On March 21, 2013, thelightwells, or Charlotte, wrote, You mentioned that if you’re writing poetry, you don’t need an agent. What about picture books (just the text)? Also, I don’t think you’ve done a post on picture books yet… any thoughts there?


First off, to Charlotte: If you can’t post on the blog, you can always write to me on the guestbook on my website and I’ll copy the comment over. This goes for anyone else, too.

Starting with the first question first, I think you need an agent for picture books as much as you do for novels for children and young adults – which is not absolutely, not in every case, but these days, most often. When I was writing about poetry, I meant poems for adults. As I wrote in my post about agents, many children’s book publishers don’t accept unagented unsolicited submissions. You can get around this if you meet an editor at a conference and she wants to see your work, but otherwise, probably not. If this is the aspect of Charlotte’s question that interests you most, I suggest you read or reread my post on agents. Just click on the label on the right.

However a comparison with poetry is apt. Many picture books are poems, whether they rhyme or not, because of the demands for conciseness that picture book length imposes on a writer. We snip here, snip there, and find simple ways to present complex ideas, and the result, ta da!, is often poetic.

I’m not the best source for picture book advice, because I have only two published picture books, and the sales of the second one were abysmal. I have a great idea for a third in the series, but the failure of the second has killed it, at least for the time being. In general the market for picture books is down right now, I believe, unless it’s turned around and nobody told me (entirely possible).

But the market shouldn’t stop you. Picture books are still getting accepted and published every day. And they take a long while to be published after acceptance, because they have to be illustrated. First the illustrator has to be chosen (by the publisher, not the writer), and then she has to fit the book into her schedule. By the time all this happens, the market, which is cyclical, may have changed in favor of your book.

If you write and illustrate, it is fine to present both text and art to a publisher (generally through an agent). However – if you’re willing – you should let the agent or publisher know that the two can be separated. If the publisher likes the text and wants to find a different illustrator, you’re okay with that. Likewise – if this is true – make clear that, if the publisher loves your art, you would be happy to illustrate other projects and let your text go.

If you just write, the text is all you should submit. Don’t find an illustrator on your own and submit the two as a package. Editors and art directors collaborate to pair your words with an illustrator. Most writers I know are happy with the results.

As you write, you may have instructions for the illustrator. You can include these, but keep them to the essentials. The illustrator will have ideas of her own. Along the same lines, in picture books almost all setting detail in the text is too much detail. You can indicate the setting in your notes for the illustrator, but leave it out of your text, by and large. The illustrator will show it. Words are precious in picture books.

The illustrator shares the creative role with the writer in a picture book. The publisher considers the creation a fifty-fifty split. Accordingly, you’ll share the royalties equally, too. (This isn’t the case with the cover of a novel or with occasional spot illustrations in a chapter book. In these instances, the artist is paid a fee.)

When I started writing, I was afraid of the novel and I stuck to picture books for several years. No one would publish them. The only one that got published as a picture book was Betsy Who Cried Wolf, and that was after Ella Enchanted, and I had to revise it big time. Another picture book became The Fairy’s Mistake, the first of the short novels that make up The Princess Tales series.

At that time, the popular wisdom was that a picture book should be under 1,000 words. I agree with this. When I see a lot of words on a page in a picture book it feels wordy to me. However, many are published with a much higher word count, so I’m not sure. And my two picture books, which have many word balloons, may be over the line! We’re in territory now that I don’t usually inhabit and don’t often visit. What follows are ideas that you should check out further, and if blog readers have more experience than I do, please speak up.

Picture books cover a big age range from board books for babies to story books for kids as old as eight. And nonfiction picture books can skew even older, into middle school, I believe. There are wordless books that may nonetheless have an author as well as an illustrator. In such books, the author tells the story in instructions to the illustrator.

One of the charms of picture books is their range. A picture book can be about anything. There’s a lot of room in novels, but even more in picture books. For example, Kate McMullan’s very popular I Stink is about a garbage truck.

The best preparation for writing picture books is reading them. Read lots of them in your local library. Visit a bookstore and see what’s new and which books became classics.

Back to my beginnings. My favorite guide for writing for children, including picture books, was Barbara Seuling’s How to Write a Children’s Book and Get It Published. I read it so many times that the glare from my eyeballs lightened the print! It’s been updated, and you too may find it helpful.

These prompts are themes from some of my never published picture books. See what you can do with them. Tell the story in under 1,000 words just to feel what that’s like. Then try telling it in under 500 words. Under 200 if you can. Once you’ve done that, if something longer suggests itself, that’s fine, too.

• Because of a curse, the people in a particular kingdom have forgotten how to sleep.

• A girl believes her earlobes are shrinking.

• A boy wreaks havoc by blowing the world’s biggest bubble.

• A girl’s nose itches, and the meaning is interpreted by everyone she knows.

Have fun, and save what you write!