Andrea Shavick - How to Write a Childrens Picture Book and Get it Published

To begin with I want to present to you a very common scenario that occurs at the beginning of the creation of a childrens picture book and many a childrens writers career:

1. Parent reads picture book to child.

2. Child enjoys the story and wants said book read another ten million times (or so it feels).

3. Parent, who by now is utterly exhausted and bored silly, suddenly has a brainwave. Hey! This book is so simple, anyone could write stuff like this. Why dont I have a go?

And there you have it. Another would-be picture book writer is born.

Its easy to see why picture books appear to be so easy to write. The plots are simple, the language is basic, the word counts are low and most of the characters are teddy bears. How difficult can it be?

The honest answer is very difficult indeed. Among other things, you need to know what sort of things to write about, what definitely to avoid writing about and how to fit your story into the picture book format, which is something of a skilled job in itself.

Above all you need a reasonable understanding of how the international picture book market works before you have even a glimmer of a chance of getting your book accepted for publication and from there into bookstores around the world and translated into numerous unintelligible but highly impressive- looking foreign languages.

Can you succeed? Well I did. Hundreds, if not thousands, of other childrens writers worldwide have succeeded too and so can you. Especially now you have this book, which contains about 15 years worth of writing and successful publishing experience, insider knowledge and tricks of the trade. Just a quick look at my contents list will demonstrate just how incredibly comprehensive this book is.

So first things first.

Well obviously its all about how to write and publish a childrens picture book. However, much of the advice is just as applicable to older childrens fiction as it is to picture books, especially on the topics of researching publishers, copyright, acceptances, rejections, self-publishing, vanity and online publishing. Other routes to publication via older childrens fiction, adult non-fiction and self-publishing are all discussed in the final chapter.

This book does not cover the following types of childrens books.

ABC and counting books are normally written for babies from birth to the age of about 2 years. They usually contain very little text and no story. Im also including in this category those attractively designed (but mind-numbingly boring) little baby books which have a picture of an everyday object or animal on every page and nothing much else.

These are often the same as baby books in content, the only difference being that theyre made of plastic so that they can be played with in the bath and then thrown away as soon as they begin to go mouldy (which doesnt bear thinking about!). Bath books have even less content than the baby books described above since the pictures are usually all boats and rubber ducks.

These are books made entirely of cardboard, as opposed to paper. They are intended to be read to, shared with and handled by babies, and the indestructibleness of the product is specifically engineered to prevent the baby eating it. Which they do, given half a chance! Again, the story content is virtually non-existent.

These are picture books for the very young child from birth to around 3, featuring elaborate devices such as flaps, peep-holes, pop-ups, tabs, sounds and different materials (e.g. fur). In general these books do not contain a lot of story the product is more like a toy, although there are some notable exceptions.

The reason I do not cover these categories (or genres) of books is because none of them really demand the skill and creativity of an author. And why? Simply because theres no story to write. This means they are, almost without exception, produced in-house by the publisher itself.

By in-house I mean that the entire concept, design and content of the product is created by people who are employed by the publisher. Professional authors are not normally commissioned because there is no creative story-telling work to do.

Your only chance here is if youre an illustrator, since somebody has to design and draw the pictures. More on illustrations later, but for now I will concentrate purely on picture books.

So what is a picture book?

Read on