Celebrity Children's Authors

I tried to respond to MotherReader's post on Bloggers Against Celebrity Authors, couldn't get the response to load, and then lost the whole thing. Life has become so difficult--and slow--since I moved over to the New Blogger that I decided that responding here would be more energy effecient. I know I can get this thing to work. (She says now, anyway.)

MotherReader says in her post "...for every book deal these celebrities strike, that’s less of the kid-lit pie for another author trying to get a break." I don't know that that's the case. I don't know that it's a sure thing that fewer noncelebrity authors are published because of celebrity authors. A lot of noncelebrity books get published every year.

Presumably celebrity authors get better deals than the rest of us, but it's not like we'd get those deals if the celebrities weren't there. Established "big name" children's authors don't get those kinds of deals, forget about new authors. Only someone like, say, J.K. Rowling gets those kinds of deals and that's because she's a celebrity author.

The kind of publicity celebrity authors get doesn't take away from our publicity, either, because we'd never be offered that kind of publicity. The Today Show is never going to call most of us. That's not a complaint, it's the way things are.

Celebrity authors don't cut into our pie. They have their own pie.

Do celebrity authors write a lot of crap? Very possibly. But go into any bookstore or library. Sad to say, celebrity authors do not have a corner on the crap market by a longshot.

Are celebrity authors exploiting the children's market, which has become much desirable in recent years? Maybe. But what about authors of adult literature who move into the children's market? Aren't they exploiting it, too? Should we unite against people like Joyce Carol Oates, also?

If you don't want to go nuts in the book business, you have to accept that it is a business that maintains itself by sales of books. Some authors are going to sell more books than others. Lots of times that has nothing to do with the quality of the books. Lots of times it has to do with the public and what it wants to buy. Sometimes the public wants to buy books written by someone whose name it recognizes, who has accomplished something it likes in some other field. The public has the right to do that.

You can't move the river, folks. Getting upset about celebrity authors is like getting upset because it's hot in the summer or cold in the winter. What's more, most celebrity authors don't last much longer than the seasons. Which, actually, makes them like many real authors.

NOTE: This post was revised, mainly for style.