The dinosaur book juggernaut: how big is it?

February 22, 2006 7:45 AM

Within the world of Children's and Young Adult books, is there a way to guage the popularity of dinosaur-related titles?

For instance, "books about dinosaurs sell X number of copies per year" or "dinosaur books hold a X% share in the children's book industry." It seems like a difficult thing to guage, but surely someone knows how popular these books are... or else they wouldn't be making so many of them!

Maybe if it was generalized from "dinosaur-related" to "science-related"... ?

posted by bjork24 to writing & language (9 comments total)

Have you considered going into a couple of bookstores and counting titles? That would give you a number to quote, at least.
posted by alms at 7:47 AM on February 22, 2006

Perhaps you could deduce something by looking at library circulation records. This would be difficult information to come by unless you work in a library, however.
posted by scratch at 7:56 AM on February 22, 2006

You can be sure that publishers have information that approaches this, about all segments of their lines. If you need hard data, you might call a couple of publisher's publicity departments in order to see if they'll share the info, but I'd bet against them really helping.

For anecdotal data, I'd go to your local good children's store. They might be able to give you local data from their re-order records. It wouldn't be difficult to get a sorted list of such reorders from any bookstore with a modern inventory mgmt system. Again, you might have a job convincing them that you aren't going to use the data to their detriment.
posted by OmieWise at 8:12 AM on February 22, 2006

Library circulation records wouldn't necessarily give you accuracy in terms of recent releases. But maybe the Library of Congress would be a good starting point for research. Also, Scholastic is the biggest publisher of children's books. They may have some answers for you.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 8:22 AM on February 22, 2006

I don't profess to know but you *might* find a site via Para Publishers - I had a quick look down the page and there isn't anything there directly but perhaps somewhere like publishersweekly could assist. Although if SuperSquirrel is right about scholastic I'd ask them first.

One other thought that came to mind - it *might* be worthwhile ringing a museum of decent size as they would not only likely sell dinosaur books, they'll probably know all the publishers in the same line (although, what constitutes a 'dinosaur book' ie. educational -vs- entertainment is something you'll probably have to define). Good question though.
posted by peacay at 8:45 AM on February 22, 2006

My advisor, Brian Sturm, has an article in Children & Libraries 2003 (vol. 1, issue 3, pg. 39) that has some statistics on reading preferences though not on dinosaurs specifically--'animals' (the category under which dinosaurs fall) is by far the most popular category.

Also:

Solomon's overview of actual terms used by children to search the catalog may be considered indicative of those interests. He found that twenty terms were used most frequently by these first through sixth graders. In rank order the terms were: cats, dogs, mystery, animals, magic, poetry, dinosaur, drawing, horses, weapons, karate, baseball, rabbits, sports, ghosts, insects, monsters, birds, fiction, and science.

posted by Jeanne at 9:49 AM on February 22, 2006

as someone who works in children's books, i am hard-pressed to think of a young adult novel about dinosaurs...

one solution might be to count the number/percent of dino books on children's bestseller lists.

you could also read the spring 2006 children's book announcements and count how many books are on dinosaurs. that only tells you what's being published, though, rather than what's being sold.

here's a qualitative snippet from booksellers via pw:
Most Overdone Subjects:
Bedtime; passing gas; dinosaurs; celebrity books
posted by nevers at 9:51 AM on February 22, 2006

These types of industry-wide stats don't really exist. Any given publisher only knows exactly how many books they themselves have sold. Bookscan can give you an idea of how it's doing in the whole marketplace, but it's far from all-encompassing.

For dinos, for instance, a publisher knows how well its own dino books have sold. They also can get a general sense that in the marketplace, dinos are popular from bestseller lists and what booksellers say (also in toys and other kids' markets). But they do not know exactly how many dino books have been sold, or what percentage of books are about dinos. Not in hard numbers. Even when a publication says there are "x number of x book in print," that information comes from the publisher, and it's usually just an estimate. And it includes unsold books sitting in their warehouse.

If you're looking for just a cute stat for an article or something, I'd go with the others and suggest making a trip around to your local bookstores and do a count. Or take something from PW like nevers suggests.

And I can't think of a Young Adult dino book, either. Young Adult books are for teenagers. You're probably thinking of Middle Grade.
posted by lampoil at 1:58 PM on February 22, 2006

Thanks for all the tips! I did indeed mean "Middle Grade" instead of "Young Adult," and I'd also like to announce that I copyrighted the word "guage" and plan on using it as the title for my dino book.
posted by bjork24 at 3:18 PM on February 22, 2006