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Dyslexia on the shelves
Publishers are starting to catch on to dyslexia-friendly books for adults; now we need more shelf space.
The narrative has changed at last for adult dyslexia-friendly books, and we can’t stop now! It is full steam ahead. In 2021, we at BOTH Press started publishing dyslexia-friendly books for adults, and now have more than 21 publications from authors such as Bernard Cornwell, Peter James and Garth Nix. I have been campaigning furiously all this time, to encourage the Big Five UK publishers to do more. I challenged the industry to publish dyslexia-friendly books with my comment pieces for The Bookseller in 2022 and 2023, with the latter asking publishers to produce 1% of their fiction in dyslexia-friendly formats.
At last, one of the Big Five UK has done so, and I am excited where we can go from this. Well done, Bloomsbury—you should be congratulated, and rightly so. This should be a starting gun for more of the leading publishers to follow suit. When 10% of the population has dyslexia, it not just a niche thing, nor a moral thing, but the right business thing to publish a wide range of dyslexia-friendly books for both children and adults.
Nevertheless, publishing the titles is only half the battle. We also need to get these books into the hands of those who deal with dyslexia every day.
Thankfully, it is increasingly normal nowadays for dyslexia-friendly children’s books to be found in bookshops, including chains such as Waterstones. We at Books on the Hill, and many other indie bookshops, sell them, and it is no longer a taboo for a parent and child to ask. But here are of course still challenges. Daniel Fridd, UK retail success manager at Edelweiss+, reports that "the barrier is often parents’ misconceptions of what dyslexia means, in terms of their child’s engagement with reading. It is very rarely that a child doesn’t want to read.”
And this misconception is much more stark with adults, for whom the normalisation of dyslexia has not happened. This is mainly because in the recent past there haven’t been enough books tailored to their needs—or any in the shops for them to ask for.
The retail opportunity for dyslexia-friendly books for adults is only in its infancy
Natasha Radford from Chicken and Frog Bookshop in Brentwood agrees that “(there is) a stigma attached to dyslexia and many adults feel uncomfortable to say that they’re dyslexic. Also the range of titles for adults is far narrower than it is for children.”
The retail opportunity for dyslexia-friendly books for adults is only in its infancy. It began with indie bookshops, with local indies having championed small press, dyslexia-friendly books for years. After seeing a video I made in a dyslexia workshop at the 2023 Gardners Trade Show, bookseller Maggie Davison told me: “I own a small bookshop in Coventry and have been stocking your titles since they started in June 2021. Very excited to receive your Arthur Conan Doyle stories from Gardners today and sold one straight out of the box."
Major booksellers, including chains such as Waterstones, Blackwell’s, Foyles and WHSmith, simply have to step up and engage with publishers, both indie and Big Five, that are producing adult dyslexia-friendly books. It is great that children are growing up without the same taboo their parents laboured under, but adults (belatedly) deserve the same treatment.
It is an exciting and liberating time for adults with dyslexia—and it is up to us, as booksellers, publishers and the media, to bring them the resources they deserve. Let’s get dyslexia-friendly books on the shelves!
