The short but glorious history of Grabbit and Go Books…

The world’s most successful bookstore.

As you know, I’ve got a lot of kids. (How many? Not sure. I haven’t counted recently.)

And – kids grow up. They read books, then move on. And in that wake lie scattered books about football, books about horses, books about fantasy realms, books about dragon taming, books about wizardry, books about witches, books about cats who fight, books about mischief-causing cats, books about entertaining cows, books about rabbits, books about fighting, and a whole mountain more.

We wanted to get rid of this scatter, to make more space on the shelves. We could have taken them to the dump, or to a charity store, but I hit on the idea of giving them away in the school playground. My bookstore was called:

GRABBIT & GO BOOKS

Its slogan was going to be ‘The world’s finest bookstore’ but, on reflection, we thought there was some room for argument, so we struck out the word ‘finest’ and replaced it with ‘cheapest’. The price of every book was £0.00, unless you were paying in dollars in which case we charged $0.00.

Our one real condition was that we didn’t want kids wandering off with just one book. We wanted to get rid of the things, so if a boy picked up a book about football, I shoved a stack of other football books at him, and he wandered away with ten.

(And by the way, if you are ever struggling with writer’s block, may I suggest you write the biography of a famous footballer? I’ll start you off:

Omar was sure that Mo would never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds. “Mo, you will never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds,” he said. “They are much bigger and stronger than you are.” But Mo simply grinned and juggled the ball. “You just watch, boss,” he laughed. He felt nervous at first, but then the game started. The skinny ten-year-old dribbled the ball round all 11 players on the opposition team and then dribbled around his own players too, a goat, and a Toyota pickup. He let fly a volley from the edge of the box. His kick was so strong, the ball tore through the net and was last seen overflying the Zambezi. Mo’s team ended up winning 109-0. At the end of the game, Omar chuckled and said, “With a little more training, you might be quite good one day.”

Write that same story, again and again, throw in something about a Champions League final, and make sure when somebody exclaims “Goal!”, they use at least 20 characters, including a great many exclamation marks.)

Picking books for kids is quite easy.

Boy with short hair? Football.

Older boy with shorter hair? Book about fighting.

Boy not interested in books on either topic? Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Very young girl? Book about unicorns.

Young girl? Book about cats, horses or rabbits.

Older girl? Same thing, except make sure the cats are fighting.

Pre-teen girl? Book about teen girls committing / solving murder in a boarding school.

And zoom. The books went. I started with a fold-out picnic table so heavy with stacks of books that I didn’t have room for them all. I ended up with one carrier bag of discards which will probably, in time, find their way to a charity shop.

Reflections?

Well, first there was real excitement in the playground. Obviously, if I’d been giving away cakes, the cakes would have gone just as fast, but there’d have been less glee. A cake is only ever a cake. A book is a portal to – well, adventure. The unknown. It’s a ship setting sail from a sparkling harbour. Giving books to kids was honestly one of my most joyous moments of the year.

Second: free works.

It just works. There’s joy in the giveaway. It’s not a tool that traditional publishers use very much, but it’s an indie author staple. Genre readers are – often, often, often – like kids. They want to find a new author that they can make theirs. Free is a way to shove your Book #1 novel to the top of their reading pile. And once it’s there, and once they’ve read it, there’s every chance they go on to buy everything else, full price, and happily. (And, uh, if you’re interested in self-publishing, I think we’ve got only two or three places left on the upcoming course. So, if you’re keen, pull your boots on.)

And third, lordy lord, all this loveliness does seem a little under threat.

Headline sales of print books remain basically static – up a bit in one year, down a bit in another – but since those headlines always exclude self-pub books, and since self-pub collectively is at least the size of Penguin Random House, it’s probable that overall sales today are close to all-time records.

So, yes, books sell and there’s not much sign of them not doing so.

But the cracks in the palace are big and getting bigger. Here’s a recent gloomy view from The Economist:

Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?

Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.

Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children … but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.

The books that I gave away in the playground reflected that.

Those football books are, I’m sure, better for kids than video games, but they are a damn sight less enriching than (say) Susan Cooper, or Watership Down, or Lemony Snicket.

Books about conflict can be terrific, but they can also just be ugly. At one stage, my kids adored the Beast Quest series. (Adored them so much that I found them playing in the garden using six-foot wooden fenceposts as swords. I removed the posts and bought some plastic swords on Amazon, relieved to have escaped a trip to the emergency room.) But the series was ugly, ugly, ugly. It had no moral tuition in it. It was just slaughter. I didn’t give those books away; I destroyed them.

And behind those ugly books: an ugly publishing model. The books name ‘Adam Blade’ as an author, but multiple authors have written the series on (I would guess) a flat-fee basis. If I were one of those authors, I’d churn out the book as fast as I could. I’d deliver the book, get paid, move on. The purpose of that publishing model is almost literally to extinguish the author. I can’t really think why you’d hire authors these days, when you could simply AI the whole thing.

There are more wholesome approaches too. I don’t love the Wimpy Kid books, but they’re healthy enough and they get non-reading kids to read. So that’s a win. But the books are still responding to a basic sense of threat. They offer less, because they are aware that more will not be palatable.

The same things are true all the way across the scale. Some of the books my 12-year-old daughter reads have a level of worldliness and violence that I did not encounter in books until much later. But – today’s authors are fighting Netflix and phones and social media and video games. And, in a war, you have to fight. You can’t be picky about how you fight.

As for me? Well, my readers are predominantly women in the second half of life. That’s a literate, thoughtful demographic that it’s a pleasure to write for.

But the future me? The author writing this email in the Year of Our Lord 2075? I’m not too sure, but I’d bet that my present readers are better than his.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Fight scene

OK, let’s have a fight scene. If you don’t have any physical conflict, then whatever comes closest. 250-300 words, plus title, genre, and any context you think we need. When you’re ready, post your offering in Townhouse.

If you write like Philip Pullman, you get 100 points. If you write like Beast Quest, you are probably a robot.

Til soon.

Harry