Comments for Personalized Childrens Books

Comment on Writing Children’s Books: Take Chances To Get Published by Mia

Mia — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:24:59 +0000

No one’s obligated to give you a chance– so you need to impress them with a book so good they’ll HAVE to.

The hard truth is that you might not be good enough yet. I second the advice to get some more experienced opinions on your work, but it doesn’t have to be a freelance editor if you don’t have the money. You could try to find a serious writers group and exchange with people as well. Critiquing other people will also help you recognize flaws in your own work.

The reason people keep telling you not to go POD (I assume you mean either self pub or vanity press) is that it won’t fulfill your dream of being a published writer– you will have very few sales, you won’t be in bookstores or libraries, and you will end up buying copies of your own book and trying to handsell them. Going down this route takes a LOT of time and energy to put toward marketing, and you still may end up in the red.

Self-publishing is not a shortcut to success. There’s a reason you’re being turned down everywhere, and it’s not that agents and publishers just aren’t taking on new clients. They are, all the time. Those writers who got accepted struggled just like you because it’s a tough market–check out some children’s writing forums and read people’s path to publication. Many of them submitted hundreds of queries, some went through multiple agents before they sold, some didn’t sell their first agented book or the second.

It takes a lot of persistence to make it in the publishing world. You have to be willing to look at your work with a critical eye and make hard decisions, which may include cutting things you love–things that may be written well, or even beautifully, but don’t serve the story. You have to be willing to scrap it all and start over. It sucks sometimes, yes. But you’ll come out of it with a better book.

Good luck.
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Comment on Writing Children’s Books: Take Chances To Get Published by michele

michele — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:22:59 +0000

The key word here is PERSEVERANCE.

Send out query after query.

Edit and revise. Then, do it again.

If you’ve not yet considered hiring a professional to evaluate your work (e.g., an editor who does freelance work), now is the time to do that.

Heed Winston’s Churchill’s words on this one: "Never, ever, ever, ever, ever give in"

Hang in there,
~Dr. B.~

p.s. Consider writing some short articles for children’s MAGAZINES. It’s much easier to break in to the market that way, and can net you some credentials to cite in your next query letter(s).
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Comment on Writing Children’s Books: Take Chances To Get Published by That kid

That kid — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:20:59 +0000

You need to first get a literary agent and they have to send it in to the publishers.
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Comment on Writing Children’s Books: Take Chances To Get Published by Opinionated

Opinionated — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:18:09 +0000

How do I get published?
I knew trying to get published is not easy, but I never thought it would be like trying to climb Mt. Everest. Presently I’ve written 2 children’s books and is in the process of writing a novel. When I try to find a publisher I only find that I can’t seem to find one. Most people advise me not to go POD and stick with the traditional route. But when I do I hit one brick wall after the other. Some people tell me to get a Writer’s Market and work with it from there, but when I manage to target a publisher who might publish my work I go would online to their website and discover that they are only accepting works from authors who’ve been published already, authors who have agents or they aren’t accepting manuscripts from new authors at all. I’ve tried soliciting agents and they all seem the same way. I don’t know what to do. Is there any publisher or agent out there who will take a chance on a new author?