A book for a few children

A primary school teacher in Muscat has spent a year writing a picture book for young children, in Arabic and English side by side. It follows a girl who moves to a new town and has to learn its streets. She plans to print a small run.

Everyone who hears about it has advice on making it sell. Use a cartoon character children already know. Cut the Arabic, the market is bigger in English. Add a lesson on every page, parents like that. Make the girl a princess.

The advice assumes the book has a reasonable chance of selling widely. It does not. Books in general sell; any particular book almost never does. Each year brings far more new titles than anyone could read, and the great majority find only a modest number of buyers. The ones that sell enormously are so few they would fit on a single shelf. Once printing became cheap and anyone could publish, the old scarcity that made each book a business disappeared, and the odds became plain.

That is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to be honest about why she started. The book matters because children who read in two languages rarely see their own life in both. Because a class she will never teach might read it aloud. Because adding a good story to what we all hold in common is worth doing on its own. Sometimes a book like this finds readers years later, slowly, without anyone planning it.

None of those reasons depend on sales. All of them are weakened by bending the book towards an audience that probably will not arrive.

So she should finish it for the reasons that made her begin, and leave the girl, the town and both languages as they are. The sales she is being told to chase were unlikely to come either way.