Yet More on Age-Ranging
September 2nd, 2008 by Vanessa
I was interested to see this report in the Guardian of the specially organised debate about age-ranging which took place at the Society of Authors conference. Only one publisher – Kate Wilson of Scholastic – accepted the invitation to meet the Children’s Writers and Illustrators group which is a poor showing from a group of publishers who allegedly feel so strongly that this is the way forward. I admire her nerve in facing a room full of disgruntled authors and it’s a shame that none of the others had the guts to back her up. However, even she conceded that the Publishers’ Association had gone about introducing the scheme badly by not consulting authors about the project early in the process.
She also defended the research which I find interesting. There are huge holes in the market research that this policy was based on – you used to be able to find a summary of it if you rummaged long enough on the PA website but it seems to have vanished now. Without intending to sound pretentious, both my husband and I have academic backgrounds and can spot fudged methodology, ropey sampling and conclusions that make unfounded assumptions when we see it and it’s been this research that has been one of my main concerns all along with the age-ranging policy.
I was at a publisher’s dinner a couple of weeks ago and discussing age ranging with someone from one of the companies that was involved with its introduction. He told me how much the research cost the PA and I was absolutely horrified and pointed out that for that amount of money they could have had a post-doctoral researcher in a university for a year with a track record in the area of education, child literacy etc who would have been able to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. If this research concluded that age-ranging on books was a good thing, it would have had credibility and even those of us who don’t like the idea would have had to concede that it had a place.
However, the key thing is the ‘if’ at the beginning of that last sentence. Academic research would have had more credibility because of its objectivity but that very objectivity might have led to the conclusion that age-ranging was not a positive move and that wouldn’t have been popular with the PA who see age-ranging as a way to increase sales in supermarkets etc. A market research company is always going to be keener to come to the desired conclusions than an academic whose career depends on the credibility of their work.
Philip Pullman’s full speech at the debate is a must-read, whatever your views, as well as Anne Fine’s. See http://www.notoagebanding.org/
Interesting re your comments, Vanessa, that Philip claims part of the research was Arts Council funded. I have to say I’m amazed, when writers in need of support in this precarious business find it so hard to get any Arts Council support, that research into a marketing strategy by the PA gets public money.
I’m sure Tesco would have helped them out.
That’s interesting Julie – the chap from the publisher in that I spoke to was on the committee that ran the project and I’m surprised he didn’t mention Arts Council support when I cast aspersions on his ‘research’. Will check with the Arts Council when I have time.
PS – and kudos to Kate Wilson, my publisher of old, who struck me as having a real passion for books and for getting good books to readers. So we really are, fundamentally, all on the same side.
Here’s what the PA have to say on their website about age ranging report…
PA age guidance
They claim “Expanding the Book Market report, commissioned from the research company Book Marketing Limited (BML) by Arts Council England (ACE) and other funding partners.”
and the actual report can be found here…
Expanding the Book Market
I could only find a press release on the Arts Council England website, but no final report which should (has to?) be submitted within 6 months of the completion of the funded project. This was certainly the way all Science Council funded projects I’ve ever worked on operate, and I should imagine the Arts Council has a similar policy.
But the research that the actual proposals were based on were carried out by a market research company and the ‘Expanding the Book Market’ report only considered age-ranging as one of a number of possible measures. Pages 5 and 6 of the Executive Summary touch on age-guidance as only one possible factor that could help book-buyers and it doesn’t (at first glance) seem to come to any conclusions or recommendations with regard to it.
What immediately jumps out at me from a quick reading of the above report is that people want better blurbs on books – blurbs that give them much clearer information about a book.
Interestingly, this is the position of the No To Age-Banders: that readers deserve blurbs and covers which do their job properly – and much more effectively than a number.
As someone who has had over 15 years of experience in university research departments, I still find it unbelievable that public money should go to carry out market research. The last time I looked we still had some excellent universities. As Vanessa mentioned, if they had funded a multidisciplinary research project including experts in retail business and child literacy and development, submitted their research for peer review and published their work in respected journals, then their findings might actually be credible. As it stands this report is nothing more than joke.
One bit of the report that I particularly liked was that of all the people asked only 1% found it difficult to choose for children*.
*14 non-buyers don’t know what to get/how to choose for children (Table 2.4.3) and 14 light or medium buyers found it difficult to choose for children (Table 2.5.4), which gives 28 people of the original 2000 sample.
And yet this is what the PA say on their website regarding this supposed ‘demand’ for age-guidance:
“The issue of age-guidance on children’s books came to the fore in 2005 with the publication of the Expanding the Book Market report1, commissioned from the research company Book Marketing Limited (BML) by Arts Council England (ACE) and other funding partners. The report made various recommendations for improved information for readers and book buyers, including the provision of age-guidance on children’s books to encourage gift-buying.”
I must have blinked and missed the bit where the report recommends this… did you find it, Malcolm?
Julie, I’ve run a search on the whole document and there is in fact only one mention of age-guidance. Searching for “guidance”, a paragraph at the bottom of section 2.7.2 (page 21) says…
There was also solid support for a number of other initiatives such as the ability to find out about authors similar to other writers, clearer guidance on the suitability of a book for a child’s age and more best-seller lists within book genres.
However, at no point do they quantify the level of support, indicate whether age-guidance was part of the questionnaire or if it came up in a comments section at the end. It is also ambiguous if they mean clearer categories within bookshops, or age-guidance printed on books. The other initiatives are all associated with bookshops, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to link clearer guidance with shelf categories and advice points within the bookshop.
Thanks, Malcolm. It gets murkier and murkier the deeper you dig.
As an ex-primary teacher, as well as an author, experience tells me there are a lot of very useful ways to give ‘clearer guidance on the suitability of a book for a child’s (reading!!) age’, but branding an actual age category on the book is by far the least helpful and least accurate way of all.
But providing guidance that would truly help adults and children would take time and skill and expertise from publishers.
So, hey, let’s just fling together a cover and blurb with hours to spare before a production deadline…!
I’m the webmaster for ‘No to Age Banding’ and some time back, having learned of the Arts Council funding, I made a Freedom of Information request to Arts Council England. A large packet of papers came through the post which I subsequently scanned and have placed online, here’s a list of what we have.
The Publishers’ Association have also put together an ‘Age Guidance Document Library‘ you might want to refer to. The Acacia Avenue Data is particularly illuminating and this informed the Newsletter that was circulated about the research.
The budget was £35.5k of which the Arts Council provided £5k.
Having read the administrative stuff in that submission, it struck me how uncritical the Arts Council in London were. You might have thought these things are looked at with a degree of healthy scepticism, well … think again. On the credit side, however, is Mark Robinson, head of the North East part of the Arts Council, who blogged about this topic.
And I hope those links all come out, or I may have to start again …
Roger, thanks for requesting that information and posting the links. I’m sure it’ll keep myself and others busy digesting it all. I’ve had a quick look through some of the forms and one paragraph in the proposal struck me…
The Publishers Association Children’s Book Group is asking for ‘Grants for the Arts’ funding of £5k to assist with Phase 2 of a project to introduce a nationwide scheme to classify children’s books by recommended reading age and content.
It’s nice to see the PA maintained an independent and unbiased view about this important issue before they applied for this funding – they even seem to know the results of phase 1 before it was even started.
Back to the Expanding the Book Market report. According to this report the average number of books bought, per annum, by adults is 8.
The Publishers Association state that the number of books sold in the UK for 2006 (sorry I couldn’t find the figures for 2005) was 787 million, and National Statistics (census 2001) gives the adult population of the UK at about 45.5 million. This gives a total of just over 17 books bought, per annum, by adults.
That’s quite a large discrepancy, so I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the validity of the Expanding the Book Market sampling methods and data.
Thanks, Roger and Malcolm. A lot to ponder and digest here…
Malcolm you must realise that children’s literature is not a ‘proper’ field for academic research and that the people who teach it are ‘not really academics’!
Seriously I doubt that the situation in the UK is any different from the one here. I once had the enormous pleasure of attending a Children’s Literature in Education conference at Exeter University in 1973 (okay my age is showing) and I can distinctly remember the same complaint being voiced back then.
We also have central buying here for the whole of the state of South Australia – and that is, all too often, market driven rather than quality driven. Local library is full of ‘big social issues’, second rate fantasy-adventure and Japanese style comic books…I exaggerate slightly but not much.
[...] isn’t that difficult, and the font is large. Incidentally, this is another example of how age-ranging isn’t very practical, because this series would clearly stretch over more than one age [...]