u/ImprovementSimple

“It is a common enough experience. You’re scrolling through the available titles on Libby or Hoopla when a book catches your eye for all the wrong reasons. The cover art looks unmistakably AI-generated. You’ve never heard of the author, and the title reads like several promising search terms hastily smashed together.

The genre hardly matters. In nonfiction, these books appear as hastily assembled how-to guides or self-improvement manuals offering dubious expertise. In fiction, they might be formulaic romances or mysteries that resemble familiar stories with every distinctive detail of the original work carefully filed off. Or, worst of all, they are something so profoundly uncanny that you struggle to describe them as anything other than AI slop. Encountering one of these titles produces an almost inevitable question. “Why did my library buy this?””

A little different from this sub’s usual fare, but still very much art history. A lot of these women changed the visual language of children’s books through printmaking, collage, graphic design, composition, and new ways of thinking about the page itself. Picture books are small objects, but there’s a lot of profound art history packed into them.

This is my attempt to explain why ebooks work so differently from traditional books on the library side, and, more importantly, why those wait times can be so long or why one book in a series is sometimes strangely missing from Libby.

My absolute favorite extra-long picture books that have come out in the last 5 years.

Picture books have almost no room for a weak opening. Too many manuscripts begin with worn-out phrases or familiar setups because writers think, “This is how children’s books are supposed to start,” instead of asking, “What is the best way to start THIS book?”

Here’s my tips for stellar opening lines.

This might be a bit of a “water is wet” article here. But I have found so many enthusiastic library users genuinely have no idea how their home libraries are actually funded.

I wanted to write something that explains why libraries tend to be funded so hyper specifically and why that matters.

“I hope Make Believe is not the last time Mac Barnett writes for adults about children’s literature. In fact, I hope someday he comes back to the subject with a much longer book and a much narrower audience. I would love to read Barnett writing specifically for librarians, teachers, authors, illustrators, or anyone else who already accepts his central premise that children’s books are real books, children are real readers, and the art we create and choose for them matters.”

Posting this here because the recent bonus episode touched on this subject and I have actually been working on this article for months.

As we notice an uptick here and other subs I thought I’d give my 10 cents on why these “authors” will never produces a good book by asking “what makes a good picture book” and feeding those answers to AI.

Here are five newer books that I recommend for people who have kids in their lives who just feel everything. Feel free to add to the list if you have a favorite :)

An essay in defense of children who keep telling the adults in their lives what they like to read, and are frustrated that no one seems to be listening.

There’s been a lot of chatter about why boys aren’t embracing reading at the same level as girls. In this essay I discuss how there is a glaring hole in the middle-grade market that is leaving many boys searching for books they want to read.

Rhyming is great until it isn’t. This is an essay of things to consider if you want to tell your story in verse.

Spooky is not a season. Find a new haunting book to read this summer.

We praise early childhood until it requires sustained investment. We celebrate children’s literacy until it becomes an invoice.

An essay on the elements that make a good picture book a great one.

An essay on why our work being viewed as “female” work might be why society won’t pay us enough or appreciate us more.

An article encouraging adults to decanter themselves when it comes to what their child reads.