Writing Children's Books For Dummies
Overview
Create the next very hungry caterpillar, big red dog, or cat in the hat with a hand from this trusted guide
In Writing Children’s Books For Dummies, you’ll learn what to write between “Once upon a time . . .” and “The End” as you dive into chapters about getting started writing, how to build great characters, and how to design a dramatic plot. On top of the technical writing advice, you’ll discover how talented illustrators work and how to find an agent. The newest edition of this popular For Dummies title even shows you how to choose a publisher—or self-publish—and how to use social media and other marketing and PR to get the word out about your new masterpiece.
In the book, you’ll learn about:
- The fundamentals of writing for children, including common book formats and genres, and the structure of the children’s book market
- Creating a spellbinding story with scene description, engaging dialogue, and a child-friendly tone
- Polishing your story to a radiant shine with careful editing and rewriting
- Making the choice between a traditional publisher, a hybrid publisher, or self-publishing
- Using the most-effective marketing and publicity techniques to get your book noticed
Perfect for anyone who’s ever dreamed of creating the next Ferdinand the Bull or Grinch, Writing Children’s Books For Dummies is an essential, easy-to-read guide for budding children’s authors everywhere.
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About The Author
Lisa Rojany is a writer and publishing professional. Lisa has her own company, Editorial Services of L.A., for writers of fiction and nonfiction.
Peter Economy is a Wall Street Journal best-selling business author and ghostwriter with more than 125 books to his credit, including multiple For Dummies titles.
Sample Chapters
writing children's books for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
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.
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For each main character in your children's book, you need to create a character bible. Your character bible really lays out who your character is in terms of personality, looks, history, family, quirks — all the elements that contribute to making a person who he or she really is. A character bible functions to help you get to know who your character is and to help you differentiate between characters.
Writing
Don’t expect to sit down and craft a perfect children’s book from start to finish, even if you’ve fully outlined your characters and plot. Writing is not just about putting your first thoughts on paper and being ready to publish. Instead, writing is about writing, revising, and revising some more.
The only way you’re going to be able to write freely is to turn off your inner critic and just get going.
If you're writing a children's book, it pays to be familiar with how publishers classify them. Publishers generally assign age groups for readers of various formats as set out in the following list:
Board books: Newborn to age 3
Picture books: Ages 3–8
Coloring and activity (C&A) books: Ages 3–8
Novelty books: Ages 3 and up, depending on content
Early, leveled readers: Ages 5–9
First chapter books: Ages 6–9 or 7–10
Middle-grade books: Ages 8–12
Young adult (YA) novels: Ages 12 and up or 14 and up
It's okay to veer off a year or so in either direction when assigning a target audience age range to your work.
Writing
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.
A character arc is just a simple visual tool to help you chart out your children's book character’s development. Her driving desire must be made clear from the start.
The changes your main character makes in her life can be drawn into this arc so you can see how she drives the action as the story starts, then something occurs that requires action, then her plight reaches a climax, and finally she heads toward resolution.
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.
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.
Writing
Sometime at the beginning of the writing process, you need to ask yourself just what makes the main character of your children's book move and groove. What does he really want that he simply cannot do without? What is it propelling him to do what he does throughout your story?
What burning desire lights him on fire and keeps him motivated from the first time you meet him until you bid adieu?
Writing
Exercises are great ways to develop and strengthen general and specific writing muscles and are great when you first start writing a children's book. Each exercise can be used not only to get you writing, but also to come up with themes to write about. Writing memorable characters is of the utmost importance — and you can’t write memorable characters unless you know them really well.
Writing
Sometimes there is something wrong with your children's book manuscript, and you simply can’t identify what it is. When you’re editing your work, you need to know not only how to recognize the problem, but also what to do to fix it.
Strengthen your opening
You need a strong opening sentence. This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s really quite important.
Writing
Words are fun. And what better way to have fun with words than to write a children’s book? You have far more freedom to play around with words when writing children’s books than you do when writing other kinds of books. The sky is truly the limit.
Use some of these common methods to have fun with words:
Alliteration: The initial consonant sounds of words two or more times in a line or sentence creates a rhythmic component to the writing.
Writing
What constitutes a good sentence or description of scenery, of place, of context in your children's book? One that evokes a strong image in the reader’s mind. Getting someone to read words and see what you want her to see requires careful writing. One way to help you create a vision for your readers is to engage their senses.
Writing
Every good children's story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning reels you in, the climactic middle keeps you going, and the end satisfies you with resolution.
Keep these pointers in mind, and your plot will be sure to engage readers from start to finish:
Hook readers from the get-go. Your plot must have a beginning in which you introduce your main character and hook readers into the action by introducing the character’s driving desire, creating conflict right away.
Writing
Using dialogue to get to know your children's book's main character better is not the same as having your character talk and talk ad infinitum in your story. Instead, dialogue is used between characters to reveal who they are, how they feel, how they think — to flesh them out verbally.
For instance, it’s one thing for the narrator to write, “Jon was as dumb as a doornail.
Writing
Supporting characters help to convey the context of the story. In deciding who else to add to your children's book's cast of characters, ask yourself who you need in addition to your main character to tell your story. “Who does my main character need around her to make her believable as well as to help her carry out her destiny?
Writing
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.
Writing
Every story needs to be grounded. That grounding or foundation is created when a context is developed. A context bible can help you give a character a place to begin, a place to set her feet and then jump into or away from when the action indicates.
Although it’s always advisable to begin a story right away with the main character in action, sooner or later that character is going to need to go somewhere.
Writing
The thought of doing your own children's book publicity can be both exciting and overwhelming thanks to the almost unlimited number of potential tools available, such as websites, blogs, videos, radio and television interviews, press releases, podcasts, and social media. Ultimately, though, it’s best to take a two-pronged approach to publicity by embracing both the digital and traditional components of publicity campaigns.
Writing
Publishers require prospective authors to submit either a proposal (a longer document providing additional editorial and marketing information about your book) or a query letter (a one-page letter of introduction inviting the publisher to ask for more details about your project).
Most publishers have guidelines for how they want your material to arrive, regardless of whether you’re sending a query letter or a full proposal.
Writing
Writer's block are two little words guaranteed to strike fear in the heart of anyone who has ever faced a deadline or had to earn a living from his words.
Getting stuck is something that all writers — no matter how skilled they are or how much practice they’ve had — experience from time to time. The writer’s brain is like a mighty river — usually it flows along smoothly, but sometimes a 40-foot barge sinks right in the middle, causing the river to back up and the words to stop flowing.
Writing
You’ve decided you want an agent. The next step is to find a great one who will not just sell your children's book to a publisher, but who is ethical, who will take the time necessary to properly develop your work and present it in the best light, and with whom you can develop a long-term working relationship.
Writing
When writing a children's book, it is important that your main character has a driving desire that is apparent to the reader. So how do you let the reader know about your character’s driving desire?
Well, you could spell out this desire in a straightforward, narrated manner. For example, if you were writing Snow White, you could tell the reader: “There was a queen who wanted more than anything to be the fairest in the land.
If you don’t make a good first impression, your children's book manuscript will likely get sent right back to you accompanied by one of those dreaded rejection letters. Editors see a gazillion manuscripts every day, and the sight of certain common errors makes them sigh with impatience. With so many resources available to writers of children’s books, it seems crazy to submit anything other than a clean and well-edited manuscript.
Writing
Lots of writers and writer/illustrators these days are opting to self-publish instead of going the traditional route of submitting directly to agents, publishers, or art directors. There are some special considerations when it comes to self-publishing an illustrated book. If you’ve taken on the role of the self-publisher and are working on an illustrated children’s book, consider the following tips:
Find an illustration style to match your story.
Writing
After you’ve rewritten your children's book manuscript and edited it, you may need a professional editor or editorial service to check overall large elements of your story or to address final smaller (but no less important) issues to ensure you’re ready to submit your manuscript to an agent or publisher.
An editor is someone who corrects, finesses, and polishes a work at different levels of complexity to prepare it for publication.
Writing
Although a key part of establishing a powerful social media platform to publicize your children's book is persistently and consistently building your online presence using the various tools at your disposal, you should also plan to make a big social media splash whenever you release a new title. You can make this big splash by launching a social media campaign.
Writing
A great way to really build a children's book character, attribute by attribute, is to create a blueprint of him, called a character bible. A character bible is a type of character outline in which everything about your character is laid out in one place so you can find answers to many questions about the character’s personality and desires.
After you've written a children's book, you have to sell it — you didn't spend all that time and effort just to entertain yourself, did you? Try to accomplish one of the following tasks each week to help your labor of love blossom to life in the marketplace:
Add new content weekly to your website or blog to keep it fresh.
Writing
Although you can play fast and loose with some facts in a fictional children's book, you don’t have that luxury when you’re working on a nonfiction book. To do so not only potentially risks your reputation with publishers and book buyers, but it can lead to disillusioned children who discover that their favorite nonfiction author is a fraud.
Writing
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?
Writing
So, you’ve decided to try to enlist the services of an agent to sell your children’s book. What next? You need to get your ideas in front of an agent. Here’s how to do that in a way that will increase your probability of success.
Follow agency submission guidelines
The number-one mistake that many prospective authors and illustrators make when submitting to an agency is that they don’t first find out what the agency’s submission guidelines are.
Writing
Many beginning children’s book writers are told never to try to write a story with two or more main characters unless they have a lot of experience doing so. Although that is sound advice for some writers, every new writer doesn't need to be constrained by this dictate; however, make sure that your characters stay distinct and different from one another:
Create a character bible for each main character.
Writing
Writing dialogue for the characters of your children's book takes developing a good ear and lots of practicing. But you may be better at it than you think. The writing exercises here are part of getting in the practice of regular writing and can help you rehearse writing dialogue without the pressure of having to make it good.
Writing
A children's book reader who is not getting enough information about a main character’s whereabouts won’t necessarily be able to tell you that’s the reason he’s not enjoying your book. But he will feel a certain lack of connection to the character — which is the kiss of death.
If a main character isn’t engaging, children will put down the book and never pick it up again.
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.
Writing
Structure is simply the bones of your children's story upon which are laid the skin and organs: drama, pacing, effective transitions, and strong point of view. You hear a lot of talk about structure in writing circles, and it’s true that structure is the key to a good story.
To give a story structure means you tie in your story’s beginning, middle, and end with characters who move it forward with action and a plot that proceeds apace.
The primary point of view (POV) decision you have to make before you can write even one sentence of your children's book is person. Third-person stories are told by a narrator who isn’t part of the story, whereas first- (and usually second-) person stories are told by a narrator who’s also a character.
First person: First person entails the author outright telling a story, perhaps his own, by being the main character of the story, narrating the book using the pronoun I.
Writing
Although many publishing houses have their own in-house style or grammar guides stipulating how to treat serial commas or ellipses or em dashes, the following primer will guarantee you a manuscript that’s clean enough to impress any nit-picking editor — even if she later changes it to reflect the publishing house’s style choices.
Writing
Not all plots are the same, but some common plot problems can creep into your children's story when you’re not looking. Here are a few guidelines about approaches you should avoid so as not to muck up your plot:
Action with no actor: When you’re writing a scene, make it clear who’s doing the action. Don’t make your reader hunt around previous or successive paragraphs to figure out who is the star of the scene.
Writing
Stereotyped characters in children's books are ones who are too familiar and thus wooden: the smart geek, the airhead cheerleader, the mean beauty queen. When every expectation a reader has about how a character will end up is met, you’ve created a stereotyped character. When your reader finds no contradictions or surprises related to him throughout the story, your character is in trouble.
Writing
Book prizes and awards look good on your living room wall and help you sell your book. The following list fills you in on some of the best annual book prizes.
Newbery Medal
Sponsored by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, the Newbery Medal is awarded each year to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.
Writing
The best test of whether or not your children's book's dialogue is working is to listen to someone else read it back to you. When you hear your dialogue read aloud, pay attention and ask yourself:
Do the child characters sound like children? If they consistently speak in complete sentences or use strings of huge words, you probably have your English professor in mind and not a child.
Actually getting a children’s book published is difficult. If you don’t know the conventions and styles, if you don’t speak the lingo, if you don’t have someone to advocate for your work, or if you or your manuscript don’t come across as professional, you’ll be hard pressed to get your manuscript read and considered, much less published.
Writing
Most of the buzz in publishing today is about the coming of age of the e-book, books published in the form of a digital file that can be read on a variety of electronic platforms, including smartphones (think Android and iPhone), tablet computers (iPad and ASUS Transformer, among others), dedicated e-readers (Nook and Kindle), and good old-fashioned laptops and desktops.
Writing
So why self-publish your children's book? Maybe you’ve huffed and puffed and you still can’t get an agent or publisher interested in your book. Maybe you want complete creative control, and the only way to get that is to do everything yourself. Or maybe you just want to keep all the proceeds from selling your printed book.
Writing
When writing a children's book, you need to be aware of a few aspects of good writing: voice, style, and tone. And these are the ones that, unfortunately for writers everywhere, nearly defy instruction.
For example, when you read a particular author and are drawn in by everything you’re reading, so much so that you savor every last page and hate for the book to end, then you have fallen for the writer’s mojo (magic).
Writing
As you consider self-publishing, don’t pass over the print route too quickly — there is still a large (and growing) market for this kind of book. Consider two of the most common approaches to getting your self-published book into print: working with an offset printer and taking the leap into print-on-demand.
Working with an offset printer to self-publish
When a traditional publisher actually prints copies of a book, they use a process known as offset printing.
At some point after you have a solid draft of the children's book you're writing, you must begin the editing process. Here's a quick overview of the salient points to keep in mind.
If a sentence doesn't contribute to plot or character development, delete it.
Make sure your characters don't all sound the same when they speak.
The rules for writing books for younger children (ages 2–8) are different from the rules for writing books for middle graders or young adults. Keep the following 12 commandments in mind. (As with most commandments, you may be able to dance around one or two, but you'd better have a good reason.)
It's okay to be different from others, but it's not easy.
Writing
When you have a beginning, middle, and end to your children's book story, you need to incorporate enough drama into your story, using pacing to keep the reader interested. Drama is struggle and conflict, emotionality and turbulence. Pacing is keeping the drama at a more heightened note than you would find in real life.
Writing
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 start writing funny children’s books, you need to understand the kinds of things that kids tend to consider funny. And although there may seem to be no rhyme or reason for exactly what children find humorous, research shows that children go through different stages of humor development.
According to humor researcher (no, we didn’t make that up) Paul E.
Just as writing children’s books has a unique set of rules to follow (you know that the good guy or gal always wins), there are some things you should never do — never! Don’t even consider doing any of the following in a book for children:
Write books that preach or lecture.
Talk down to children as if they're small, idiotic adults.
Writing
There are lots of reasons to include scene development or description of scenery in your children's book. There are also reasons why you should not. Often writers will decide to include a context description that fails to add anything measurable or meaningful to the story.
How do you tell whether something is meaningful or measurable?
Writing
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.
Writing
Revising is the fixing process you do when you go back to check whether all the major parts of your children's book are working. The revising phase is all about making sure the major elements of your story are in order — specifically theme, characters, plot, pacing and drama, setting and context, and point of view.
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