YA Books Ratings and Publisher Arrogance (shh, it’s about the $$)

ByJohn Brown

I’m a bit irked.

I wish I could talk to a publisher about this. I should talk to a Barnes & Noble corporate book buyer. But since I don’t have one handy, I’ll discuss it with you folks. Maybe I’m up in the night? You tell me.

Here’s the deal. My wife is 7th and 8th grade language arts teacher. My wife is also a mom who loves books and wants her girls to read until their eyes bong out of their heads.

So we go to find books for her students and for our girls and, jeez, wouldn’t you know it, but this YA book features masturbation and that one features lots of fine words like F*** and S*** and this one is about giving the guys a blow job (tee, hee, hee).

Yeah, I know about YA saves. This isn’t about banning this or that content.

It’s about the fact that I’m a parent. And, geez, I have a certain way I want to raise my kids. My wife is a teacher who needs to provide books to her students that aren’t going to piss some parent off. Why? Because she’s providing a service to that parent. Because she wants to keep her job. And because it’s her job to help parents improve their kid’s reading ability not tell them how to raise a family.

So why in the Sam Hill can’t publishers rate their books?

There are millions of their customers who would find this useful.

Well, here’s one answer I was given by a writer friend I respect.

Everyone in the industry is really pushing back against the idea of a rating system. Let me see if I can explain why.

A friend of mine, ZZ [name removed], is the nicest person in the world. Volunteered for years at a prison to help people learn to express themselves by writing. Her older brother was a closeted homosexual for years, contracted AIDS, died too young. She wrote a book recently called [title removed], about a family in the restaurant business (as hers was) who have a “late” baby and the problems it causes for the older teens, one of whom is coming out as gay. It’s a soft, quite, sad, moving book. And it would be part of the “rating” system and banned from a bunch of schools. ZZ also wrote a book a few years ago about teenage pregnancy. Also beautifully written, kind, compassionate. But it would get tagged by schools as “inappropriate.” ZZ feels strongly that there are kids out there who need books, kids in your wife’s school system who need to be told they are not alone.

I don’t see any way to have a system that distinguishes between books that I see as anchors to kids who need help and those books which I see as genuinely offensive and encouraging bad teen behavior by glorifying it. The only system I know is me recommending the best books I see. And I’d much rather see librarians and school teachers go through books on a case by case basis, deciding whether they personally think it fits the values in their community than to have someone else not attached to the community do the same thing.

Uh huh.

If this is accurate, it shows the industry’s stunning lack of creativity AND arrogance. Because if publishers really were listening to parents, they could come up with a solution.

No, really. They could.

Why, there’s already one out there. They don’t even have to expend even one creative molecule to find it.  

Look at the Kids-in-Mind rating system: http://www.kidsinmind.com/. It rates movies 1-10 on sex, violence, and profanity (SVP).

There’s no age stipulation in their ratings.

Unlike other rating systems, there’s no “children under 13 not admitted.” No “appropriate for teens.” No recommended range for this or that group or this book is good and that one’s bad.

It just rates the content and gives it a number. You, as the user, determine what level you’re comfortable with and then find the movies that fit.

I’m a 4-10-4 on sex, violence, and profanity. You might be a 5-2-9. That’s not good or bad. It’s just what it is. More importantly, the rating allows me as a consumer to EASILY FIND AND PURCHASE THE PRODUCT I WANT.

I know some folks have never heard of it, but consumer choice is a really cool thing.

And if I hear about a movie that’s amazingly good, but I see it doesn’t match my normal levels, then I can make an informed choice to watch or not watch. The King’s Speech, for example, is a bit above my normal profanity setting. But this didn’t prevent me from watching the film (it was a fabulous movie, btw). SVP just gave me a couple of pieces of simple data I find useful as I make my choices. Data I’m already looking for.

If publishers were to use a similar rating system, every librarian could peg the levels they wanted in their school and be done with it. As well as consider special cases. Teachers could peg the level for their classroom. Parents could search and find and buy. And they could guide their kids in their purchases as well.  

Make it easy for them to go case-by-case. And don’t imagine librarians and teachers and parents are going to read every YA book published to find those that fit with their values. They don’t, can’t, do that now. They won’t in some utopian future. If you give them SVP ratings, it will help them spend their time, case-by-case, on books that they’re likely to buy. Which probably means they’ll buy more.

Write about homosexuality, rape, whatever. But make it easy on the consumer to see if it’s the kind of product they want to buy.

Some might say, but themes of homosexuality and rape and child abuse etc. etc. are important and would be automatically excluded!

No, they won’t.

You can write a story about those themes that scores low on SVP. You can write about those themes and score high. Themes are outside the SVP scale.

Some parents, librarians, and teachers may want to avoid some themes. Others would seek them out.

So, good golly, here’s an idea only a rocket scientist could come up with. OR someone who took the issue a tiny bit seriously and wanted to serve their customer. How about a little box under the SVP rating that contained “sensitive” themes.

They don’t have to do what Scholastic does with its school catalogs and label them “mature” themes, which might suggest “mature audiences only.” They’re not “mature” themes. They’re not “bad” themes. They’re not “good” themes. They’re just sensitive themes.

SVP and Sensitive Themes: four little pieces of data consumers would find oh so incredibly helpful.

But no. The industry can’t be bothered with that. And, consequently, reveals its arrogance and total lack of respect for a HUGE portion of their customers.

I guess they think librarians are mindless idiots. Never in a million years, if a librarian is tuned into the needs of her community and thinks a book on homosexuality would be important, would she search on that sensitive theme and her SVP ratings. And parents would never do that for sure (do you know how many gun-clinging troglodyte parents there are out there!?)

I guess the industry thinks because it sits in an office in NY City that it knows everything about raising kids. It knows so much it must dictate to parents how to do it right.

Yeah.

Or maybe what this really shows is that the publishers have got a book they want to sell. They want to make a buck. And, dang it, this might hurt sales. Because then people wouldn’t buy things they didn’t want.

They really don’t seem to care about what many of their customers want. Because if they did, and they realio trulio cared about these sensitive topics and saving the world, then they’d publish books high on the SVP because they’re just sooooo goooood, but they’d also publish books on those topics that are equally as goooood with SVP ratings that the majority of parents and school districts would be comfortable with.

And they’d let the customer choose what they wanted to purchase.

Customer choice. Customer service.

Wow, what revolutionary concepts.

They even might find that if you delight the customer, they’ll come back for more.

I know, I know. I’m living in fantasy land; delighted customers coming back for more . . . as if.

Question is: will the publishers listen?

We’ll see. I truly hope I’m wrong about their arrogance and disregard towards huge swaths of their customer base. In the meantime, you might want to think about talking to the manager of your favorite book store about this. Strangely enough, books stores have a lot of pull with publishers.

You also might want to look at Kids-in-Mind. It seems to make a lot in advertising. Looks like there’s money to be made in a review site like that for YA books. I know a lot of people who have said they wished they could just read books for a living. Anyone feeling entrepreneurial? Anyone?

EDIT

Two more points.

First, what’s sensitive for one person may not be for another. But that’s the beauty of this. This only identifies subjects that would be sensitive for reasonable sections of the market. For someone with your reading tastes, you’d say, eh, homosexuality, big deal. That’s not a sensitive subject. For others, they’d say, hum, have to think about it.

It’s just giving data. A respect and recognition of different tastes. Not a prescription of what someone’s taste should be. Or what people should or shouldn’t feel is sensitive subject matter.

For this reason, I don’t think publishers would want to use the word “controversial” because that implies controversy. Just sensitive (or some other similar label). Or even “Potentially Sensitive Themes.” This is just giving data about content areas SOME parents might want to know about.

Second, the SVP is not going to be 100% perfect. But something is much better than nothing. And having some clear standard for rating, whatever it is, pegs things so you can figure out where you are. As long as the raters are fairly consistent, then you can tell if something is close to the type of product you’re interested in. There will be goofs. No doubt about it. Huge goofs would be probably very infrequent because a ten-point scale allows you to make gradual distinctions. But I’ll take some goofs now and again over nothing at all.

Furthermore, because it’s NOT age-based like the MPAA and prescriptive in the target audience, it’s not telling parents what to do. There is no “good for your kids” and “bad for your kids” rating. Just the level you’re comfortable with.

Finally, some people object to ratings because “how can you boil a book down to a few numbers?” I don’t think this boils a book down. It’s only a couple of pieces of data about a book. Data parents are already looking for. The cover, recommendations, word-of-mouth, flap, description, buzz–these are all pieces of data as well.

In fact, you and I exclude many books based on genre labels alone. And yet we don’t worry about a genre labels much. They’re useful pieces of information. Are they always perfect? No. But they’re by-and-large very useful. I don’t see that this is much different. Just another piece of data to help consumers find what they want.

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  • Buck, America the Vulnerable

    ByJohn Brown

    Buck

    About two years ago I was walking out in Round Valley and saw a rider on a horse coming down a hill through the brush.  I got to him just as he moved onto the road. Right away, I noticed that there was something a bit off with the horse’s gear—the rider was not using a bridle. The rider, Wayne Batty, was using nothing more than a rope harness that went around the horse’s head. I was amazed; how did you steer the horse without a bit in its mouth?

    I asked Wayne if I might walk alongside as he rode. He agreed, and then began to talk about training and riding horses. I stuck with him for little over a mile before I had to turn back. I learned in that short period that Wayne was able to communicate with that horse with small nudges. The horse also communicated to him many things with its stance, ears, the cock of its head. Most importantly, I learned they both had built up a trust of each other. Wayne’s methods were not based on fear, it seemed, but something else.

    It reminded me a lot of the fascinating and compelling The Man Who Listens to Horses, the autobiography of Monty Roberts, that shares Roberts’ life and his development of natural horsemanship methods. Unlike many training approaches which seek to break a horse’s will through harsh punishment-based methods that often veer into abuse, natural horsemanship employs methods that are much gentler and seek to build trust in the handler. Roberts can join up with (he doesn’t “break” horses) a wild or un-ridden horse, be up on the saddle calmly riding the animal, in an incredibly short period of time.

    But Batty and Roberts aren’t the only ones practicing this. These methods have been around some time. One of the most famous practitioners and teachers is Buck Brannaman, who found his years of being severely physically abused by his father actually provided some insight into training horses.

    Says Brannaman: “I’ve started horses since I was twelve years old and have been bit, kicked, bucked off and run over. I’ve tried every physical means to contain my horse in an effort to keep from getting myself killed. I started to realize that things would come much easier for me once I learned why a horse does what he does. This method works well for me because of the kinship that develops between horse and rider.”

    Recently, a film was produced that looks at Brannaman’s life and methods. It’s called Buck and is worth every minute. If you love horses, you’ll love this movie. If you have a horse and think you might want to learn these methods, or just want to watch and listen, you might want to check out Brannaman’s teaching schedule at his site brannaman.com. He travels all over the country and is likely to hold a class within driving distance.

    America The Vulnerable

    A few years ago I received an email from my bank. At least, it looked legit to me. I opened it. It said it needed me to update some parts of my account and provided a link to the bank’s website. I clicked on the link, which took me to my bank’s website. At least, it looked exactly like my bank’s website. I entered my account number, login, and password. I made the requested changes and logged out.

    Two days later, somebody in Spain cleared every penny out of my account—thousands of dollars stolen.

    That email was a phishing (fishing) scam. The website had been a fake. I had willingly handed over my account number, login, and password to thieves.

    Luckily, the bank insures such thefts. But the problem of information security remains. Thieves living in Spain, or Russia, or LA, or China, can rob me blind from their bedrooms in their pajamas. They can do this because our information processing nowadays is increasingly tied to the internet.

    And they don’t just rob dopes like me, because it’s not just individual criminals who are in the business. Corporations and governments are in this business as well.

    They steal billions of dollars of trade secrets, engineering designs, and other intellectual property from American companies through computer hacking. They steal military secrets. For example, the US Navy spent years and about $5 billion dollars to develop a quiet electric motor for submarines that would make them incredibly hard to find and track. Chinese spies stole that technology. The Navy then spent billions more to develop a new radar for their top-of-the-line Aegis Cruiser. Chinese spies stole that, too.

    And they not only steal. Terrorists, crime organizations, and foreign governments can now insert malicious software into the computers that control, among other things, our electrical grid. They can use this in an attack, not just to shut the grid down for a while, but to destroy power generators. They can insert such software into our air traffic control system. Our train transportation systems. Our banks. They have already done this. They have already breached some of our most secure government systems.

    It sounds too far-fetched to be true, but it’s reality. Joel Brenner, who has served as the former senior counsel at the National Security Agency (NSA), the national counterintelligence executive in the office of the director of National Intelligence, and as the NSA’s inspector general writes about what he’s seen in America The Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digial Espionage, Crime, and Warfare. In the book, he explains the cyber threats to individuals, corporations, and the country and what we can do about it. If you want a fascinating look into the next phase of crime, espionage, and warfare, and an introduction to some of the things you need to do to protect yourself and your company, and what we need to do as a nation, you’ll want to read this book.

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    Indie Thoughts: Publishers know profit, but haven’t tapped best seller lists

    ByJohn Brown

    In The Business Rusch: Generational Divide Kris Rusch points out that the new on-demand and long-tail market for books has changed the duration of the opportunity a book has to be successful, but that it seems the industry still isn’t recognizing this in how they measure success.

    The problems come from the fact that those of us who run things—people in our forties, fifties, and sixties—use metrics that were developed by our parents for their world, that tightly controlled Mad Men world where everyone was expected to be the same, not just in what they wore or bought but in what they listened to or watched or read as well.

    The bestseller list?

    It measures velocity. (A good essay on this topic, “The Meaningless Metrics of Fame,”  came from Mike Briggs, husband of Patricia Briggs, earlier this week. I’ve also dealt with it.)

    Reviews?

    They only want new books, and then only at the time of release.

    Brick and mortar bookstores?

    They only have room for the latest releases, and then only the ones that are the most popular with their customers (whoever those folks might be).

    Books have come late to this fight. Books have been available on demand for only about four years now, in the U.S. In other countries, there’s been even less time.

    And we’re all still fighting over meaningless metrics, to use Mike Briggs’ term, because those metrics only measure things that were important around the water cooler, not things which are important now.

    What’s important now?

    She goes on to say:

    The publishing industry isn’t even talking about new metrics. That idea hasn’t occurred to traditional publishing, and indie (or self) published writers are constantly seeking validation from the old system—trying to figure out ways to game the bestseller lists or to get a fantastic review from somewhere that has old-world prestige . . . But at some point, traditional publishers are going to have to develop new ways to figure out which products sell well and which ones don’t. All of their systems—from sales figures (which measure books shipped not books sold) to bestseller lists to critical acclaim—are based on the old models.

    Kris is a very experienced with publishing, but her last point conflates internal accounting with marketing. Publishers DO know which products sell.

    The primary measure of success in a financial enterprise s not new. It’s been around for 100’s of years. And on demand and long-tail markets don’t change it.

    The measure is how much a product or service contributes in profit to the bottom line. You take revenues, minus expenses, and that’s the contribution that product (a book in this instance) makes to your total profit. Or to covering your fixed costs.

    Booksellers have measured the success of their books with actual or estimated profits for quite some time. Publishers already know which books sell well and which don’t. No accountant in the world is going to report books shipped as the measure of success. And they don’t. The very fact that publishers have a profit and loss statement and show returns on royalty statements demonstrate that. They look very closely at actual and estimated profits. And to they do this by channel, which is reflected in a small way when they break out ebooks on royalty reports. This is all basic accounting.

    Here’s an example. Until Ender’s Game the movie, Ender’s Game the book hadn’t appeared on any best seller list since it was first released. And its release was 30 years ago! Yet over the years Tom Doherty touted its sales numbers many times. Tom knew that book was gold. Of course, he did. Because he doesn’t use best seller lists to tell him what’s selling well. He knows those lists are marketing devices. He has the real data in house. Why would he need a list to tell him anything?

    And Tom isn’t going to use books shipped either. Tor may report those numbers to Publishers Weekly for marketing purposes, but he will always multiply that number by an expected return rate to estimate sales. He wants to do that. Because books shipped is meaningless to the bottom line and everyone knows it, including the auditors.

    Publishers are well aware of the long tail. They see it with books that have been rotated out of the brick and mortar channels but are still selling in the online ones. They report it in their annual statements. They know the online channels work differently from the brick & mortar ones.

    The measure of success is still the same as it ever was—how much profit is this property contributing to our bottom line?

    Marketing, however, is a whole other ball of wax.

    What the long tail and on-demand allow are marketing campaigns that are impossible in the brick & mortar channel. In brick & mortar you have a limited time to advertise (roughly 8-15 weeks). After that period, most books are rotated out of the store. This means that any marketing for those brick & mortar buyers MUST coincide with the period when the books are in the stores.

    But the online channels open up all sorts of other opportunities. You can market forever. And the contribution margin is always positive. The online and POD costs are easily recouped with each sale. (Publishers are well aware of this profit potential; this is why we have so many making grabs for backlists.)

    And I see publishers taking advantage of these new marketing methods. This last week I saw publisher books not currently stocked by brick & mortar retailers on BookBub, BargainBooksy, and Book Sends. And the industry isn’t totally focused on new books for reviews. I just had a large newspaper agree to look at my book that was published four months ago. Still, Rusch is right when she says that the publishers haven’t adapted one of their biggest marketing tools to take advantage of the new opportunities–they haven’t done anything with the best seller lists.

    Amazon has lead the way in creating new ways of marketing books to different types of readers with their best seller lists. These lists create the excitement of discovery.

    But every one else is still reporting weekly sales on the big lists.

    If I were a publisher, I’d be asking USA Today to provide more than just the weekly view of the top 150 books. And USA Today is THE list to watch because their numbers are not based on units shipped to a sample of stores, but actual sales. Here are some lists that readers would be interested in.

    1. Most anticipated this week: based on pre-order totals
    2. Most anticipated this month: based on pre-order totals
    3. Hot new releases: based on weekly numbers
    4. Hot new releases for the month: based on monthly numbers
    5. Books with legs: last 3 months; I know it needs a different name (grin)
    6. Best sellers of the last 12 months: annual total of units sold
    7. Best sellers of the last 18 months: total units
    8. Contenders: for each of the lists above show the next 150 books (I always want to see the next 100 books after the top 100 on Amazon’s lists; why not show readers the top 300?)
    9. Movers: for each of the lists above show those that have the biggest rise in percentage sales and meet some unit minimum (you don’t want to feature books with 2,000% increase because they went from selling 1 unit to 20), even if they don’t break the best seller lists
    10. Genre: allow all of this to be sliced by genre.

    Let the reader select the view they want to see!

    Avid readers will gravitate towards the shorter time periods. Those that read fewer books will gravitate towards the longer periods. Everyone who wants to discover something new will go to the contender and mover lists.

    This is about marketing. Not publishers measuring success.

    And then armed with those numbers guess what the publishers will do? They will go back to the brick & mortar venues and pitch to have some of these same books carried in the stores for the first time (some publisher books are printed digital first) or carried again.

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  • The MT Sandwich, To A Dying Girl, Bloody Jack

    ByJohn Brown

    you-MOM-ee

    I used to move along the salad bars, looking at the mushrooms, and think: they’re vegetable Styrofoam! Who ever thought eating mushrooms was a good idea? My answer, of course, was it must have been some starving dude lost in the woods who found they were easier to chew on than bark.

    Such were the days of my ignorance. Because while raw mushrooms are fairly bland, sautéed or grilled mushrooms are worthy of a passionate, say it slowly, “oh my freaking heck” (hey, I live in Utah).

    I now love mushrooms. And I’ve found they very easily replace tasty meats. Probably because they have loads of the fifth basic taste—umami (you-MOM-ee)—just as meats do. I know some of you are thinking, “hold on, didn’t I learn that the tongue can only taste four things?” That’s indeed what you learned. But you were wrong. In 1985 scientists discovered we have a fifth taste, popularly referred to as savoriness, that’s been sitting on the tongue with the sweet, sour, bitter, and salty all along. In fact, humans get their first experience with it in momma’s milk.

    But cooked mushrooms not only taste good, they are also actually good for you. They help safeguard against cancer, boost the immune system, supply hard to get nutrients, and can help you cut calories and saturated fats by, as I said before, moving some of the meat off the plate.

    With all this goodness it’s hard not to see new opportunities for consumption. And indeed I found one. I love a good BLT (bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich, for any troglodytes who read this column), especially when the bacon is crispy and the tomatoes have some sass or a little feta cheese to accompany them. But one day while partaking of some of my fungus friends, my mind was expanded, and I thought: why not replace the bacon with some sautéed mushrooms? Why not, indeed?

    I replaced. I partook. And rejoiced. Then I ate my MT (mushroom-tomato) for lunch three more days in a row (I also found if you must have crispiness, two Sun Chips added to the top of the sandwich do the trick nicely).

    Do not disdain the fungus. Cook the little guys up and devour them with some well placed oohs and aahs on an open-faced MT.

    “To A Dying Girl”

    Clinton F. Larson was a poet who taught at BYU. I remember him coming in to read during one of my classes, but he soon retired, and I was never able to take any of his classes. How sad I am that I could not learn from him because he had much to teach, as evidenced by some of his poems. Here’s one of my favorites.

    To a Dying Girl

    How quickly must she go?

    She calls dark swans from mirrors everywhere:

    From halls and porticos, from pools of air.

    How quickly must she know?

    They wander through the fathoms of her eye,

    Waning southerly until their cry

    Is gone where she must go.

    How quickly does the cloudfire streak the sky,

    Tremble on the peaks, then cool and die?

    She moves like evening into night,

    Forgetful as swans forget their flight

    Or spring the fragile snow,

    So quickly she must go.

     -Clinton F. Larson

    The first reading fills the mind with vivid images and a sense of beauty and sorrow. Subsequent readings deepen the feeling. Especially when we reflect a bit on the three images he evokes of passing from life into death. First, the black swans arise to fly south for winter: graceful, beautiful, and dark as death. They’re the girl’s own harbingers, maybe her guides, coming from mirrors, reflecting in the depths of her eye. The second image presents fleeting grandeur and beauty with the stunning cloudfire that often awes us as the sun sets. Isn’t death the time we most value life? The time when, like cloudfire, it burns in glory and beauty and then is gone? The last image presents another image of passing, but not one of loss. It’s not a transition to blackness or cold or bitter loneliness, but of winter passing to spring. Of a fecund beginning.

    Of course, there are other things the lines and images evoke. This isn’t a poem to be wrapped up in a tidy bow. Poetry is meant to be felt, not dissected like a dead animal. In the end, that’s what Larson delivers: sorrow, loss, and hope all wraped in the music of his rhythm and words. Beautiful.

    A Great Read

    Sometimes a book’s beginning is so good you can’t not purchase it. Here’s one that forced my hand.

    “My name is Jacky Faber and in London I was born, but, no, I wasn’t born with that name. Well, the faber part, yes, the Jacky part, no, but they call me Jacky now and it’s fine with me. They also call me Jack-0 and Jock and the Jackeroe, too, and, aye, it’s true I’ve been called Bloody Jack a few times, but that wasn’t all my fault. Mostly, though, they just call me Jacky.

    “That wasn’t my name, though, back on That Dark Day when my poor dad died of the pestilence and the men dragged him out of our rooms and down the stairs, his poor head hanging between his shoulders and his poor feet bouncin’ on the stairs, and me all sobbin’ and blubberin’ and mum no help, she bein’ sick, too, and my little sister, as well.

    “Back then my name was Mary.”

    The book is a historical novel by L. A. Meyer called Bloody Jack. It tells the tale of Mary Faber, who is orphaned in London in the early 19th century and survives only by joining a street gang and then, posing as a boy, the crew of a ship. On board, she has to hide who she is and avoid the many perils of ship life.

    The book is delightful, transporting the reader to the time and place with excellent details and a style that evokes the speech and times. There’s humor, danger, adventure, and an interesting cast of characters. I recommend it highly. If you end up loving it as I do, you’ll then be happy to know this is only Jack’s first adventure.

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  • Good Stuff! Two fun family and party games

    ByJohn Brown

    There’s nothing quite like the laughter and fun a good family or party game creates. And we discovered two games this summer that have brought hours of pleasure.

    The first is Just One. It’s for 3 to 7 players and takes about 20 minutes to finish.

    Now, I was skeptical of this game at first because it’s a cooperative party game.

    I mean, come on. Cooperation?

    No teams?

    No competition?

    What were we going to do—hold hands and sing Kumbaya?

    I was fully expecting to be bored out of my mind. Boy, was I wrong. There was suspense, laughter, and loads of fun.

    There are 13 rounds in each game. In each round, one player blindly selects the number of a word on one of the game cards. The other players each write a one word clue to help that player guess the word. However, if two or more players write down the same word, they have to remove that clue.

    So you’re trying to come up with one-word clues the others won’t that still help the guessing player. Some clues lead the guessing player off onto funny tangents. Others are just funny. And then there’s the suspense of whether someone else wrote your word and whether the player will be able to guess it from the clues that are left.

    Your goal is to guess all 13 words selected. And there’s a little score card that ranks what it means if you get 13, 12, 11, etc.

    As an aside, it’s crazy to me that the score card provided motivation. But it did. It was a delightful little brain hack.

    One Word is a quick, fun game. We’ve played it with a few as 3 and as many 8 players and had a ball each time. We are so happy to have it in the family game closet.

    The next is Fish Bowl. It’s for 4+ players. What this game does is take favorites like Taboo, One Word, and charades and mixes them together in a competitive game between two teams.

    Here’s how you play it. Each person writes up 5 to 7 different words or phrases on separate slips of paper, folds the papers, and puts them in a bowl. Then you do 3 rounds.

    Round 1 is like Taboo, where you can describe, but can’t say or act out the word or phrase on the paper. You select a team to go first. One person on the team selects the papers from the bowl and then tries to describe the word or phrase. The team has 30-45 seconds (you decide) to guess as many of the words as possible. When the time is up, it’s the other team’s turn. Back and forth you go, selecting a new team member each turn to give the clues, until there are no more slips of paper in the bowl. Then you count the number of slips each team got and move to round 2.

    In round two, you put all of the slips of paper back into the bowl. The team that went second in the first round starts this one. This time the person giving clues gets to share one word. That’s it. And the team has to guess it. Again, the team has 30-45 seconds to guess as many as they can.  Then it goes to the next team. And you switch back and forth just like you did in round 1, and when the slips of paper are gone, each team counts up their score.

    In round 3, you put all of the slips of paper back into the bowl. The time the person giving the clues has to act them out. No words allowed. You run this round just like you did the first two with  30-45  second turns, switching back and forth between the teams until all the papers are gone. At that point, the teams  total their scores for this round and then for all 3 rounds together to see which team won.

    If you don’t want to use paper, you can play a version online.

    Either way, it’s another fast, fun game. In fact, we played it last night. And laughed and laughed when one daughter was trying to get the other to guess “sling” and nailed her teammate in the head trying to act out a rock hitting Goliath.   Movies are great. But sometimes what you need is some delightful game fun. And I’m betting you’ll love these.

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  • A Response to John Scalzi

    ByJohn Brown

    The best way to change someone’s mind: use the skills you learned writing fiction.

    John Scalzi recently wrote a post about White Privilege.  You know: the idea that Straight White Males (SWMs) have all the cards stacked in their favor.  It’s called “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” I assume he wrote it to help SWMs have more sympathy for those who aren’t SWM.

    It’s a noble cause.  Not as noble as true love, but that’s so rare–not one couple in a century has a chance at true love (at least when you live in Guilder).

    The problem is that Scalzi’s post is a great 101 on how To NOT Win Friends and Influence People.  Actually, that’s not right.  He will win new friends and increase his influence among those who are like-minded.  But if he was hoping to win over those who didn’t already see things his way, I don’t think he’s going to be very successful.

    His posts generated hundreds of comments. When you look at the comments, you’ll see that the vast majority of them are folks arguing Scalzi’s side with smug condescension and other folks arguing points against Scalzi with an equal lack of tact.

    In short, it’s a classic online bring-your-guns-to-the-party event.

    Alas.

    Except I must admit such events can be a lot of fun if you’re on the side with greater numbers.  Furthermore, there is sometimes a tremendous pleasure to be had in being provocative.  Sometimes we simply must publish something with teeth in it.  And maybe that’s what Scalzi was trying to do. 

    But if not, here’s where Scalzi’s post went admirably wrong.  And it has everything to do with principles that underlie influence as well as writing fiction.  You see, when you’re writing fiction and you want someone to root for your character, you do not turn to the reader and insult him. Insults don’t bring readers into your world.

    Equally as important, telling, or demanding someone feel a certain way towards someone else, will fail every time you try it. You cannot demand (or whine) that a reader must feel sympathy and admiration for the character.  Why?  Because emotions don’t respond to demands.  They just don’t.  It’s like trying to freeze water by seasoning it with pepper. 

    The advice “Show, don’t tell” works in real life as well as it works in fiction.

    Emotions are automatic.  If someone presents the right stimulus, we WILL feel the desired emotion in response.  We don’t experience a sympathetic change of heart when someone gets in our face and demands we feel sympathy.  We do feel that change when we see the antecedents which prompt the emotional response in us.  Show me.  Make me believe.  And the response is automatic.  

    This is what happened with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the movie Ghandi and the TV series Roots and the more recent movie Believe in Me and the novel Les Miserables and thousands of others.  It’s what happens every day when someone in one group meets someone in another group they feel some distrust for and begins to build a friendship. 

    Show the antecedents, help folks identify, and you’ll move millions.  Get up and rant at someone, and all you’ll get is the bird.  And applause from the true believers.

    Scalzi claims that if you feel offended by his post then you’re hypersensitive because all he was doing is pointing out the facts.  Um, no.  Jim Hines is trying to establish potential facts.  You could try to verify those.  You could try to separate out causation from correlation.  But Scalzi is not doing that. He’s telling all SWM that they are playing on the kiddy version of the life video game.  Your life is so easy.  Everything is rigged for you.  You’re playing the baby version.  And because of that everyone else’s life is so much harder.

    No, he didn’t say those words exactly. But there is this thing call connotation. There is this thing called tone.  And no matter how hard you try, you’re can’t separate the non-verbal communication from the message. 

    Everyone knows that some people have it harder in life and some have it easier. Like, duh.  I think we all learn that when we showed up to the first grade.  So what’s the point of telling all the SWM’s reading his blog that they are playing the dweeb version of life, the one with training wheels?

    Furthermore, instead of helping all of us pampered SWMs identify with our brothers and sisters, he tries to erect more boundaries that would push us apart by giving all of us another way to discriminate and another reason to be resentful.

    Lowly, pampered SWMs at the bottom.  Gays, people of color, and women farther up. 

    So now we’re going to go around with a My Life’s Harder Than Yours number?  The opinions of those with low numbers will have less weight.  How could they have anything as worthwhile to say when their life has been so easy?  Those with higher numbers will have more weight. 

    A whole new group calculus will have to be developed and standardized.  And it will have to go beyond which shade of brown your skin is (yes, White people really are just a lighter shade of brown), your gender, and sexual orientation.  Because those who are handicapped, by birth or by accident have it really rough too.  We’d have to figure out if they had it more or less rough that someone who was gay, and would that change if that gay person lived in San Francisco versus Laramie, Wyoming?  A geographical element!  And what about those with idiot parents who teach their kids to take meth and don’t get them to school or beat them in alcoholic rages or who are never around?  I wonder what score that would bring.  And what about the kids who grow up with grandpa molesting them?  And what about the short, the fat, the plain?  What about those with glasses?  Those who are runty bully targets?  Or those with a minority religion.  What about those born with AIDS? 

    Are we sure it’s a good idea to start ranking ourselves, using color, gender, and sexual preference to tag our status? 

    Wait, haven’t we already tried that?

    When someone comes up to you at a party and condescends, when they’re always one-upping you with a “you think you’ve got it hard you haven’t seen squat” line, what is your response?  Even if it is legit.  What about when they get in your face for someone else?  Does that change your default response?

    It’s the same at internet parties and gatherings.

    So.

    Lesson 1: If you want to influence someone, don’t start by insulting them and continue by talking down to them. If you want to have a good time with like-minded friends, then, by all means, skewer.

    Lesson 2: Remember “show, don’t tell” to win someone’s affection.  Present the person’s story, and the reader will feel respect, trust, sympathy, sorrow, regret, and admiration automatically (okay, you’re right, some of that depends on the reader).  Tell or demand, and none of that will occur.

    Lesson 3: Don’t raise barriers between two groups when you want members of one group to identify with members of another.

    Here’s a better way. 

    Tell me a story about a real gay black woman.  Make me love her.  Make me care.  Tell me a story about her I can sympathize with.  Just show me the woman.  Make it about her, not her group category.  Or tell me a story about a Mexican man who is just trying to provide for his children in America.  Or tell me about a sympathetic SWM who goes to Asia or Polynesia and finds the cards stacked against him.  Stories like this abound.  

    In fact, why don’t you drop the whole “SWM” business.  If you want me to identify, to experience-take (yes, that official jargon), it’s probably best not to slap SWM on me and set me in one corner and slap GBM on someone else and set them in another.  Help me identify.  Focus on how we are alike. When you do discuss the differences, magnify those things that are wonderful and unique, or eccentric and unique, or goofy and unique, or weird and unique, or whatever, but make it positive.  And when you must talk about old or continuing grievances between two groups, do so with respect, with a desire to calm, not enflame.

    Lest you think I don’t know what I’m talking about, I grew up working in a family business where employees were White, Black, Hispanic, Tongan, and Japanese.  Male, female, homosexual, heterosexual.  And we were a big family.  My father and mother held out big welcoming arms.  I have Whites and Blacks in my biological family.  I hope my daughters find great men to be their husbands.  And if they happen to also be Indian or Puerto Rican or Black or Asian or Maori or Scottish or Southern or whatever, I would think it was grand.  It’s possible I might experience some of that mild “other group” anxiety that sometimes comes when you meet someone that’s not just like you.  But I know it’s possible to get beyond that by seeing what’s common, building friendships, and celebrating and laughing at and with the differences.

    My father, God rest his soul, liked to quote Edwin Markam.  I thought it fitting.

    He drew a circle to keep me out,

    A thing of scorn, and a thing to flout.

    But love and I had the wit to win:

    We drew a circle that took him in.

    You want to laugh with the like-minded?  Draw the first kind of circle.  You want to win hearts and minds?  Draw the bigger one.

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  • Good Stuff! Atomic Habits, Let Me Finish, a Political Taxonomy

    ByJohn Brown

    Habits are one of the most powerful forces in our lives. If we could consciously harness them, there’s no telling what we can do.

    The problem is that we keep going about it all wrong.

    We keep trying to motivate ourselves into behavior change. Sometimes motivation works, but motivation is fickle. And more often than not it leaves us hanging just when we need it the most.

    So are we doomed?

    No.

    Because motivation is just one of four parts of creating habits. And it’s not even the most important one.

    What are these other parts? How do you harness them?

    Well, that’s the subject of Atomic Habits by James Clear.

    And one of the neat things is that Clear reveals that tiny changes can lead to remarkable results. No Herculean efforts. No getting yourself amped up. Something else that’s much easier to do and much more effective.

    The book’s been a New York Times bestseller.

    An Amazon bestseller.

    It’s been on the USA Today bestseller list for twenty-two weeks.

    If you want to build some good habits, if you want to stop some bad ones, if you want to make any behavior in yourself or others more likely, let me recommend you find out what Clear has discovered in his research and give it a try. I think you’ll be happy you did.

    *

    Chris Christie, the two-term governor of New Jersey, is an interesting figure.

    He was a federal prosecutor who cleaned up a ton of government corruption in New Jersey.

    And then he became governor. He might have come and gone like hundreds of governors, but a video went viral, showing his direct, in-your-face politics.

    Many begged him to run in the 2012 presidential election, including a whole bunch of billionaires.

    He turned them down. Said he wasn’t ready. You’ve got to admire someone who does that.

    Then he did run in the 2016 election, but failed to get the attention and votes he might have because Trump was sucking all the media out of the room. And that might have ended it. But Christie dropped out of the race and was the first to endorse Trump, who’d been a long-time friend.

    Trump almost picked him for vice president. The choice ended up being between Christie and Pence. Ultimately, he chose Pence and asked Christie to create the transition plan.

    Christie spent six months with a whole team of people creating that plan. It was a plan that would have helped Trump avoid so many disasters in appointments and policy during his first two hundred days. But when it was finished, the Trump team decided to throw it away.

    Why? What was going on?

    Christie is unlike Trump in many, many ways. Why would he support him?

    Christie reveals all and much more in Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics.

    In the book he sets the record straight about his tenure as a corruption-fighting prosecutor and a Republican running a Democratic state, as well as what really happened on the 2016 campaign trail and inside Trump Tower. It’s a fascinating book that gives insights into the Trump team, Trump himself, and Christ Christie who I think would have made a terrific president.

    If you’re interested in politics, larger-than-life figures, and a view from the inside, I think you’ll love this book.

    *

    In less than three minutes, you can amaze your friends, cut through a lot of political blather, and clearly assess what’s being proposed over the next eighteen months as the presidential campaign heats up.

    How?

    By understanding the simple taxonomy below. 

    Every day folks in the media make accusations and claims about socialism, Sweden, Venezuela, capitalism, and the United States. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it’s clear they’re a bit muddled. So let’s cut through the confusion.  

    Whether you’re an independent, Democrat, or Republican, you’ll want to know these three terms.

    SOCIALISM

    The state owns and directs huge portions of the economy. The government in these schemes is the old-fashioned Soviet, Mao, and Nazi style dictatorships.

    These types of socialists did so much good in the 20th century. No other scheme was better at piling up dead bodies. Millions and millions of them.  

    An interesting tidbit. Did you know that “Nazi” is the abbreviation in German of “Nationalsozialistische”? That word means “National Socialist”. It comes from the name of Hitler’s political party, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” or “Nationalsozialistische der Deutsche Arbeiters Partei.”

    Nobody running for president today is advocating for this type of government.

    DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

    The state owns and directs huge portions of the economy. The government in these schemes is supposed to be democratic, which means you should be able to vote the bums out and put other bums in. Venezuela supposedly uses this model, although some wonder if it is a true democracy or a sham one.

    For those who like socialism, this is supposed to be the good way of doing it as opposed to the bad way of the old fashioned authoritarians. I will let you determine whether the “good” scheme actually leads to any better economic outcomes than the “bad” one.

    SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

    You rely on lots and lots and lots of capitalism (private ownership and direction of companies in a free market) to fund government social programs. The funding is done via high tax rates. You have elections and can vote the bums out and put other bums in. This is Sweden.

    A lot of people in the current presidential race are advocating for this type of government. Although, if they say that any system that allows billionaires to exist is immoral, you will need to scrutinize that candidate carefully because Sweden’s system allows billionaires. It may be that candidate actually wants some form of democratic socialism.

    One last point. If you think about it, the United States and Sweden are similar types of governments. They’re on the same continuum. The difference is that the United States is simply much less of a welfare state than Sweden is.

    There you have it. Three terms you are going to hear a million times over the next eighteen months.

    Amaze your friends by actually knowing what they mean.

    Be proud of your knowledge.

    And use it to carefully consider the candidates.

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22 Comments

  1. JohnI thought I’d disagree with your post when I first started read but this is incredibly well reasoned and seems very common sense. Which is why publishers more than likely won’t do it. =)

  2. This is a good exposition of a real problem. I’m a teacher too and have some of the same problems as your wife. I also have problems as an adult reader. I’ll get a couple hundred pages into a book and then find some extensive pornographic scene, and it makes me angry. Either I have to throw the book away and give up on the story that was thus far engaging, or I have to skip the scene, hope I didn’t miss anything, and hope that it was the only one in the book.

    Anyway, I hear you.

    Maybe a website like you propose could be crowdsourced, with a kind of rubric so that the ratings were consistent.

  3. Stephen, we just need one big one. Just one . . .

    Jared, can you imagine? Tons of raters. Just as long at they were conscientious. Do you know how many millions of hits that site would get?

  4. Did you mean “The King’s Speech”? I don’t know of a movie called “The King’s English”.

    I’m not sure about your SVP rating system. I think calibrating it could be difficult. It seems to me just a simple listing of incidents of various types would be more useful. IMDB does this for movies. They call it “content advisory”. They list incidents of “sex & nudity”, “violence & gore”, “profanity”, “alcohol/drugs/smoking”, and “frightening/intense scenes”. For example, here is their section for Battle Royale:

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266308/parentalguide

  5. I’m a little confused as to why you want to rely on the book industry to provide this?

    As a parent, if I’m not sure if a film is appropriate I use rotten tomatoes or imdb to get an idea of what the film is about. I’ve found ratings to be fairly unhelpful (especially when youngest was going through a phase of finding any kind of mild peril too much for him, which even ruled out many U films, whereas he really enjoyed a TV program which the BBFC rated as a 12). I also strongly encourage my kids to self-sensor and put books down (no diktats about having to finish a book in our house!) if they’re not enjoying them or are finding them too scary – a really vital life skill to have, imo. They’re never going to enjoy every book, film or game in the world and having the self-knowledge and confidence to say “I’m not enjoying this or getting anything out of this and my time is precious to me” can only be a good thing.

    However, if enough parents/teachers/librarians would find your rating system useful, then rather than waiting for the publishing industry to do anything about it, a more appropriate reaction would be to set up a review site similar to imdb/rotten tomatoes for books. A quick flip through amazon reviews already gives an idea of the content of many YA books as it is – perhaps the onus is on more readers to get around to reviewing anything they feel has sensitive topics that they’re unhappy with. Reducing complex themes into a few numbers seems to me to be providing less information, not more.

  6. I totally get that you feel like ratings for books is necessary and I hope you understand that you’re very unlikely to convince a majority of authors of that (much like directors are not exactly fans of film rating systems).

    But putting that aside, there are some other problems with your plan. Our current film rating system was put into place by the MPAA to break free from the Hays Code, which was incredibly restrictive and censoring. While it might help parents decide what movies they allow their children to see, but that’s not why we have the rating system we do.

    We don’t have a Hays Code for books, so there’s nothing to break free from, and there is no publisher trade association like the MPAA with the power to make such a sweeping decision for publishers. To make ratings work, every individual publishing house would have to come to the same conclusion about ratings on their own — a decision that would be costly because it would require time and dedicated staff to create a system and then to educate editors, publicists, sales teams, buyers, and booksellers of what it all means and how to code according to it. Not only that, but it would be likely to result in individual publishing houses coding completely differently, even if they could agree on a universal coding system, which is pretty unlikely.

    In the title of the post, you suggest that the real reason that publishers won’t institute a ratings system is money. And if that’s true, then indeed that’s a problem. Publishers are money-making entities above all else and there would have to be a financially compelling reason to make devote their resources to making such a change. That reason couldn’t be anecdotal either; it would have to be backed up with hard data and it would have to suggest a large bump in book sales across the board (and not just sales of individual titles) to offset the financial burden.

    Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, it would be a very, very unpopular decision with the ALA. The American Library Association is firmly against rating systems. You can read more about the organization’s stance here: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/qa-labeling

    I am personally against rating systems for YA novels, however I think the barriers to getting them put in place are far greater than what individual authors want or don’t want.

  7. JohnW,

    Thanks for the catch. Correction made.

    Pewari,

    You’re right. An independent org migt be a much better way to go. Kids-In-Mind is exactly that.

    Holly,

    Thanks for the post. I don’t know if we can generalize that most authors would be against this. I’m an author, and I have a lot of author friends who feel the same way. I have a lot who feel as you do as well. More importantly, very few parents I talk to say, “eh, I don’t care what my kid reads.” And that’s the heart of this matter. Parents care. As they should.

    And this isn’t just for parents who want to avoid certain types of material. It’s also for parents who want to make sure their children don’t take the wrong lessons from the books they read.

    Let’s look at an example with regards to the “sensitive topic” information. Let’s say you have a parent who is concerned about the topic of sexual orientation–she wants to make sure her children do NOT grow up to hate gay people.

    So her son picks up a book that contains characters who exhibit gay hate. The overall tone of the book might be supportive of a homosexual orientation. But Johnny might read it incorrectly.

    This isn’t uncommon with kids. It isn’t uncommon with adults. Case in point: Archie Bunker in the popular 1970’s sitcom All in the Family. The producers wanted to create a show that disuaded people from, among other things, racism. The idea was that Archie would be unlikeable and racist, and people would reject those racist statements because of how they felt about Archie. But people loved Archie. Oops. It might be that voicing the issues might have done some good, regardless of how people felt about Archie. It also might have been easy for kids to watch that and model the racism displayed.

    Okay, so the parent wants to make sure Johnny doesn’t read the book and pick up the wrong message. Having this information lets the parent know she might want to make sure she looks into this book just a little more than other books that are just about adventure and swords. It might alert her that, hey, here’s a chance to talk to my kid about this. At least to make sure he’d not picking up the wrong message.

    It’s information that parents will find useful on both sides of the issue. It’s information that parents are already looking for and already using to select books.

    I think you’re right that it’s probably wrong-headed to have each publisher do this separately. Too much variation. And it’s not efficient. A separate group could handle this much better. And that would drastically cut any publisher cost associated with it.

    And you’re right that any business person worth their salt wouldn’t want to take on extra cost without seeing some benefit. But my gut feeling is that adding this type of information would funnel sales to the publishers who provided it. It would do this because the vast majority of parents care about what their kids read.

    It would funnel more sales to books that met SVP criteria that more parents were okay with. Which would then prompt both publishers and authors to provide more of the same. I think any publisher who starts doing this will realize an advantage. But you’re right–they’d need to test it.

    As for ALA, according to their statement, the ALA objects to ratings “as a means of advising parents concerning their opinions of the contents and suitability or appropriate age.”

    Ratings like the MPAA film ratings advise parents who should watch films based on age. “R” is not suitable for children. Such ratings prescribe suitability. SVP does not prescibe anything. It just reflects content levels. Parents have to decide for themselves what is suitable for their children. It’s a neutral framework.

    Furthermore, despite the organization’s official stance, it does not match up with the behavior of school librarians. Schools, as opposed to many public libraries, still use content measure to select books for their collections. And those content measures vary from community to community. SVP would only help those librarians.

  9. THANK YOU for this post. I’ve thought for a long while now that books (not just YA books…EVERY book) need content labels, and can’t understand why publishers and authors are so against them (including my own very well-known publisher.)

    What’s wrong with giving people more information about what they read? I don’t know of anyone who’d get rid of nutritional labels from their food–and aren’t books how you feed your soul? Like you, I decided that publishers & authors are afraid that once people realize the content of the book, like the calories on a restaurant menu, people won’t want to eat the food. Pretty squirrelly.

    Thanks for taking on this topic, you articulate it well. I don’t see publishers agreeing to it anytime soon (they’re too insecure, sadly), but I wonder if there’ll be a movement among the indie writers to put content labels on their own books. A lot of the writers don’t seem to mind rating their online & fan fiction.

  11. It would also avoid authors getting a lot of blowback for their publishers’ marketing decisions. For example, I’m still mad at the author of Bridge to Terabithia, because I was given the impression I was going to be reading a children’s fantasy novel, not a children’s issues book about death. I will never be able to read any of Paterson’s work, because my childhood rage at being cheated is still so deep. A simple contents label would have avoided that.

  12. Maureen,

    A lot of people think this is just for adults. But you’re right–it would be useful to kids. I know all my daughters, who are massive readers, select and filter on these things. It’s not mom and dad policing thing. It’s initiated by my girls themselves. And they feel just as you did when they’re let down.

  13. I certainly agree that much of the sex and other themes in many YA novels have become gratuitous. I also absolutely agree that parents should know what their kids are reading. Let’s honestly recognize that many (most?) parents won’t bother. They will say they do, but when it comes down to it they won’t have time, even if they have the intention.

    Sometimes the more adult themes seen in YA are well done and ‘fitting’, but that is MY opinion, and I never expect anyone to share it.

    A rating system would be helpful. It would give parents the quick answer they need. They shouldn’t be going for the quick answer, but they will. That is reality.

    The kids-in-mind system looks ideal. The ratings there have great potential, but it always comes down to WHO is doing the ratings. Who decides if a ‘make-out’ session deserves a ‘4’ or a ‘6’? What rating to we give the word ‘crap’, and who decides that? And while it is more complicated (and admittedly, potentially more useful) than a simple G, PG, R, X system, that won’t prevent it from being treated as one.

    I almost never agree with the publishing industry, but this one time I do. A ratings system for books will function just like a ratings system for movies. Libraries and schools and bookstores (if there are any left) will be pressured (eventually compelled) not to carry books rated “R” or the equivalent. Take a look at the Texas School Book controversy, where a single group of half-a-dozen reviewers in that state have vastly undue influence on the content of all textbooks, nationwide. Adult themes will creep into the “PG” (or equivalent) category like has happened with movies, reducing the value of the rating system itself. Finally, while I personally believe there is too much sex and profanity in most current YA, occasionally it fits just right, and those books will be much harder to find.

    Some say that censorship is a word that only applies when imposed by the government. I disagree.

  14. I was pointed here by the Passive Voice blog and I’m glad I clicked over and read the whole thing. So nice to see a rational *discussion* about this. The difficulty for teachers and parents of multiple fast-readers is one of volume. Having a rating on a book would simply let me know if I need to go check out the content and have a discussion with my child.

    And as a kid I would have *loved* this. I did not like sad or scary books and was terrified of getting caught up in a book that would keep me up at night.

  15. JM,

    The thing I like about this is that it doesn’t suggest what’s appropriate for an audience as the R, PG, PG-13 system does. It only marks levels. You decide. As for school libraries, they already have strict standards. They vary from place to place, but school librarians already do this. This would help in those decisions, which would vary from community to community.

  17. I’ll give my two cents. I think something is needed, but a scaled rating system I believe is not good. A quantifying system is better, in my opinion.

    IMDB, like JohnW said works, but I am thinking more factual with less detail (if that makes sense, but hopefully it will as I explain it).

    These are books for crying out loud. It’s so easy to list with a word search of the manuscript: Profanity: 121 uses of G*D; 97 F-words . . .
    Or to note during editing:
    Sexual/Nudity: 11 with 7 explicit (containing nudity and sex acts) S/N Breakdown: 4 references; 2 scenes with nudity, but no sex; 2 self-pleasuring; 2 oral sex acts; 3 full sex acts . . .
    Sexual Violence: Rape . . .
    Violence: Body Count…. and so on.

    I would have a pretty good idea, about if I wanted to read that book or not, by using my own judgment and not having to rely on others opinions I don’t know and who have no idea what my values are. IMDB does a decent job at letting you know what content is present, but bias is rampant and it can also kill the story/movie with spoilers. When just the data is presented spoilers are not given and story’s integrity would remain, but you can get the general feel and tone.

    Holly mentioned the Hays Code. This is my other reason I am against any system that is a scaled rating. Rating systems become flawed and a power unto themselves eventually. IMO, any rating scale (notice scale, NOT list) is subject to more bias and prejudice–they always have been by nature of their creation.

    Now to be honest, I believe a rating system would work . . . initially . . . but then it would start to fail once society polarizes it with money and special interests. Too many have an agenda. There is nothing wrong with opinion and free speech. Yet, with a fact count system the argument becomes more about making someone’s opinion look ludicrous when they try to deny facts–the evidence is counted in the book, not opinionated on. As Joe Friday in Dragnet used to say when interviewing witnesses who kept interpreting things, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.”

  18. Daron,

    Looks good. Alas, like so many others it has such a small selection. I searched for a number of popular titles just to see what they had, like Hunger Games etc., and there was nothing. But it’s certainly a resource to use. Thanks for the link!

    Michael,

    I like the quantifying system idea. Just expose the data. However, I don’t see why you can’t use both. Kids-in-Mind does exactly that. If you can quantify, you can create a scale based on that. Or am I missing something?

  19. Sorry, I thought I’d poke my head in again, to remind people that this is nothing like the Hays code. The Hays code forced the screenwriters/studios to change content to fit their guidelines. SVP labels don’t make anyone change anything. I’ve had stuff I’ve worked on rated by MPAA & ESRB and I’ve never felt censored in the least. The SVP is even freer than that, not ratings, just pointing out what’s inside.

    Whether people agree with content labels or not, they have to admit that this is a problem. There is NOTHING out there I can recommend for my mom, a voracious reader, because there are so many books she’s tried and has put down in disgust b/c of sex scenes…not even a “Christian” label on a book has been a good enough heads up. She quit visiting the adult section of the library years ago. I even know people who quit reading fiction or won’t try anything new anymore. There needs to be a solution.

  20. Thanks, H.

    Hays sounded like a PRESCRIPTIVE program. MPAA etc. is DESCRIPTIVE, yet prescriptive in suggested audience. SVP takes away the suggested audience and is simply descriptive.

  21. This is an incredibly well-reasoned post. Thank you!

    I remember the last time this all blew up online (YA Saves) I got so frustrated with all the pinheads yelling at each other that I just gave up on the whole subject. You may have found a rational common ground that everyone can live with.

    Authors can scream and yell about being “censored” and “stereotyped” if you’re trying to judge their book’s intentions and worth, but they can’t really dispute the fact that there’s an F-word in their book. If you focus on merely exposing a book’s content without judging it, using empirical data, it gives the reader/parental screener the info they need without censoring anything.

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