For the Toon Books you release, how do you ensure appropriate age level and reading level?
Especially because your books don’t talk down to kids, which must be somewhat difficult to make happen. That’s a good question. The key point is turning to people who really know. I’ve been very lucky to have access to teachers who know this stuff. One of the teachers we have had as an advisor from the start teaches in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. She has taught the same grade for the past 20-plus years. She knows that phase of development. It’s second nature to her. She vets, and she’s ruthless! No niceties about, “Oh, what a cute little teddy bear” or whatever. Nothing like that! One bit of feedback I got from her last week is “the word easy is hard.” Okay. I didn’t realize that. It’s a hard word to read. We forget that. The word bad is easy. And good is easy. But some words are Dolch words, about 50–100 words that come up often that kids have to learn to read by sight. But the word easy is not a Dolch word, so it’s a hard word until a kid has encountered it many times. So we had to reph