What’s the difference between British and American picture books?
A lot of dudes and a lot of problems…
At Lost My Name we do a lot of research and have a lot of data to help inform our product design work and help us make better decisions.
One of my favourite research projects we’ve been doing is a meta analysis of picture book story structure, looking for common patterns and trying to understand the basic story building blocks of children’s picture books.
As part of this we’ve taken our categorisation system and applied it to the top 100 bestselling picture books in the UK and the US over the last ten years. Here’s the results:
It’s a startling difference! UK consumers love Dude with a Problem (DWAP) stories whereas the Americans have much more balance. We’re processing this now and diving into the data a bit more to understand why.
One obvious answer is the Donaldson Effect — Julia Donaldson loves to write DWAP stories and she totally dominates the UK list:
I’m going to write up the results of the analysis of the 3–6 soon and you can read the 0–3 piece here but I’d love to get your suggestions in the comments or on Twitter — why do Brits love reading DWAPs to their kids and Americans love a bit of everything?
P.S If you like reading about and talking about storytelling for kids sign up for our Story Studio newsletter — we send out interesting links, job opportunities and invites to our monthly meet ups in London once a week. Hope to see you at one of these soon!
