What makes our books "dyslexia-friendly"?

Actually, we prefer the term "Reading Level Neutral". Stay with us, and we'll explain.

Someone recently asked about The Curse of the Fart Witch. Of all our books, this one was our biggest labour of love, as it had been written initially at a reading level suitable for 10- 12-year-olds. We wanted to make it suitable for struggling readers, so we rewrote it to make it accessible at an 8-9-year-old reading level. The Curse of the Fart Witch was designed from the outset to be accessible to children who find conventional books difficult or tiring to read, including dyslexic and reluctant readers.

That starts with the language itself. We use Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores as tools during editing to help us monitor sentence length, word complexity and overall readability. They don't determine the writing, but they help us identify passages that may have become unnecessarily difficult and keep the language appropriate for the reading level we're aiming for.

The physical design of the book matters just as much. We use a clear sans-serif typeface, with slightly increased spacing between letters and generous spacing between lines. There is enough room beneath each line for a child to follow the text with a finger if that helps them maintain their place.

Text is left aligned rather than fully justified, avoiding the irregular gaps between words that can appear in justified text. Lines are kept to a manageable length, paragraphs are relatively short, and pages are deliberately prevented from becoming walls of dense text.

The book is printed on cream-coloured, book-quality paper rather than thin, bright-white stock. The softer background reduces glare for readers who find high-contrast pages uncomfortable, while the heavier paper was also a practical decision: some children track a sentence with their finger, sometimes repeatedly, and we wanted a book capable of surviving being properly read.

Illustration is part of the reading experience rather than simply decoration. Spot illustrations provide visual landmarks throughout the book and regularly interrupt larger areas of text.

Typography is also used deliberately. Changes in size, style and placement can signal sounds, reactions, interruptions and changes of pace, giving the reader additional visual cues rather than asking the prose to carry everything.

During action sequences, the book sometimes moves almost completely into comic-book storytelling. Pictures, panels and speech bubbles carry part of the narrative so that an exciting scene doesn't suddenly become several pages of dense prose just when the story should be moving fastest.

We also avoid unnecessarily complicated vocabulary and sentence construction while deliberately not simplifying the ideas, humour or plot. The aim is a lower barrier to reading, not a younger or less sophisticated story.

That distinction is important to us. We deliberately separate reading age from interest age. A child may be 10, 11 or 12 and still find text written at that age level difficult to decode. They should not have to choose between a book they can comfortably read and a story that actually feels as though it was written for them.

Our aim is to make books that all children can enjoy. A confident reader should simply experience a fast, funny, highly illustrated story. A struggling or dyslexic reader should be able to enjoy that same story with fewer barriers in the way. The humour, characters, danger, pace and plot are not simplified just because the reading experience is made more accessible.

We also test that approach with real readers. Our books are read by dyslexic children and by specialist dyslexia tutors, whose feedback helps us identify anything that may still be getting in the way of the reading experience. That practical feedback is important to us because no readability score or design guideline can fully replicate what happens when an actual child sits down with the book.

Most importantly, there is no single design that works for every dyslexic reader. Dyslexia varies enormously from person to person. Our approach is therefore to remove as many common sources of unnecessary reading friction as we reasonably can while still producing a book that looks and feels like a book children genuinely want to read.