Taiwan Today

Individual local authors and their works are finding success even as publishers grapple with a challenging market.

The story is a simple one: A mother and her young son go to a traditional Taiwanese general store to purchase mung beans, do a bit of cooking and then enjoy some quality time together over bowls of sweet mung bean soup. While the children’s picture book Let’s Get Mung Beans, Momma! may have an uncomplicated storyline, this has not prevented it from becoming one of the top-five best-selling picture books ever released by Hsin Yi Publications, which was established in Taipei in 1978 and specializes in books and educational toys for young children. The book was published in 1988, illustrated by Tseng Yang-ching and written by Wan Hua-gwo. Let’s Get Mung Beans, Momma! received a Hsin Yi Children’s Literature Award honorable mention the same year it was published and has since become an enduring classic of Taiwanese children’s literature.

“It’s just about the simple, fun things of everyday life for children in Taiwan,” says Arni Liu, a supervisor at Hsin Yi. “The readers see their own lives in this book.” Liu believes that the lingering appeal of the book stems from its unique Taiwanese flavor, which differentiates it from the translated works by foreign authors that typically crowd the shelves of children’s sections in bookstores around the island. “Things like the traditional Taiwanese general store in Let’s Get Mung Beans, Momma! can’t be found in imported books,” Liu says.

The definition of what constitutes a children’s book can be a bit fuzzy, especially as youngsters go through different developmental phases at different ages. Chang Shu-chiung is the overall supervisor of children’s books for Eslite Bookstores, a large chain operated by Eslite Corp. Chang says that the company focuses on books for children under the age of 14. Hsin Yi only publishes books for readers under the age of 10. Publishers of children’s literature in the United States generally target picture books at children up to 5 years old, early reader books at those from 5 to 7, chapter books at those from 7 to 12, and young-adult fiction at those from 13 to 18.

Text-Oriented Niche

Founded in 1945, Eastern Publishing Co. is widely recognized as Taiwan’s first publisher of children’s books. The vast majority of Eastern’s books, however, are basic text-dominated versions of Chinese classics like Journey to the West, most often attributed to scholar Wu Cheng-en, as well as Western classics such as Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Such text-oriented books have earned a niche in the market, but when most people think about children’s books of the last 25 years, they usually think of picture books, Eslite’s Chang Shu-chiung says. This is especially true for younger children, who are drawn by the colorful, often fantastic illustrations.

Picture books by Taiwanese authors also tend to sell better than text-dominated ones in the global market. One reason for the higher sales is that it is easier for publishers to sell copyrights of locally produced picture books at international exhibitions, as works that consist mostly of text present an immediate language barrier for foreign buyers. A text-heavy book also obviously requires much more time on the part of translators, which increases costs for publishers, says Chang Tzu-chang, a professor in the Department of Language and Creative Writing at National Taiwan University of Education (NTUE). While a picture book usually contains no more than 3,000 words, text-only children’s books typically range from 20,000 to 50,000 words.

Hsin Yi was one of the first picture book publishers in Taiwan. The trend toward picture books received a boost more than a decade ago, when volunteer storytellers began visiting primary schools around the island. Known as “story-telling mothers,” Chang Tzu-chang says, these volunteers have used picture books to engage young students in reading activities.

The picture-book trend gained momentum in 2005 in Taipei City and Taichung County, central Taiwan, when Hsin Yi began working with the local governments to launch the domestic version of the Bookstart campaign, which originated in Birmingham in the United Kingdom in 1992. Under the Taipei and Taichung County Bookstart programs, participating children from 6 to 18 months old are offered a free bag containing one picture book from Hsin Yi and one from the local government, as well as a reading list of recommended books. Today, the Bookstart program has expanded to half the townships around the island, according to Arni Liu.

The success of picture books is a relatively recent phenomenon. “In the past, parents rarely bought books for children under the age of 3,” Liu says. As the majority of picture books also include some text, parents believed their toddlers, who lacked the ability to comprehend most written words, would gain little educational benefit from them. “And they thought the reading experience should always be about learning something new,” Liu says. “They couldn’t get comfortable with the concept of just reading for pleasure.”

Although they contain an average of only 30 pages, picture books are also not cheap, costing about the same amount as adult books. With their relatively high prices and little obvious educational benefit, many parents considered picture books a waste of money. “But that attitude has changed over the past three years or so,” Liu says, mostly as a result of the Bookstart program.

Bridging Books

There has also been a degree of resistance to picture books by educators. “Children growing up today have been found to be weaker in their ability to read texts,” says NTUE’s Chang Tzu-chang, suggesting that the heavy reliance picture books place on images can impair the development of reading comprehension. As a result, about six years ago the publishing industry coined the phrase “bridging books,” which help older children make the transition to text-heavy books by placing more words alongside pictures. “Bridging books had been on the market for some time before the term was invented, but they didn’t receive serious attention until recently, when parents began recognizing their importance in helping children transition from the picture book stage to the text-only book stage,” Eslite’s Chang Shu-chiung says.

The popularity of some locally written books like Let’s Get Mung Beans, Momma! notwithstanding, the reality is that translated editions of imported children’s books have dominated the market in Taiwan. According to NTUE’s Chang Tzu-chang, about 90 percent of picture books for children available in Taiwan’s bookstores are imported titles, while more than 70 percent of text-dominated or text-only books targeting teenagers are from abroad. Most of the imported books for children and youths are from the United States, Europe and Japan. Chang Shu-chiung notes that small and medium-sized publishing houses in Taiwan rarely release locally created children’s books because it requires substantial financial resources to pay writers, illustrators and production costs.

Still, while import titles dominate the children’s book market in Taiwan, individual Taiwanese authors have also found success. “Overall, books by foreign authors have stronger sales, but Taiwan can also boast of individual authors whose works have reached bestseller status at home and abroad,” Eslite’s Chang says.

One local author who has succeeded in making his name known outside Taiwan is Chen Chih-yuan, who has released 10 picture books. Chen is perhaps best known for creating the picture book Guji Guji, which was first published in Chinese in 2003 and is now available in 11 countries. Guji Guji is about a crocodile who thinks he is a duck and sold 55,000 copies within three months of its arrival in the United States, according to The New York Times’ bestseller list.

Another successful local children’s author is Jimmy Liao, who first became known at home and abroad for his picture books for adults. Liao made an impressive foray into children’s books by working with Walker Books, the largest children’s publisher in the United Kingdom. Liao illustrated Walker’s The Monster Who Ate Darkness, with UK author Joyce Dunbar supplying the text. The Monster Who Ate Darkness was first published in English in October 2008 and then in Chinese two months later.

Several awards have been established to encourage the publication of children’s books, in Taiwan and around the region, including the 23-year-old Hsin Yi Children’s Literature Award. Chen Chih-yuan’s first three books—beginning with Memories in 2000 and followed by On My Way to Buy Eggs in 2001 and Guji Guji in 2003—were Hsin Yi Award winners.

Meanwhile, the Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award was established in 2009 in Hong Kong to recognize outstanding works from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Named after the famous Chinese essayist and illustrator Feng Zikai (1898−1975), the biennial event has judges from all three places. In 2009, the judges selected 12 outstanding works, half of them by Taiwanese illustrators, from more than 100 entrants.

The Government Information Office (GIO) has also used awards to recognize authors of children’s books. The GIO’s Little Sun Award was conferred from 1996 to 2002, while the Golden Tripod Award for Books for Children and Teenagers has been bestowed from 2003 to the present.

Meanwhile, Eslite Bookstore has been doing its part to promote picture books by Taiwanese authors by highlighting them at several of its major outlets since the summer of 2009. The promotional strategy involves setting aside shelves for works by a single local children’s author every month. By the end of 2010, Eslite stores around Taiwan had highlighted the works of 15 local authors in this manner.

Meanwhile, authors are making breakthroughs in the areas of creativity and content, Hsin Yi’s Arni Liu says, including deviating from teaching obvious moral lessons, which were the focus of many children’s books in the past. “There’s still didactic stuff and some sells pretty well, but there’s a wider selection of content for children today,” he says. Granada An is one example of fresh creativity in the content area. In 2003, An grabbed the top Hsin Yi Award with A Wednesday Afternoon, Chasing Tadpoles, a picture book with a phantasmagoric style inspired by Taiwanese artist Hung Tung (1920–1987). “The company’s very proud of publishing this book. We think there should be a difference between the role of a publishing house and that of a normal business,” Liu says. “We’re happy to launch a bestseller, but we also feel a sense of mission to encourage works with originality.” In 2010, Liu’s company also published At Sixes and Sevens, another Hsin Yi Award prizewinner by Granada An with a post-modern flavor featuring a collage of seemingly disparate images. Meanwhile, Chen Chih-yuan’s most recent book, 2010’s Bear Papa Goes to Work in Another City, reflects the impact of globalization on family life, as the father is often away from home on business for long periods.

Local books may be improving in content and creativity, but challenges remain for local writers. In 2009, children 15 years old and younger constituted around 16 percent of Taiwan’s total population of 23 million, an indicator of the relatively small size of the domestic market. Taiwan’s declining birth rate will further impact that figure in years to come. As a result, local opportunities will likely remain limited for full-time authors of children’s books. In fact, prior to the success 
of Guji Guji, Chen had to moonlight at a number of other jobs to make a living.

For publishers, limited opportunities for authors mean a smaller talent pool to draw upon. As a result, it is common in Taiwan for authors to provide both illustrations and text, as Chen does. “When the market is small, the sector is less developed and less sophisticated in terms of division of labor,” Hsin Yi’s Liu explains.

The relatively small market and dearth of full-time authors has also created problems for Eslite’s Chang Shu-chiung. “I often find it a headache to fill a bookshelf with works by a single author, because most of Taiwan’s authors are not prolific,” she says, referring to Eslite’s project for promoting local authors of children’s books. “Only about one-third of the authors we introduce have published five books or more.”

When they do have an immediate need for writers and illustrators, the shallow talent pool has led local publishers to look overseas. Hsin Yi, for example, began coping with the talent shortage about five years ago by working with writers and illustrators in mainland China. “There’re so many mainlanders good at writing and drawing,” Liu says. “The only problem is that few of them are familiar with the picture book format, so we work with and advise them. Hsin Yi has a lot of experience at this, since we’ve edited children’s books for many years.”

The cross-strait effort has also broadened the company’s offerings. Hsin Yi’s 2008 picture book A New Year’s Reunion, for example, is about a migrant worker who returns home for a family reunion. Illustrated and written by two mainland Chinese, the book won the top Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award in 2009. A New Year’s Reunion was printed in traditional Chinese characters in Taiwan and in simplified characters in the mainland. In December 2009, it was also released in Korean in South Korea.

Taipei-based Grimm Press, which bills itself as Taiwan’s largest and best-known publisher of children’s books, addresses the domestic creative shortage by looking to the West, although it also works with local talent when it can. “It’s easy to find illustration as a discipline abroad, but not in Taiwan,” says K.T. Hao, founder of the press. Hao notes that his company began tapping international resources soon after its founding in 1993 with a view toward entering the worldwide market. Hao often writes the text for Grimm Press’ picture books and searches out award-winning international illustrators to provide the artwork, with the press paying royalties to the illustrators based on the number of books sold. The benefit of this arrangement for Grimm Press is that it owns the original copyrights to the works and can sell them freely to international partners. As of November 2010, of the company’s more than 1,500 titles, it held the copyrights to about 800 and had sold them to publishing houses in 22 countries. So far, the company has cooperated with 380 foreign illustrators, mostly from the United States and Europe, as well as 10 local ones.

Another benefit of owning original copyrights for Grimm Press is that it has the freedom to produce digital versions of its own titles, while publishers that do not hold such rights must purchase one set for printed books and another for e-books. Although e-book readers have been around since the Kindle from Amazon.com hit the market in 2007, e-readers for children are a more recent development. Sales of one of Taiwan’s first child-oriented e-readers began in late 2009 in the form of the Story Book inColor, a collective effort by Grimm Press, Heryin Publishing Corp. and AIPTEK International Inc., with the former two offering content and the latter hardware.

Grimm Press began selling an improved AIPTEK-manufactured  e-reader named Telly Bear in November 2010. The device sells for NT$9,800 (US$316) and includes 100 digital picture books supplied by Grimm Press. One notable feature of the device is its voice recorder, which enables parents to read the story aloud for later playback by the child whenever he or she desires. “We anticipate that affectionate bonds between parents and children can be built through reading,” Hao says. With an interface that can be toggled between Chinese and English, Grimm Press is first testing Telly Bear’s reception in the Taiwan market before venturing overseas.

Mainland Market

Meanwhile, mainland China is not only a source of illustrators and writers these days, but also a growing children’s book market. “The market for children’s picture books really started to develop about four years ago,” NTUE’s Chang Tzu-chang says. Factors behind the recent surge include the mainland’s growing economic prosperity and smaller family size, the combination of which has enabled parents to focus more financial resources on educating fewer children.

“People are watching the mainland market closely and expecting it to continue maturing,” says author Chen Chih-yuan, who has traveled to Shanghai to discuss children’s literature with researchers there.

In September 2010, Grimm Press began selling its picture books through Dangdang.com, one of the mainland’s largest online booksellers. Grimm Press started by selling 10 titles on the Dangdang website, and Hao hopes to increase the number to 60 later this year. The Taiwanese company is confident that it can succeed in the mainland, thanks to advantages it enjoys over its Western counterparts, notably its familiarity with Chinese stories and culture. “If we can launch 100 titles on the Dangdang portal, we will be a strong player in the mainland,” Hao adds.

As with the overall publishing market in Taiwan, individual children’s book authors and their works have enjoyed notable successes, but publishers continue to face strong challenges. The bright spot is that parents in Taiwan, mainland China and around the world are more focused on childhood reading than ever, which means that the market should continue growing. Companies like Grimm Press may represent the operational model of the future, under which control of original copyrights makes it cost-effective for publishers to sell works in a variety of languages and in printed and digital formats. For children and parents who love books, such innovation could make finding a good read easier than ever before.

Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw