The folks at OnlineCollege.org alerted me to their newest post, 10 Biggest Predictions for the Future of Book Publishing. I'm listing their predictions below with my take on how they apply to children's books (click on the link to read the whole article with additional links):

1. Vanity presses and self-publishing will swell in popularity. As it gets easier (and cheaper) to self-publish, more authors are choosing that route. With children's books, authors who enjoy marketing (especially visiting schools and communicating with their readership via blogs and web sites) find they prefer to cut out the middle man of the traditional publisher. But before you self-publish, do your homework. Know exactly what you'll need to do to promote yourself, and figure out some creative ways to reach your market.

2. More writers and artists will experiment with motion comics. Don't know what I'm talking about? Read this. Motion comics are a natural evolution of the whole comic book and graphic novel craze.

3. There will be little need for gargantuan publishers. The big houses are becoming less relevant as authors and illustrators find new ways of directly reaching the consumer. In children's books, I believe this opens the doors to innovative new formats, subjects, and a redefining of what a "book" is. Kids are more open than adults to trying new things, and they'll embrace whatever clever artists and entrepreneurs create next.

4. More people will be authors. See numbers 1 and 3 above. In the children's/YA field, more teens will be authors in the coming years.

5. eBooks will only get more popular. The genie's out of the bottle on this one. And when you're talking about illustrated books for kids, the eBook format opens up all sorts of possibilities for multimedia and interactive experiences. Now that eBooks have been around a few years, the data should comfort those who predicted the print book was dead: eBook sales have been found to actually increase sales of the print version of the same book.

6. Authors will grow even more media-savvy. Authors don't have a choice, especially when your audience is kids and teens who have grown up on computers. They don't think twice about Googling an author, checking out a new book's web site, or blogging about their favorite reads or recommending titles to their friends on Facebook. Authors who aren't comfortable on these platforms will be left out of the loop.

7. Memoirs expand as a genre. This has always been a more adult-centered genre, but it makes sense that memoirs geared to middle grade and young adult readers will catch on. Kids are more aware of the world and different cultures than in past generations, and accounts of interesting lives by all types of people should be welcomed in schools and libraries.

8. Books will no longer have a minimum length. Word count and page length in children's books are more important than adult books, because we're dealing with shorter attention spans and different reading abilities. However, I do believe that the strict page lengths of picture books will be changing as it becomes easier to print books more cheaply, and as more picture books are produced in electronic formats. This should be good news for authors and illustrators who feel confined by the traditional 32 pages.

9. eBook readers will move further away from E Ink. In other words, eBook readers no longer have to closely mimic the printed page. This is good news for illustrated and interactive children's books, and even novels that can include links, animation and audio within the text to enhance the storytelling experience.

10. More young adult books will hit the shelves. The proliferation of YA titles in the last few years, along with the arrival of new young adult imprints at the big publishers, speaks to the market share teen readers command. This is a generation that loves to read and talk about their favorite books, along with a generation of parents who read what their kids are reading. Who knows when this bubble will burst, but it's sure to be here for a while.

Thanks, OnlineCollege.org, for another thought-provoking article!

Most parents wonder how to get their kids to read more.

In our house, we had to have a penalty for unbridled reading! We’d send our son to his room to get dressed, and twenty minutes later we’d find him on the floor, pants half on, reading. He’d read anything he could get his hands on. He’d probably have starved if I didn’t physically take his book away at lunchtime.

Though voracious readers like my son aren’t the majority, there are many. Enough, in fact, that their parents find each other online to ask the same question, over and over:

What should I do? My child has run out of books!

Specifically, at two points in these readers’ young lives, there is a dearth of books aimed at high reading capacity but lower social/emotional development. I’ll use my son as an example.

Most, though not all, gifted readers start young. My son didn’t start young; he started to read at the boringly average age of 6 3/4. But unlike the other kids in his first-grade class, he didn’t slowly progress from ABC books to early readers to chapter books. In October, he was still pronouncing “the” as “tuh-HUH.” In November, he was reading anything he got his hands on.

The problem was, he was still six, and an emotionally young six at that. He blew through all the classic children’s repertoire in about a year. I remember my gratitude upon finding that there were over 30 books in the Oz series.

The advice we got from other parents, teachers, librarians, and booksellers was almost always off. Sure, Dick King-Smith books are adorable, but a kid like this can eat one up in half an hour. Harry Potter started out a boy, and the early books were just on the edge of too scary, but as Harry ages, the books get more terrifying to a young psyche and further from her experiences.

What these kids need is good, thick books with compelling storylines, rich vocabulary, and little-to-no violence. Writers could look to the past for models: White, Baum, and Wilder got these kids.

Somehow, we got our son through this period. We thought it would be smooth sailing till one day in the library he said, “I’ve read everything here.” Read more

Many aspiring authors want to write for ages 8-12 but have trouble pinning down exactly what those readers want from their books. From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle Grade Authors is a group blog from 30 middle grade authors that offers regularly updated book lists organized by unique categories, author interviews, market news, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a children's book from writing to publishing to promoting. Their list of October New Releases is a great place to start your education on all things middle grade.