Russia (bbabo.net), - Studying last year's book sales statistics published by the Book Chamber is as exciting as studying betting rates before the Nobel Prize in Literature. And also on the verge of guilty pleasure, "dirty pleasure". Because, as you know, anything can be explained in hindsight.

But still, let's take the risk. So, here are the top 20 positions in the list of adult authors.

The first thing that catches your eye is that there are exactly equal numbers of living and non-living in it. But the second is a little more. Alive - 10, but this includes Tatyana Polyakova, alas, who died just in May 2021.

Those who write in Russian and not in Russian are also in full parity - 10/10.

But among those who write not in Russian, oddly enough, there is no total hegemony of those who write in English: it is diluted by the German Remarque and the Norwegian Nesbø. True, there is a big trick: both new English-speaking participants in the list (not to be considered the "new" King classic) Bardugo and Omer are Israelis. And their first language is Hebrew. What follows from this? It only explains once again why translated literature is not so developed in the USA. Why do they all translate themselves.

Well, the cherry on the cake is the gender composition. There is no smell of equality here. The ladies on the list are only six out of twenty, that is, 30%. And this, from the living, is not Ulitskaya or Rubina. Not even Yanagihara. And in general, if men are represented almost exclusively by "serious" authors, from Dostoevsky to Strugatsky (after all, apparently, brothers are meant), and only Akunin and Omer stand out from this line, both are fantasy and detective authors, then ladies are exclusively detectives and fantasy (Bardugo). "Serious" can only be considered Austin, and then more out of respect for her venerable 250 years of age.

Conclusion: To become a super-successful author, it is still better to be a white male. Preferably dead, but, however, as King's championship experience shows, now this is no longer necessary.

Let us now turn to the writers singled out as children's

Here we see an even more bizarre picture. And, one might say, tough.

There are only six living authors in the top twenty.

Foreign - only five. Only one of them is a man - Hans Christian Andersen.

In total, there are more than half of men in this twenty - 13. And, really, these are enviable men - Pushkin, Alexei Tolstoy, Korney Chukovsky. It is in first place with a total circulation of 957.6 thousand copies. Which is only slightly inferior to the circulation of Stephen King - 961.5 thousand copies. So it turns out that Korney Chukovsky is Stephen King for children.

The most interesting thing is revealed when you start to analyze, and who are the living Russian authors? Who are Uspensky and Dragunsky, it is clear, but who is Arina Vladimirovna Chunaeva, who overtook Pushkin and almost caught up with the fashionable author of cute little books, Holly Webb?

Surprisingly, neither the publishers nor the reviewers of children's literature were able to answer this question right off the bat. Yandex came to the rescue: the screenwriter of "Fixies", "Barboskins" and ... a practicing psychologist who, as follows from her representation on the site samopoznanie.ru, has "a certificate confirming mastery of the science and art of NLP at the level of an "NLP master"". Her numerous books are novelizations of animated series created in co-authorship, but she entered the top 20 with the only (!) Author's book "New Year with New Fairy Tales. Interactive Book", published in a frenzied circulation of 750 thousand copies. Here you don’t even need to joke about the NLP master - just look at the cover with the heroes of Soviet cartoons.

"" Books "on popular cartoons will always be in demand. Go to any supermarket, all the shelves are full of them and there are turntables with them at the cash desks. Moreover, unlike a tablet with cartoons, they do not cause parents to feel guilty, because the child reads", - Maria Kozlova, co-founder of the Pink Giraffe publishing house, noted in a long discussion.

The same bewilderment is caused by Elena Ul'eva, who occupies the tenth place. And this confusion is resolved just as easily. Her books, published with a total circulation of 383 thousand copies. - these are various educational games, cognitions, "encyclopedias for kids" - products are useful and necessary in their own way, but putting it on a par with the fairy tales of Pushkin and Andersen is the same as putting a 365-page yearbook on a par with collected works. Because it is also thick and in a beautiful cover with gold stamping.

The only living Russian children's author who admits "books" is Andrey Usachev. With what we congratulate him!

The conclusion from the study of this children's top 20 can be drawn as follows.

The market for children's literature, unlike the adult one, is a market like the winner takes it all.This means that there is no distribution curve and a "long tail" in it: there are two or three well-known authors who do, in essence, the same as the rest, but they are already used to working with them. Because baby development is not even a matter of marketing, but of logistics. When everyone is doing about the same thing, whoever puts their products in hypermarkets first is the winner who takes everything.

It sounds pragmatic and even cruel. But one has to remember the words of another cruel pragmatist: I have no other market for you, fellow writers.

Read more about the rating of the Book Chamber on the Year of Literature.RF portal. Winner Takes All - Year of Literature (godliteratury.ru)

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