The first is books by celebrity authors. Two obvious sources of resentment are that celebrities get far bigger advances than regular children’s authors and their books get far more publicity. However the more serious issue is that – while there are a few celebrities who write good children’s books – publishers set the quality bar a lot lower for celebrity authors because they know that having the celebrity’s name on the cover will be enough to sell lots of copies of the book. That may be good for publishers’ short-term profits, but it’s bad for children’s reading for pleasure, because having a celebrity’s name on the cover will not be enough to keep a child reading a poorly written book. And in the long term that’s going to be bad for the publishing industry as people that are turned off books as children do not grow up to be book-buying adults.

The second thing that children’s authors are always complaining about is books by dead children’s authors. By which I don’t mean books that are written by ghosts, I mean books that were written forty or more years ago. These may be good books, they may be books we read ourselves as children that inspired us to become children’s authors. But they’ve become the default option for many parents and teachers who are simply not aware that there are equally good or better new books written by modern authors, many of whom are struggling to make a living out of writing. And if those authors don’t succeed in making a living, we’ll end up with a smaller, less diverse group of people writing books that will appeal to a smaller, less diverse group of children.