Live Breaking News & Updates on Baby lit

By Alex Green
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Feb 26, 2021
Children’s booksellers often need to satisfy more than one customer when making a book recommendation. There’s the young reader herself, but there’s likely also a parent, grandparent, or other adult with an opinion about what belongs on her shelf. With multiple people to please, children’s booksellers say they tend to reach for beloved older titles, and consequently, children end up reading deeply into an author or genre’s backlist.
In short, backlist is integral to starting kids on the path to becoming lifelong readers, says Cathy Berner, children’s and YA specialist and events coordinator at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston. “You want to hook them; you want them to love reading. When they do, they gobble up books. When you’ve got a voracious reader, you need to know backlist—it’s so important for the bottom line. Every bookseller in the store has favorite backlist titles that we always keep in stock.”

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