Australia Leads the Way: Repurposing Adult Nonfiction for Children
If you're an Australian parent, good news is on the way. Australian publisher Text has decided to re-publish three bestselling nonfiction books as children's books.
Global warming is no fairytale. Junk food ingredients make for grim bedtime reading. And what child wants a picture book about punctuation?
We'll soon find out. Three bestselling adult non-fiction books -- Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves -- have been turned into children's books.
Melbourne publisher Text is about to launch a children's version of Flannery's 2005 call to arms over global warming, The Weather Makers, aimed at the high school market and called We Are the Weather Makers.
Associate editor Penny Hueston says she noticed that while her teenage children's friends were interested in global warming, they found some of the concepts hard to grasp. She asked a 13-year-old neighbour to read the adult version and circle passages she didn't understand. Working with Flannery, Hueston then halved the text, simplified the science and added illustrations. But Hueston says the new version, released on July 26, isn't dumbed down. "It's not written in kiddie language," she says.
Penguin Australia has just published Chew on This, the children's version of Schlosser's 2002 burger expose, Fast Food Nation.
The new version, co-written with journalist Charles Wilson, relates all the information to children's own experience with Happy Meals and Junior Whoppers. Schlosser's famous sentence, "there is sh** in the meat," was sanitised for the school market -- now it says "poop."
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The August publication of Truss' picture book version of Eats, Shoots and Leaves is unlikely to draw the same kind of heat, even from the grocers she mocks relentlessly in her 2004 bestseller.
The new book, aimed at primary school children, uses Bonnie Timmon's cheerful cartoons to illustrate the difference between sentences such as "Slow, children crossing" and "Slow children crossing."
We think it's a great idea: one that American children's publishers should consider. The children get access to important nonfiction authors and learn something, while the authors and publishers make more money. Everybody wins.
