Each friend adopts one classroom and donates a book a month. 

2) Buy a book by an author of color featuring a main protagonist of color. This is pretty simple, folks. And I would add that if you do that at your local bookstore, they will be more likely to continue to stock their shelves with diverse books.
3) Go further and shift your reading habits. Early in the year, I had thought it would be interesting to try reversing the dismal national publishing statistics; that is, I would read 90% books featuring main characters of color and only 10% featuring white people. Unfortunately, that’s unrealistic for several reasons including the lack of books to fill that 90%, as well as my bookseller’s need to read to read a lot of what’s on publishers’ lists to make buying decisions. So what I came up with, what my experiment will be for 2015, is to Read 50/50. I think it’s very possible to alternate in this way, and I invite anyone interested to join me. Thanks to Zetta Elliott, I also just read Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s Dark Fantastic blog post and learned about NCTE’s 2015 National African American Read In, a month-long reading invitational. Share your reading plan with friends. Share your passion!
4) Help a teacher by alerting her or him to Perspectives for a Diverse America‘s K-12 Literacy-Based Anti-Bias Curriculum. Common Core teaching plans often limit themselves to Appendix B titles, but don’t need to. Link them to Appendix D, a resource for diverse titles and Common Core applications.
5) Partner up. Ask your local hospital to consider including library card applications in the take-home bags at hospitals. If the hospital doesn’t already work with Reach Out and Read, a program that helps distribute free books to families, tell them about it. Same with any pediatricians you know.
6) Chat with a librarian. One librarian at the Day of Diversity mentioned that their system gives kids a “side card” that allows them to check out paperback books even when they have overdue books and can’t use their regular cards. That way, children aren’t ever punished by withholding reading. Talk with your local librarian and invite her or him to consider such a program.
7) Make books your birthday gifts. For adults as well as children, give people the pleasure of a book that you love, and branch out with the choices. Find beautiful books written by authors of color, books that offer mirrors or windows into the lives of main characters of color. Surprise someone with a glorious book!
I’ve got plans for the bookstore, as well, and will continue to blog about our efforts and diversity in publishing and children’s books here at ShelfTalker.
What are your ideas for grassroots diversifying?