Lisa Rojany

When you explore writing children's books, you enter a different world, one filled with book formats — from board books to young adult novels — and a whole different set of rules to follow and restrictions to heed for each.If you want to become a successful children's book author, you need to know how to edit your work and how to promote your book.

Genres are the general nature of major children’s book categories. They’re like big buckets into which a bunch of books written with certain similar conventions are thrown. For example, mystery fiction is a genre, as is action/adventure.Science fiction and fantasy are two popular children's books genres.Writers of science fiction can manipulate settings to fit narratives or make up out-of-this-world settings altogether.

What the children's book publishing industry loosely refers to as “books with pictures” describes any of the formats focusing mainly on heavy illustration and few words. Books with pictures are therefore perfect for babies and growing toddlers. Usually, parents read these to their kids, rather than the kids reading the books themselves.

This list takes a look at children's books that focus on telling a story through words. This category includes early readers, first chapter books, middle-grade books, and YA books.Early readers are developed for children who are first learning their letters or perhaps even sounding out their first words.Experts in reading, teaching, learning, or curricula create particular programs around the theory of reading that the publisher has chosen to embrace, often a phonics-based or whole-language-based theory.

After your manuscript is in house at a publishing company, the art director takes over. She and the editor in charge of the project get together and discuss possible directions for the art. Artists are considered, agents of the shortlist of preferred illustrators are contacted, and a decision is made. After an illustrator is hired, he follows a specific process to deliver the art to the publisher.

Before you can revel in all those copies flying off the bookstore shelves and into online shopping carts — you have to write a children's book! For some fortunate writers, this is the easy part; for others, it’s like waiting at the dentist’s office for a root canal.Figure out when you're the most productive.Guess what?

The best children’s books have some grounding in a child’s reality, and the best way to discover what that reality is rather than what you imagine it to be is to get out there and explore. Besides of looking through bookstores, libraries, and online book sellers, here are some of the best ways to find out more about kids and about the people standing between your manuscript and the children you’re trying to reach: how they think, how they act, what they like, what they think is gross versus what they think is cool, and what proves perennially popular.

Certain premises for story lines can be employed time and again. Whether your take on an existing story sounds derivative is up to you and your writing skill. Here are some fabulous resources for story lines that you’re welcome to pilfer and tinker with to your heart’s content because no one — and everyone — owns them.