The gap in the market

What is this gap in the fantasy and science fiction market for children & YA that we keep referring to? We mentioned it in our video, but we haven’t broken down the numbers yet in a post, so let’s look at them a little more deeply:

Mitali Perkins reported in a School Library Journal article that

Statistics show that 17 percent of students enrolled in American schools are African American. During 2008, however, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that among the 3,000 or so titles they received, only six percent had significant African or African-American content. While 20 percent of the country’s students are Latino, only about two percent of all books reviewed by CCBC had significant Latino content.

The numbers are even more dismal for American Indians, though better for Asian Americans. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center went on to report that in 2008, “A significant number—well over half—of the books about each broad racial/ethnic grouping are formulaic books offering profiles of various countries around the world.” That is, they’re geography books with reports on a country’s agricultural and mining products, geology, that sort of thing.

How many of the titles left over are fantasy and science fiction? Well, it’s hard to pin down a number, because fantasy and SF are broken down separately in the report, so it’s hard to tell whether F/SF featuring characters of color or set in non-Western or minority cultures were counted among the F/SF, the multicultural fiction, or both.

But let’s look at a wonderful online booklist project being compiled by Flying Pig bookseller and PW blogger Elizabeth Bluemle. Out of 517 really great books–including picture books–that feature multicultural settings and characters (this number itself a tiny percentage of the number of books published every year), only 23 come up when you search the list for “fantasy.” Now, there might be more fantasy titles on the list that aren’t showing up under that search, and she may not have had the chance yet to add the titles from the list I linked her to a while back–she’s very busy, of course!

But even adding the titles from that list and others like it (which were compiled thanks to Color Online’s challenge) to the bigger booklist, the percentage of multicultural fantasy and science fiction in the market is quite small.

Last night, I attended a reading and signing by Sherman Alexie, a prominent, award-winning Native American writer. I had heard that he had published one book that had some fantasy in it. As I spoke with the bookseller about Flight, one of Alexie’s adult titles which has some time travel in it, she pointed to a 15-year-old girl standing next to me, saying, “She’s read it, and she loved it, so it has crossover appeal.” The girl, who was Native American, nodded at me and said, “It was one of the first books that I felt a real personal connection with.”

That’s an experience we hope every reader can have at some point, hopefully early on in their lives. And we think that by providing more diverse fantasy and science fiction for readers, we can provide the opportunity for that experience for more young readers.