So you want to write a children's book?

As a publisher, I subscribe to a lot of book publishing and marketing newsletters. Yesterday, I received the following email from two of those newsletters:

Ever wanted to write a children’s book?

If so, publishing your work as an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle platform is a great way to go – and now is a great time to get started.

The children's e-book market is up 475% this year alone, which makes it one of the fastest-growing book categories on Amazon.

Plus, once you know a simple formula, children’s books are one of the easiest types of books to write.

To discover how to get started writing and publishing your own children’s e-books, join Steve Harrison for a free webinar this Wednesday, April 1. (link redacted)

Steve will be interviewing an author who wrote a silly little 26-page Kindle children’s book in less than seven days, which, more than two years later, still produces more than $1,000 in royalties each month!

The idea that anyone can write a children's book using a "simple formula" is offensive and misleading. Writing a good children's book is not easy, it's hard! It takes dedication, hard work and a willingness to educate yourself about children's writing.

A common misconception is that writing for children is easy, because the writing in children's books appears simple. But that simplicity is deceptive; it takes skill and experience to know how to write for children in a way that's appealing without talking down to them. Writing good children's books is harder than writing good adult books. That book your children beg you to read every night? It was probably the result of many rounds of edits trying to get exactly the right words and the right tone. Of course, good adult writers do the same thing, but they don't have to agonize over every word, every sentence the way children's writers do.

Simplicity is hard! Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, is one of the most well-known and beloved children’s writers. The seemingly simple rhyming text of his stories has fooled many writers into thinking that it’s easy to write such books, but Geisel labored over each book, writing and rewriting, sometimes for a year or more.

Encouraging people to write a "silly little" children's book using a "simple formula" does no one a service, least of all the writers themselves. The marketing copy above leads people to believe that fame and riches are just around the corner and easy to achieve, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth. There are thousands of new children's books published every year, probably even more than that when you count all the self-published books. Many of those will languish in obscurity, many others will sell a decent number of copies and sit solidly midlist, and very few will sell a large number of copies. I personally know many, many children's authors, both traditionally published and self-published, and very few are getting rich. (Actually, I don't think any of my author friends are rich. If you are, let's talk!)

If you want to write a children's book, great! I admire anyone who pours their heart, soul, time, and effort into writing a book. But don't do it in expectation of making money. Yes, you might get lucky like the author mentioned in the ad above, but that's the exception, not the rule, and unless you are very, very lucky you won't achieve that. There is no magic formula that guarantees success - believe me, if there were, the big publishers would be using it! If you're going to write for children, do it for love, not for money. For most authors I know, the letters they receive from children mean much more than the royalty check. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money from your writing, but if you go into it with that as your primary goal, there's a good chance that you're in for disappointment.

As a book blogger and Cybils Awards organizer/judge, I'm active in the children's book blogging community. Self-published books have developed a bad reputation in the community, and many bloggers now have review policies that exclude self- or indie published books. For years, I've advocated for indie publishing among my peers. Authors self-publish for many reasons, and self-publishing by itself is not an indicator of the level of quality. Self-publishing gives a voice to those who are disenfranchised by the traditional publishing industry. As one of the leaders of the Cybils Awards, I continually advocate to keep self-published books eligible and judged fairly and impartially. There are excellent self-published books, and a few have even been finalists or winners in the Cybils Awards.

But I sometimes feel that advocating for self-publishing is an uphill battle, when for every excellent book there are hundreds of others that are poorly done. People like Steve Harrison are making the situation worse by encouraging people to take the easy road, to produce more dreck that will further drag down the reputation of self-publishing. Not only that, but it misleads authors to believe that there is an easy road to success. There is no easy road that guarantees success! You might get lucky, but then, someone wins the Publishers Clearing House, too.

If you want to write a children's book, go for it! But rather than looking for easy formulas, take the time to learn what makes a good children's book. To start with, read a great many children's books. (If you have children, this isn't hard!) Read them critically, with an eye to what works well and what doesn't. (I've learned so much about children's books from nearly ten years of reviewing them for the blog, and nine years of being a Cybils judge). Read books about writing children's books. Take classes from reputable institutions or teachers. Join the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and your regional chapter of it. Attend writing conferences. Join or form a critique group. Check out any potential agents, publishers, promotional companies, contests, and more on the excellent Preditors and Editors.

One of my good friends, Anne Boles Levy, has her first book coming out in August, a YA fantasy published by independent publisher Sky Pony Press. For Anne, it's been at least a fifteen year journey: writing, editing, revising, and submitting the book. Anne works regularly with a critique group that includes multiple award-winning authors; I believe that the group has been working together since before any of them were published. During that fifteen years, in addition to writing Anne also invested a lot of time into things that helped her to be known in the children's book community: blogging, attending conferences, and even founding a children's book award. None of that guarantees any good reviews, of course, but it does mean that Anne has a better than average chance of getting bloggers to take a look at it. I haven't yet seen the book (although I can't wait!) but I assume that all the work she put into writing it has paid off in the form of an excellent book.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone needs to invest fifteen years. That's a lot of time to wait to achieve your dreams. But I am saying that true success does not come overnight in most cases, and if you want to succeed, you need dedication, perseverance, hard work, and a willingness to learn.

Don’t give in to the siren call of get-rich-quick schemes. Instead, invest your time and money in learning the craft and trade of children’s writing and publishing.

Do non-interactive books do a better job of encouraging literacy than interactive books?

A recent study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center seems to indicate that they do. The study found that when parents and children read together, children recall significantly more details when reading print books or regular, non-enhanced ebooks than they do when reading interactive ebooks. In addition, children engage with the content more when reading non-interactive books, with actions such as pointing and talking about the story.

So what does this mean? Are interactive books a dead end? I personally don't think so. We live in an era of options, and while all those options sometimes make it difficult to choose, in the long run this is a good thing, because there is no one right option for everyone and every situation. There are many ways to read and many ways to publish, and we can pick and choose as the situation requires. The key, as with everything, is balance.

For Parents

The old advice is still the best: read to your child early and often. We started reading to our son the day we brought him home from the hospital, and read to him almost every day after that until he was a teen. Even then, we sometimes read books together as a family, taking turns reading. We spent a glorious weekend reading the last Harry Potter book together the weekend it was released. I don't think it's unrelated that, at age 16, my son just finished his first year of college, living in the dorm, earning excellent grades and fitting in well with the other students. Reading to him was certainly not solely responsible--he's his own person and in large measure responsible for his own success--but it certainly helped.

But interactive books have their place as well. They may not be as good at developing traditional literacy skills, but computer literacy skills are just as important in today's world, and interactive books do help with those. In addition, the study also showed that interactive books have a lot of appeal for children, and can help encourage an interest in books, especially for reluctant readers. And in some cases, interactive eBooks can teach things that are difficult to teach using traditional books, or provide additional experiences and information about a particular topic. So the key, as it always has been, is in providing a variety of experiences for your child: books, ebooks, apps, not to mention "real life" experiences.

For Publishers, Self-Publishers, App Developers, and Authors

Parents will need books in a variety of formats, which is good news for everyone involved in creating books for children. Publishers can choose to provide their content in a variety of formats, or focus on just one or two. Print, Kindle, ePub, iOS, Android, computer: it's all good and all will be needed. Publishers need to keep aware of the changes in the industry and be prepared to act accordingly. Read industry newsletters and learn as much as you can about the different options, so you can make appropriate choices. Print is not dead, and I don't believe it will go away any time soon, but there's no denying that print markets are shrinking, so publishers need to think carefully about what formats to publish in, and run the numbers to see what makes sense and what will be profitable.

Some projects will be ideally suited to interactive ebooks, others will be a good fit with print and traditional ebooks, while still others will make sense to do in both formats. Any absolute statements about what publishers "must" be doing should be viewed with caution and evaluated carefully. There is no one right solution, and thank goodness we live in an exciting time of options.

Print Books, Basic Ebooks may Top Enhanced Ebooks at Fostering Literacy, Says Study — The Digital Shift

Digital World 1990

Twenty years ago, I attended a conference in Monterey, California, organized by Seybold and called "Digital World 1990." The conference was intended to address the rapid technological changes affecting publishing, computer gaming, movies, and other media industries, and the coming convergence of technologies. I've attended other conferences, but that one was strongly imprinted on my memory, and I've never forgotten it. Last week, attending BEA and IBPA's Publishing University was somewhat of a déja-vu experience, which reminded me strongly of that long ago conference.

In 1990, we were in the midst of a sea change of technology that threatened to drastically change the way we did business. Publishing was still reeling from a relatively new technology, desktop publishing, that took power away from the corporations and put it in the hands of ordinary people. There was disagreement between advocates of desktop publishing, and those of us (including me) who advocated a device-neutral tagging system, SGML, as a better approach for the long term. Multimedia, in the form of CD-ROMs, was going to change the way information was presented, and a convergence of technologies meant that soon computers, televisions, telephones, and other devices would merge into multi-purpose devices.

Broadband access, in the form of ISDN, would put the world at our fingertips, although no one seemed to know exactly what that meant. The internet was gaining in popularity, but gopher was the primary means of using the internet, and the World Wide Web was just on the cusp of being developed. Ted Nelson spoke about his vision of a world wide hypertext library of information, Xanadu, which would allow anyone to create content and link to other people's content. Digital World 1990 was where I first heard about a new technology being researched, I think it was by Xerox, called electronic paper, which would use rotating dots of electrically charged ink to create paper on which the image could be changed.

There was both fear and excitement at the conference, but excitement seemed to be the primary emotion, particularly since many of the people at the conference were deeply involved in bringing about those changes. I remember one speaker, I wish I could remember who it was so I could credit him, talking about the curve of development of new technologies. Using the example of multimedia CD-ROMs, he talked about how when a new technology is first developed it generates a lot of excitement, and people think it's going to change the world. Then, when change doesn't happen as quickly as expected, there's a backlash against it. Finally, the change does happen, although often differently than expected.

Today, we are once again (or still) in the midst of a sea change affecting the way we do business. Just as twenty years ago, there is both fear and excitement, but whereas I think fear was the primary emotion at BEA 2009, I think BEA 2010 moved more towards excitement.

Some of the changes predicted at the 1990 conference have come about, although in almost all cases the change has been different than expected. CD-ROMs still exist, but they are essentially dead, however multimedia presentation of information is stronger than ever, as evidenced by the many demonstrations of "enhanced e-books" at BEA 2010. Broadband access has indeed come about, although through DSL and cable and wireless, not ISDN.

We do indeed have "the world at our fingertips," but the World Wide Web has replaced Ted Nelson's Xanadu (although project Xanadu still exists and is working to bring their vision to reality). I do wish that Xanadu had won out over the web, because Nelson's vision was far superior to what we have today. Xanadu had greater granularity of linking -- you could link to any amount of content, even down to a single byte, instead of being forced to link to whole pages -- links were bi-directional, and there was built-in copyright protection and automatic compensation of copyright holders.

E-readers based on e-ink, the descendent of e-paper, are the hot item in 2010, although sadly it seems that once again Xerox missed the boat on a technology for which they were a pioneer. There is indeed a convergence of technologies, although there is also increased specialization. Today consumers have a choice: you can purchase multi-purpose devices like the iPhone, which combine telephones, computers, and video, or you can purchase specialized devices like the Kindle that serve one purpose. Instead of an overall convergences, we've seen a combining, separating, and re-combining of technologies in many different ways.

Desktop publishing has evolved into robust graphical typesetting programs like InDesign. Yet, with the increasing importance of e-books and multi-platform publishing, format-neutral tagging based formats -- in this case XML, the intellectual descendent of SGML -- are playing a more important role, and even InDesign now incorporates XML tagging capabilities.

Using the development curve described above, I think that e-books are starting to move from the second phase, backlash, into the third phase, real change, although there is certainly still some backlash.

I think the important thing to take away from all this is that change will happen, although probably differently than we expect it to. Twenty years from now, the world -- and publishing -- will be very different than today, but it will also be different than today's predictions of where it's headed. The important thing is to be flexible and creative; companies that can adapt, in one way or another, to the change, will survive, and those that don't, won't. Adapting doesn't necessarily mean moving everything to e-books, but it does mean finding ways to do business in this new world, whatever that might mean.