EIGHT years ago, Random House Australia sent a 12-year-old schoolboy a manuscript from a new name in children's fiction. The publishing house wanted feedback for The Ranger's Apprentice.
While it is assumed primary school boys go straight to fantasy and adventure, they can be conservative readers whose tastes are difficult to predict, publisher Zoe Walton says.
Robere Rahme wrote on his form: ''This book was so good I couldn't put it down.'' His praise helped persuade booksellers to stock the work - John Flanagan's series has now sold 4 million copies worldwide.
Random House is searching for 100 children who are ''voracious readers'' to bolster its book buddies club as, like Rahme, many of its original members are now young adults.
Allen & Unwin runs Silverfish, a focus group of 30 readers aged between eight and 19. ''One of the problems of the children's book market is that adults buy books for children and so you don't get direct feedback from sales,'' says Allen & Unwin's children's publishing assistant, Julia Imogen.
Each member is given one manuscript per term and last year they reported back on titles including The Paradise Trap, by Catherine Jinks, The Golden Day, by Ursula Dubosarsky, and City of Lies, by Lian Tanner.
Imogen says her brutally honest reviewers have slammed covers as ''lame'' and picked up outmoded schoolyard slang.
As the retail downturn and the migration to online retailers eats into publishers' bottom lines, children's and young adult fiction has proved resilient. But a frequent dilemma for publishers is what to put on the cover and how to maximise the appeal to the readers they are targeting. The danger, says author Jacqueline Harvey,, is marketing ''somewhere in the middle and appealing to no one''.
Young boys especially won't pick up books they perceive as too girlie.Booksellers and librarians report that boys tend to enjoy humour, fantasy worlds and books with factual content.
Imogen acknowledges that teenagers tend to read what is fashionable. For now, they are migrating from vampire and werewolf themes to dystopian worlds.
''You can't predict by gender who will prefer a historical novel or an adventure fanstasy or a vampire spoof,'' Imogen says. ''Our boys are as adventurous as the girls and if you add non-fiction into the mix, they are just as widely read.''
bookbuddies@randomhouse.com.au