It’s a very simple question, that immediately gets all sorts of defensive accusations instead of an answer. But when the smoke and the chaff from linguistic screeching countermeasures faded, the question is still there. Reality that which, when you stop believing in it, still exists anyway.
The truth is, kids books suck. They have for a long time, and especially for boys.
Before you start pulling out the ones you loved as a kid as examples of books that don’t suck, take a step back and look at the book market today. My Side of the Mountain was written in 1959. Hatchet was written in 1987. Encyclopedia Brown started in 1963, and whether or not you think the later ones suffered in quality, even those ended in 2012. Tom Swift ran 1910-1941, and Tom Swift Jr, which is what most people think of as Tom Swift, ran 1954-1971.
So, what happened to make kids books suck?
First, Trad Pub buys children’s stories based on what they can sell to parents, teachers, and librarians, because those have traditionally been the people who actually have the purchasing power to buy the books.
Note that the most successful kid’s book of all time – Harry Potter – was published because Bloombury didn’t normally publish children’s books. So the editor, not knowing any better, gave the first chapter to their 8-year-old daughter to read. She loved it, and demanded the rest of the story.
Then note that despite the overwhelming success of publishing something a child actually wanted to read, this screening procedure has not been repeated since.
Instead, editors buy based on adult social fads that have nothing to do with children’s desires.
So when the current fad is sticking up Black Lives Matters banners and paying money to a couple Marxists grifters who would go on to do absolutely nothing to actually help black lives other than their own (that being why they are now sarcastically referred to as Buys Large Mansions), then the editors want “Black Lives Matters”-type books.
This has 0% relevancy to the actual composition of the demographics of the general public, much less the target market who want to read the books, and everything to do with social virtue points so they fit in at the next cocktail party.
I went as far back as I could, and present to you evidences that this idiocy is far older than you think. That being: the Journal of Education for Librarianship
Vol. 11, No. 4 (Spring, 1971), Published By: Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)
In an effort to halt the flight [of librarians from parental or administrative censure] , concerned writers call for greater relevance in the choice of books for adolescents. John Igo complained, “We take kids off 1966 streets and give them 1916 answers.” “The time is overdue for much more realistic literature,” wrote Frank Bonham, “These kids live in the real world, not a fiction world.” And the perennial pleader for greater relevance in literature for young adults, Nat Hentoff, protested that “the real disservice you do kids it to pretend that everything is cool when they know damn well it isn’t.” Reiterating the same point in “Baby Dolls Are Gone”, Nancy Larrick discussed the need for books reflecting our social and economic status. “This is what many youngsters are living with. It is what many of them want to read about.”
In the 53 years since, we have absolutely and utterly proven that no, that’s not what kids want to read about. That’s what adults want kids to read about, and it’s driven the American public away from reading.
And yet, the same attitudes are still there, and refusing to admit that they could possibly be wrong.
The thing is, they didn’t have to do this to children’s books, and to us. G. K. Chesterton had already warned them on the critical need for fairy tales:
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
While the common paraphrase is “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”, I much prefer the original quote, because it emphasized that the dragon can not only be killed, it provides a role model for doing so.
As one kid complained, “I don’t want to read about people who suck sitting around and talking about how miserable their lives are and never doing anything fun.” That reader already knows the world can suck. He wants to read about fun things instead, that contain at their heart the ways to overcome the suck.
And the kid is not alone:
Turning to Tolkien’s defense of “escapist literature”, which avoids the dreary muck of focusing on “our social and economic status”:
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all.
…
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
And C.S. Lewis agreed, in an essay on science fiction:
Stories of that sort like the one I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us. … Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reasons, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers. The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.
Unfortunately for the traditional gatekeepers, indie has broken down the prison walls, and now the authors are free to write and read what they want, and many kids are able to purchase or borrow it on their own.
So go forth, and reject the counterculture that has been in place so long that it is the man trying to keep us down. Stop giving them 1966 answers, and give them 1916 ones. Embrace slain dragons, explored jungles, and clever inventions, as well as all adventure and humour and wonder that kids love.
Be traditional. Because, as the fox says:
Have fun, and write things where your readers have fun, too.
Mad Genius Club 
67 responses to “Why Do Kids’ Books Suck?”
I’ve been thinking about kid’s book a lot lately, and the kinds I liked as a kid, mostly animal stories, horse, dog, etc. You don’t see a whole lot of those around any more, either.
i’d really really say comic books, but those have gone so woke they’re killing themselves too
Sadly, these days comic books are quite expensive to create. If you’re not an artist you’re looking at about $400 a page.
i was referring to things for kids to read.
$400 per page? ask again why i’m doing my comics in 3d…
Which means that you’re doing it yourself. Most people don’t have those skills. But I used to know a couple of comic book artists, and I even used to eat dinner (occasionally) with the VP of Dark Horse.
Comic books are expensive to create and expensive to print, and even more expensive to distribute, which has a lot to do with why no one has really challenged DC or Marvel. And why with their downfall so many comic book stores have gone out of business.
I looked into getting one of my novels turned into a graphic novel. Someone I know who went that route for several of his authors told me not to waste my money, that scifi readers won’t go for graphic novels. Not enough to pay the bills that is.
So comic books has become a very tough market.
It has indeed, because they’ve p1ssed off their fanbase. I used to buy Marvel’s and DC’s full output some weeks. Thousands of issues grace my basement. Tons of guys like me out there.
Stopped cold-turkey in 1993. They were garbage.
Now, of course, they are so much worse. Any decent story would be a ray of sunshine.
And as such, instantly smothered by the ‘individuals’ keeping the industry stuck the way it is. Enemy action, John.
It doesn’t help that current comic book creators think their fan-base is the angry, bitter lesbian wine-aunts that want terrible transgressive shipping stories. Because that’s the only thing that gets their attention.
There are still a few good comics out there. Hellboy and Usagi Yojimbo come to mind. Most of them though are just plain muck.
Stan, who does Usagi, retired a few years back.
He did? The people in the Usagi Yojimbo FB group I belong too seem convinced he still works on the comic. Or at least advises on it.
Stan Sakai is still actively making new issues of USAGI YOJIMBO.
I’m pretty sure he’s retired now. Could have sworn I saw that a couple years back.
I have a friend who knows Stan (known him for like decades). I should probably ask him.
a couple of years ago he hopped publishers from IDW back to Dark Horse. The current USAGI arc “The Crow” is currently in process. Check the official Dark Horse website for more info-
Here’s a link to the solicitation for the latest issue. His continued activity is extremely verifiable. 🙂
Usagi Yojimbo: The Crow #3 :: Profile :: Dark Horse Comics
I remember seeing stuff saying he was retiring, too. But I guess that was wrong, or he changed his mind. Good!
I’d have to see some real evidence that sci-fi readers ‘won’t go for graphic novels’ because many of the sci-fi readers i know either have or had extensive comic collections, and jus stopped reading mainstream comics a decade or two ago, which does not mean they won’t read *your* comics. As for the printing prices, they really aren’t bad at all, there are a few places specializing in it now and most of them will also take care of shipping them out for things like Kickstarter fulfillment.
Distribution? Forget getting into comic book stores. Unless you can get Diamond to pick you up, you’re not likely to get into stores. However, you can get Amazon to stock your comics just fine…
I’m in massive amounts of pain right now, so excuse me if I act rude.
In short, doing a quality comic, in today’s market, if you’re not an artist, is an expensive proposition.
Oh, one last point: Most comic book artists are jerks. Trying to get them to do any kind of long project on a deadline is very difficult, and unless you’re hiring a top dollar pro, they could very well just walk off one day and leave you hanging with an unfinished project. Seen that happen too many times.
Then you need a better grade of 3d people. No, seriously, don’t look at the stuff by the people who picked up Daz Studio yesterday…
Many artists i know are jerks, not just comic book artists.
ok so real number time:
A lot of comic book stores went under in 2020 and 2021.
In 2019, ‘bookstores’ sold 8% more comics than ;comic stores’
In 2020 comic book sales through ‘bookstores’ sold 46% more comics than ‘comic stores’.
In 2021, they sold 65% more.
I can practically guarantee that for the purposes of these numbers, Amazon counts as a ‘bookstore’.
50+ Comic Book Statistics: Sales, Readers & Facts (marketsplash.com)
Heck, you can look at the bookstores that are still afloat.
The scifi section is next to “graphic novel” section.
There’s a reason they hired a known scifi writer to do scripts for the Barbarella comics.
Comic books have become-at least for the Big Five (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, and IDW)-the place you put people that you need to give jobs…but can’t have them work on anything important.
It is the only explanation that I have for the various editorial decisions made by the various creators out there.
I knew that one of my children was playing a game called Final Fantasy. I was so ignorant that I didn’t realize there are lots of versions of Final Fantasy but I finally asked her to show it to me. This particular game had beautiful graphics, a betrayed princess, some lowly peasants trying to help, and an ending which included (as I remember it) everyone rejecting the wrong answer about what to do about power. She was essentially rereading any number of fairy tales as she played. I also discovered that she and her siblings keep in touch not with phone calls and letters but through their side comments when they play some online game together (at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning). Really changed my ideas about lots of things.
A betrayed princess and some lowly peasants trying to help… I have only played about half the Final Fantasy games and I can think of two of them that match that description. Was this the princess in the game you saw?
And were these the peasants trying to help?
Been out all day… this first set is the one!
That’s Final Fantasy 12, one of the really good ones. The only complaint I have about it is that the princess is clearly the main character, yet Vaan, the peasant boy trying to help, is chosen as the point-of-view character. A PoV character whose choices do not drive the plot, and who doesn’t understand the political interactions of the plot and has to have them explained to them.
From a storytelling perspective, that’s weak. If they didn’t want to have the princess be the PoV character, there was another character right there available to use: Basch, the knight. He’s centrally involved in the plot (details would be spoilers) and has perfectly good reasons to go along with the princess, protect her, and follow her orders. Whereas the peasants (Vaan and his girlfriend) have no particular reason to do so, and a few times the question “So why are they going along with the party again?” can only be answered “Because the writers wanted them to, even if it would make more sense at this point for them to want to go home and live a peaceful life far away from war.”
I don’t know how such games are put together so I don’t know how important the general rules of storytelling are to such games. I do know that there was a lot of random walking around and ‘leveling up’ after killing monsters that the peasant boy did which was a choice of the player. But I saw clearly that a good story, even if badly told, was the driving force and it gave me hope for people who play a lot.
Off-topic, sorry, but I can’t help myself:
I had three issues with 12. First, as you mentioned, Vaan and Penelo didn’t really have a good reason to be there; you could have cut them out of the story entirely without it making a difference.
Second, the wandering around tended to take a long time. Usually, by the time the characters got where they were going, I’d forgotten why they were going there in the first place—and often the game didn’t remind me. Usually, it was, “Oh, there’s some interesting news that has made your original purpose in coming entirely irrelevant,” which made it kind of feel like you were just going places randomly.
Finally, that was during the period where MMORPGs were big, and FFXII was clearly made with that format in mind. Except that it was a single-player offline MMORPG, and it didn’t really work. A lot of times, it felt like what you were really doing was programming the AI to play the game for you.
That’s not to say it was necessarily a bad game; I had fun, and in some ways, I liked it a lot better than the 13 series. But there were a lot of flaws that weren’t present in the games before it.
Or was this the betrayed princess?
And was this guy one of the peasants trying to help?
Nope. The first set…
Ah yes. Broccoli books. Socially relevant, spiritually uplifting, facing the grim nihilism of life head on, and good for you. You notice that broccoli books don’t concern themselves with telling a good story.
My kids hated them.
You’d think they were designed to stop kids from reading.
It goes back a long, long way too. IIRC, some kid’s librarian at the main library in New York City (a power in the industry) bitched about Roald Dahl’s books. How dare he be amusing and silly and dangerous.
Conspiracy theorist me is willing to believe they are designed to stop kids from reading.
A populace that reads is one that can form its own ideas.
If that’s the case some people have been at it for a long time. I can remember how back in 7th grade I had an English teacher who destroyed Treasure Island for the class. It takes real skill to turn Treasure Island into a hateful slog for a room full of teenage boys.
It’s at least a century old or more: the names of Enid Blighton and Little Lord Fauntleroy come immediately to mind.
Any teacher who’d spoil Treasure Island for boys Jim’s age (but I suspect that books per se were being spoilt already) should be given a pink slip with the Black Spot thereon.
To be fair to the teacher, as she was a nice lady otherwise — we had some teachers that flat-out hated the students — she was doing what her job required of her. And some of us did get into it. More of it could be blamed on the local school system administration than the individual teachers.
Hey, I like broccoli and so did my kids, when they were kids!😁
Seriously, I know what you mean. The novels, especially for middle grades (4, 5, & 6), are really bad. They are trying to featured “underrepresented” populations and illustrate how awful America/Western Civ is. Or they use very simple vocabulary and sentence structure, devoid of intricate details. Then we wonder why students don’t have any imagination, especially when asked to write a story for class.
This has been a problem with childrens’ literature from the beginning, largely because “moral uplift” was the whole point of the genre when it started–and, given that it started in the mid-19th century, was done with all the subtlety of dropping an anvil. The fact that Mark Twain satirized this tendency in “The Story of the Good Little Boy” and “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” tells you all you need to know.
Also, the reason why we remember the children’s books and authors of yesteryear so fondly is because the books that anyone still talks about are the good ones–the dreck got left behind and forgotten.
See also, Saki, “The Storyteller.”
Or Bram Stoker’s The Dualitists; or, The Death-Doom of the Double Born, which is both a riot and incredibly cynical.
It’s probably just sentiment talking, but I feel like I’d prefer “moral uplift” to what we have now, which seems more like “amoral casting down.” It’s true no one wants to read, “Good little boys and girls have everything work out for them, while bad boys and girls lose everything and end up sleeping in the gutter,” but they want even less to read, “Life sucks in all respects, so let’s wallow in despair.”
It shouldn’t be a choice between “Three Little Kittens” and The Hate U Give, but if that is the choice, I’ll take the former over the latter any day.
Grooming.
There’s more (and weirder, and a lot more graphic) s3x in Y/A these days than anything I’ve been willing to read over the years.
I gave my kids Monster Hunter International after they’d read all of Rick Riordan. It was less graphic and less bent than the crap they faced in the school library.
They didn’t turn out too weird, honestly. ~:D
Part of the problem is that now, a good chunk of the people reading Y/A are in their twenties and thirties.
But yes, graphic sexual content in Y/A has been an issue for awhile–I remember one of my high school English teachers, who was no prude, talking about this as an issue back in the late oughts.
The other reason many 20 and 30 somethings read YA is it still — frequently but not always — tells a story that doesn’t consist of “should I cheat on my spouse to fill the void inside me.”
Ah, yes – practically none of the books that I adored reading when I was a kid would pass muster among the current Jiggery-Wokery. I wanted thrilling adventure, escape, interesting people, the far corners of the world, magic, mystery and more thrilling adventure. About the only grim realistic teen book that I could stand was SE Hinton’s “The Outsiders” and it was far from my favorite read.
I’ve successfully hand-sold my own adventure/mystery series to about every tween and teen boy that I have encountered at book events. There is so very little out there for boys, now that Harry Potter ran it’s course, and that is such a pity. No wonder the boys are escaping into games.
At this point, we *are* the counterculture.
We totally are. What a revoltin’ development, eh?
Well, my works are, on the whole, suitable for teens, and some are perhaps more slanted toward boys (A Diabolic Bargain?), but I’m working on a MG.
As an elementary school librarian, I have to agree that it is very difficult to find good narrative chapter books or picture books that do not lean too heavily on the message or moral.
I’ll repeat the comment I left at Raconteur: Children’s librarians seem like such nice people. I’ve never met one who wasn’t kind to children and enthusiastic about them reading. But as a class, they’ve probably done more damage to literacy than just about any other group. If they were part of an alien conspiracy to make sure that the next generation grows up illiterate, it’s hard to say what they’d do differently.
I think in some ways the problem is that they are, in fact, very nice people–as a result, they want children to grow up to be nice, so they only want them to read nice books that teach them how to be nice.
The problem is that most people don’t want to read that sort of thing.
This used to be a big problem in Christian literature too, at least the modern stuff I read back in the 80’s at the insistence of well-meaning horrified relatives who saw the covers of my Lancer Conans and/or Marvel Comics of the time. I understand it’s gotten better since then.
The profession of librarian in this country has been infiltrated and taken over by a ton of Communists, who basically replaced the Socialists and liberals of the previous generation of librarians.
Obviously a few decent librarians got through, but not many.
And of course, most elementary schools don’t really have libraries anymore, which explains a lot. Also that nonsense with making kids read only books classified to a certain reading level.
There are still good kids’ books out there, but you have to dig.
Re: kid reviewing books — That’s also how The Hobbit got published. The publisher was unsure, so he gave Tolkien’s manuscript to his son Rayner Unwin to read, and his son gave an enthusiastic report.
Looking at YA novels on a regular basis at the local B&N, you see a lot of the same themes. Depressing, terribly depressing themes.
They’re not being sold to teenagers/”young adults” for the most part. They’re being sold to librarians that think they know what teenagers and “young adults” want.
You could get a ChatGPT bot to run through a series of prompts to make many of these novels-and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of them are.
I was raised on the really old-fashioned kids’ books – “Heidi,” “Five Little Peppers” etc. They may have dated too badly for today’s kids by now, but they did have strong storytelling. I also helped myself to any of the books I found in the kids’ section at the libraries, but this was back before the woke YA stuff. I agree that it’s important for kids to be able to face a challenge and triumph over it, while remaining kids rather than jaded semi-adults.
Posted a response to Jane Meyerhofer that got stuck in the spam bin. Could someone go let it out, please? It was about how the main character was not the same as the point of view character in the game she mentioned, and the storytelling weaknesses involved in that choice.
Thanks to whoever released it. I’m starting to theorize that the factor putting the comments in the spam bin is long comments made more than X hours (perhaps X=24) after the post is created.
[…] FOR THE SAME REASON — BY AND LARGE — TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING SUCKS: Why Do Kids’ Books Suck? […]
And there I thought I tried to write YA… that I would have loved to read as a kid. No wonder I never got to be a bestseller.
F**k sakes Dave, nobody is a best seller these days. Kids don’t read. They TikTok.
Did you see that thing I posted the other day from Rick Beato? They’re all glued to their phones. They don’t even game anymore, going by the stats.
You want to get some eyeballs, TikTok and YouTube Shorts is where the eyeballs are. Hook ’em there, they’ll buy your book.
This is the zero-cost advertising that’s been keeping my little company afloat. We have youtube videos on the subject (which I will not speak of here, due to the Usual Suspects and their infernal intent) and people see them, then they come to our business.
I find this intensely annoying on one hand, because making and posting a bunch of youtubes is not what I thought I’d be doing at 68 years old. On the other hand, almost every other avenue of promotion out there is bullsh1t these days.
Because, of course, everyone is on their PHONE. They do -not- watch TV, listen to the radio, read the newspaper. At all. This is what the numbers say.
I believe, deep in my crunchy, stony little heart, that an AI voice-over with decently selected voices and background images, coupled to a rip-roaring story, delivered in 30 second tidbits, could work.
I haven’t done that myself because A) I’m busy writing and B) its not so easy as one might hope to manage all this stuff, but that’s what I think.
Random other thought, you know what’s popular with Zoomer kids these days? Console stereo systems and turntables for their growing vinyl record collections. Youthful ears can hear the difference between high fidelity recordings and compressed streaming from Spootify. Who could have seen that coming?
True suckiness typically has more than one cause, (as does true greatness). In the case of kids’ books one of those causes is the conceit that kids want to read about other kids, “characters they can identify with,” rather than about adults.
Or as Terry Pratchett put it: “[Wee Free Men is] a children’s book because:… 2. It has a nine-year-old heroine. This is good enough for the industry, which believes that books with children as the main protagonist are de facto books for children. For similar reasons, Moby Dick is very popular among whales.”
I’ve noticed that kids’ books popular among kids often subvert this. The Hobbit is about a 50 year old pipe-smoking bachelor, and that first chapter of the first Harry Potter book is full of cool and strange adults. (And later on, the Harry Potter books were popular among kids younger than the ‘intended’ target age – among readers younger than the protagonists.)
But that’s just one reason. Kids books suck from other causes as well: Moralizing (and mis-moralizing). Being ‘serious’ and ‘edifying,’ often to the point of grimdarkness and what TV-Tropes calls “Death by Newberry Medal.” Other, lesser, reasons also contribute.
Ah, yes, “Death by Newbury Medal.” Or, as the page quote at least used to say, “If there’s a dog and an award sticker on the front cover, the dog is going to bite it.”
Pro-tip: Kids don’t actually want to read about dogs dying. Adults don’t really either. In general, the dog shouldn’t die unless you’re writing John Wick fan-fiction.
Oh, holy fructose yes. Do -not- kill the dog. Or the kid. What’s the two stories I hate the most in all the world? Old Yeller and the Little Match Girl. [incoherent snarling, snapping sounds.] Yesss, we hatesss them, Preciousss.
*chuckle* Two of the books that I loved the most at that age were “Old Yeller” and “Where the Red Fern Grows”. Didn’t really care as much for the “Old Yeller” sequel, “Savage Sam”. Didn’t have the connection.
This is the best piece about children’s books I have ever read. I have worked in the field and it’s garbage—books bought sold by, bought by, and given awards by leftist adults and sullen kids who don’t like them and know it’s all miserable. The only thing worse is the horror show that is teen lit.
Y’know, maybe that’s the same reason I couldn’t get into Dickens much (poled my way through David Copperfield, and read the RD edition of Oliver Twist, and got stuck in Great Expectations at the dead wedding cake; the Tale of Two Cities was a good audiobook, though). His orphans are living in grimdark broccoli books.
The problem is and remains how to get those good books – either the ones you know of or the ones you write – in front of kids to begin with?
As you said, the teachers and librarians are the gatekeepers who decide what books end up in front.of children.
Self-puffery, but on topic: I’ve published a book of short stories for children, Unexpected Tales from A to Z (available on Amazon), and will have a sort of sequel, The Adventures of Zoe the Flying Rhinoceros, coming out later this year. Aimed at beginning readers, or for reading aloud by parents. Guaranteed 0% Woke.
I agree that this phenomenon has been around for a while. When I was a kid it was a small fraction of the books I read (perhaps 10-20%) – books like Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye and Down so Long it Looks Like Up to Me. I also remember reading a short story about a kid who blew his brains out playing russian roulette – it traumatized me. But the majority of books were still uplifting – I got lost in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, the Witch of Blackbird Pond (not a series but several excellent books by the same author), and a host of other books (Westerns, adventures, etc and lots of sci-fi) that were written for adults but were excellent reads and not to hard for my 9-12 year old brain. By 12-15 I’d already moved on to Tolstoy and Hesse (and Tolkien of course!)… So in short – the dark and dismal (or marxist/sexual-agenda) books for kids thing did start decades ago, but it was a minority of the books being written, whereas now (from what I hear) it’s the majority.