Great…I’m Competing with Jada Pinkett-​Smith

I am hap­pily plug­ging away work­ing on my book and I am start­ing to see my character’s life take shape. As I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous post my char­ac­ter Ana has become more than mere words on a page, but a liv­ing and breath­ing per­son and I am enjoy­ing telling her story. I am even begin­ning to visu­al­ize my book being picked up by a world-​renowned pub­lish­ing house (I dream big) and on the shelves of such places as Mahogany Books. I can also imag­ine the happy faces of chil­dren who love read­ing Ana’s story as it becomes one of their favorite books as so many did in my own child­hood.

With that in mind, I decided to scope out the com­pe­ti­tion. No doubt thou­sands of writ­ers attempt to pub­lish children’s books each year and I wanted to get a sense of what children’s books are sell­ing right now and who is pub­lish­ing them. While I have my own built in focus group with my opin­ion­ated ten and twelve-​year-​old daugh­ters (think Ebert and Roeper) I decided to do my research. As I did, I came across many won­der­ful books, but one in par­tic­u­lar caught my atten­tion. A book enti­tled “Girls Hold Up This World” writ­ten by Jada Pinkett-​Smith.

Mrs. Smith’s book seemed like a won­der­ful read geared towards empow­er­ing young girls some­thing that Ana’s story also pro­motes, but see­ing her book as well as other notable peo­ple brought some­thing to my atten­tion. More and more celebri­ties are begin­ning to pen their own books directed towards young peo­ple. In times past, while a new writer may have had a greater oppor­tu­nity to be pub­lished will we soon see a trend of celebri­ties with scores of built-​in read­ers (fans) tak­ing the place of lit­er­ary unknowns like myself?

While celebri­ties are by no means monop­o­liz­ing the children’s mar­ket it reminded me of a state­ment made by actor Nia Long, “…It’s just not about how tal­ented you are any­more. It’s about, ‘How much box-​office rev­enue will this per­son gen­er­ate?” Today, brows­ing the shelves of your local library you may see books by well-​known celebri­ties such as Spike & Tonya Lee, Debbie Allen, Bill Cosby and Whoopi Goldberg. It has made me begin to won­der if the trend that Nia Long spoke of has begun to influ­ence the lit­er­ary world as well?

While the above peo­ple men­tioned are tal­ented writ­ers some celebri­ties write with the aid of ghost writ­ers and the celebri­ties them­selves do none of the actual writ­ing. With the econ­omy in the state that it is cur­rently in book pub­lish­ers may feel that it is bet­ter to pro­mote famous peo­ple whose name alone will “gen­er­ate more rev­enue”. This may be the rea­son that more and more authors have begun to self pub­lish as opposed to going through one of the major pub­lish­ing houses. While I will con­tinue to remain opti­mistic that a lit­er­ary nobody like me can eke out a place in the world of children’s authors I am def­i­nitely keep­ing my eye on the com­pe­ti­tion.

Photo Credit: MahoganyBooks​.com

Thanks for read­ing,