![]() The Horrid Henry books by Francesca Simon are a good example. Sometimes called early readers or chapter books, these books bridge the gap between picture books and novels with plenty of line drawings within the text and can be 6-15,000 words long. The whole text is usually submitted for this length book. You won’t be expected to provide illustrations – the publisher will match you with an artist (unless you are one yourself!). Classics include The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney. Less is more as the pictures do the talking. You will only have an approximate guide but at least you won’t be wildly off course. If it’s illustrated, adjust the word count by the percentage you feel the pictures take up. If they don’t specify a word count, and many don’t, take a look at some of their books in your local library and do a quick word count by counting three lines, dividing by three to get an average, multiplying by the number of lines on the page and then by the number of pages. Before submitting, make sure you check the publisher’s website. The reason there isn’t a definitive list is that publishers vary considerably in their requirements and so you will see that the range is large within each category. Macmillan are the only ones really keeping it up and they have gone down from about 20 a year to 4.Following on from my blog post on which publishers are accepting unsolicited manuscripts for children, I thought I’d put together something else I had difficulty finding on the web – a guide to word counts. It's a small world, most people know, or have heard of, everyone else.Įdit to say perhaps i should also mention that there is hardly anything being published at the moment in poetry as most of the publishers have shut their lists as they say it doesn't sell. ![]() ![]() If the editor (and most of them are poets themselves) like your work they'll answer and you will be put on their list. When you are sure you have a small collection of really good, short (short is important!) poems, you can look at who edits anthologies and send 6 poems off to the anthologiser, c/o the publisher, asking if they would consider you when they are asking for contributions to an anthology. ![]() See what sort of thing sells and try and emulate them. The easiest way to get rhyming stuff published for children is by getting a poem published in an anthology and going from there, that would entail looking at the anthologies on the market now (I didn't say this in my message to becky, but there is a new one just out, 'A Million Brilliant Poems (part one)' which I just happen to have 2 in!). It's one of the main reasons that picture books tend to be animals. It costs the publishers so much they have to get a co-publisher and that is someone abroad and that means not only the words but the feel of the story and the subject etc have to be translatable. It looks easy but it's an enormous skill and it's actually the hardest genre to write in and get published. You have to write a picture book with picture books in mind as there are so many rules to stick to regarding number of layouts, number of words, cliffhangers at each page turn, comedy for both adult and child, most of the story in the pictures not the text etc. Rhyming picture books are around but not the norm as they have to be translatable, the Gruffalo ones are an exception which spring to mind. Long poems aren't published much either, it's mainly 20 lines or shorter. It's very hard to get rhyming fiction published, even experienced poets find it difficult to maintain for an entire book and difficult to publish. I've written a long post to becky but it's not a case of seeing who does it as no-one does.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |