Do Adult Gatekeepers Affect Teen Book Sales?

Publishing books for children and teens is a bizarre, fickle thing. I’ve come to the opinion that you have to be very brave or a little crazy (or both) to take it on.

You see, there is nothing straightforward when publishing for the under-18 set.

With adults, it’s all pretty common sense. If you publish romances or gothic mysteries or airplane centric real crime novels, then you know your audience is going to be romance fans or mystery enthusiasts or airplane crime novel devotees. Nothing too extraordinary there.

But the minute you publish for the children’s market (and that includes teens), you find yourself having to please two audiences. Oh, yes, there are those actual children and teens the phrase “children’s publishing” implies. But, and this is a big but, there is a second audience, a more powerful audience, the audience with the actual money paying for the books: adults.

And the biggest problem for the publisher is that these two audiences often don’t have the same tastes. What a thirteen-year-old finds fascinating is not necessarily the same thing I find fascinating in my thirties. (This is probably a good thing. Having the exact sensibilities as a thirteen-year-old is probably not in my best interest.) To take on both a child and adult audience simultaneously can only best be described as courageous.

I salute Leap Books on their foray into the nutty dual audience world of children’s publishing. Whether you are a child/teen or an adult (or adult with the heart of a child/teen), their books will find an audience in you.

ABOUT THE BLOGGER

Madeline Smoot is the publisher of Children's Brains Are Yummy Books, a micro publisher of fantasy and science fiction for children and teens.

Leap Books Launches Frolic Titles

Leap Books is excited to announce two Frolic titles leaping in 2013.

The first title in this new line for tweens is by New York Times Bestseller Maria V. Snyder. Maria is known for her Poison Study and Magic Study books as well as for Inside Out and Outside In. She is also a contributor to the anthology Spirited.


In STORM WATCHER, the youngest son in family of search-and-rescue dog trainers, Luke Riley, must face his deadly fear of storms to prove that he and the dog he's training belong in the family business.

STORM WATCHER will be be debuting October 2013. Fans can pre-order a copy now in the Leap Bookstore and have it shipped as soon as it comes out.

Our second 2013 Frolic release is by another Leap author, Patrice Lyle. She is the author of Lethally Blonde. Her new release, THE CASE OF THE INVISIBLE WITCH, is part of the Poison Ivy Charm School series.


In THE CASE OF THE INVISIBLE WITCH, thirteen-year-old Tulip Bonnaire, Witch PI, runs Spells & Spies out of her dorm room at Poison Ivy Charm School, a school for polite witches and warlocks. She has only 72 hours to figure out her latest case, or her classmate, Missy, will never be seen again. Literally.

When Missy shows up in Tulip’s dorm room around midnight, she’s invisible. As in not even x-ray vision could spot her. The mean triplets who call themselves The Belles have cast an invisibility spell on poor Missy. But if Tulip can’t break the spell in 72 hours, Missy will remain invisible forever.

It’s a case Tulip can’t resist — between her mom’s annoying new boyfriend and her own secret crush at school, Tulip understands how much it stinks to feel invisible. Luckily for Tulip, her two best friends and her cute, techy guy friend help dig up clues on a case that turns out to be her freakiest one ever.

THE CASE OF THE INVISIBLE WITCH can also be pre-ordered in the Leap Bookstore.