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A novelty book goes beyond just words and pictures on flat pages. It’s often three-dimensional and always interactive (meaning the child must engage more than just their eyes in the experience). From pop-ups to pull-tabs, from juggling balls to paper dolls, innovative novelty books can really engage the imagination (see Figure 2-7 for an example). When any type of children’s book has something in addition to just flat paper and images, it moves into the novelty category.

Printing just words and illustrations on paper has become expensive — especially if the publisher prints only a few thousand copies to start. And novelty books always go beyond simply printed and bound paper.

Once upon a time, publishers could afford to print tens of thousands of copies of a novelty title right off the bat. But when the market became saturated, it couldn’t sustain all those titles. So the publishers could no longer count on economies of scale to offset the extra costs of hand-assembly or packaging the items that came with the book.

a) cover and b) interior from Deep in the Sea by Susan B. Katz with illustrations by David A. Carter. Text copyright © 2021 by Susan B. Katz. Illustrations copyright © 2021 David A. Carter. Reprinted with the permission of Little Simon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division. All rights reserved. c) interior from Hide and Seek, reprinted courtesy of the author/illustrator David A. Carter.

FIGURE 2-7: Example novelty books.

For these reasons, you find very few players in the novelty book market today. What does that mean for you? Unless you’re David A. Carter (a novelty book creator who can write, illustrate, design, and engineer his own titles), Robert Sabuda (another Renaissance publishing star of multiple talents in the pop-up world), or an expert in some form of artistry such as paper artist Hélène Druvert, your chances of getting a novelty book to market are slim to none — unless you self-publish. (We fill you in on the world of self-publishing in Chapter 19.)