In fact, when it comes to children’s and young adult novels, many publishers are scrambling to capture the attention of the elusive, picky boy readers. Girls tend to accept a broad range of books, especially if romance is a thread in the story line. But boys lag behind girls in reading skills in all 50 states, making reading “the most pressing gender-gap issue facing our schools,” according to a 2010 report by the Center on Education Policy. Captivating boys and making reading fun presents a big challenge — but it can translate into an enormous payoff, as Scholastic learned again when the fifth Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” earned $185 million in just six months.
The publisher that discovers the next big boy book “is like whoever can find a way to open up China. You’ll have a great market,” says Michael Sullivan, a frequent speaker at schools and the author of “Connecting Boys with Books.” Sullivan also writes novels aimed at boy readers.
A longer-term concern is that non-reading boys will grow into teens and men who shy away from books in general and fiction in particular. Statistics back this up: Women read more books and more broadly across genres than do men. The British author Ian McEwan once stood in a London park handing out free books. Women gratefully snapped them up while many men “frowned in suspicion or distaste,” McEwan wrote in the Guardian newspaper. “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
“I think there is this assumption that any book we publish will be read by girls or could be read by girls, so there’s more concern about, ‘How do we get boys to read it?’ ” said Mary Lee Donovan, executive editor of Candlewick Press, a major publisher of children’s literature based in Massachusetts.
Cover art plays a big part. Girls will read a book featuring a boy on the cover or a simple but evocative image of, say, hands cupping a red apple (yes, “Twilight,” we’re talking about you), but boys tend to recoil from an image of a girl on a book cover. Many boys are drawn to the bold, splashy and outrageous — think garish colors, battle scenes and especially humor. The book “Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder,” for instance, combines laughs with charming illustrations by Mike Lowery. He notes that his artwork has a “naive feel to it” that can make young readers relate.
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