Michael Pietsch, my long-suffering editor, now the CEO of Little, Brown’s parent company, Hachette, is a good guy. Really smart too. He’s a devoted family man. He cares deeply about books. That’s probably why—against all logic and common sense—he let me start my own kids’ imprint, JIMMY Books, at Little, Brown.
This is how I finally sold Michael on the idea. I told him JIMMY’s mission. Like all good business plans, it’s deceptively simple, but I think it’s spot-on:
“When a kid finishes a JIMMY book, he or she will say, ‘Please give me another book.’”
Here’s a sad alternative to that: Millions of kids in this country have never read a single book that they love. That’s the truth.
So is the fact that tens of millions of our kids—over 50 percent of them across America—don’t read at grade level. That’s so tragic, and avoidable, it’s hard to fathom, hard to write about. And it’s happening in the richest country in the world.
I know, I know, get off the soapbox.
In a minute.
Everywhere I go to speak, I hear the same thing from parents and grandparents: I didn’t know you write books for kids. Well, now you know. What’s more, I happen to believe my kids’ books are the best books that I write. Just my opinion.
Here’s what I have to offer your kids, or your grandkids, or the kids you teach in school.
I Funny. I wrote the book and the series with Chris Grabenstein. It tells the story of a precocious middle-school kid named Jamie Grimm. Jamie is aching to be a stand-up comedian. So he studies every comedian he can find. Real comedians, like Chris Rock, Groucho Marx, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Gaffigan, Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes, John Mulaney. Then he starts writing his own stuff. He’s funny. He wants to get funnier. A big twist in the story is that Jamie can never be a stand-up comedian. He’s in a wheelchair.
Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life was my first book for middle-school kids. Like I Funny, the Middle School books get kids smiling and reading more.
Pottymouth and Stoopid is even funnier. And it dares to take on the difficult subject of word-bullying. I’m obviously biased, but I highly recommend it.
Unfortunately, there seems to be an unwritten prejudice against books and movies that make kids laugh. Some adults in positions of authority think, How serious can a book be if we’re laughing at it? Pretty damn serious. Catch-22, anyone? Breakfast of Champions? A Confederacy of Dunces? Carry On, Jeeves? Diary of a Wimpy Kid?
If they taught movies in school—and it wouldn’t be such a terrible way to get kids thinking about structure and storytelling—but started with Ingmar Bergman movies, most of us would say, Oh, I really don’t like movies much.
And that’s what has happened with books in a lot of our schools. Way too often, kids are taught with Ingmar Bergman–style books. Millions and millions of kids are turned off to reading before they get a chance to fall in love with books.
It almost happened to me back in Newburgh at St. Patrick’s grammar school. The Dominican nuns almost got me.
Parents come up to me all the time and say, “I can’t get my kids reading.” I commiserate, then I tell them, “Hey, do you manage to get them to the dinner table? Do you allow them to track mud or snow onto your living-room carpet? Do you let them curse in church?”
Then make this a rule: We read in our house.