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Remember those wonderful story tales you read in your childhood. How good were they? The answer is that you still remember those stories. Some of those stories are evergreen tales, for example, Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty, and the Beast, Rapunzel, etc. And you never get bored reading them. Before we read these stories, we had also read short children’s stories illustrated with pictures. You can think of children’s books like comics and manga, but they are not the same. A children’s picture book differentiates from a comic book as their illustrations are different, and usually, comic books are not read by children below five. Comic books audiences are children above six years of age. This blog post will teach us how to write a children’s book in 2023.
Page Contents
Before you Write a Children’s Book
Writing a children’s book is a huge responsibility. You should be cautious when writing a story for children and avoid negatively affecting their brains. You need to know the age group of children you are writing the book for.
Below we’ll discuss eleven steps involved in writing a children’s picture book.
11 Steps to Write a Children’s Book in 2023
1. Knowing the Word Count
Length is significant in writing a children’s story. A story that is too long is not best for kids. We recommend writing 200-800 words for children. The children aged 3-7 years would not be interested in stories over 2000 words. However, don’t count words while you write. Pour your words onto the page as they come. Once the story is finished, you can cut down the excessive words and polish the story.
Moreover, if you are a comedy genre children’s book, keep the word count to 500 words. The funny writings are good and safe when they are short. However, we don’t mean to say that instead of writing a book, write a joke only.
2. Have A Unique Character
Decide the main character for your story. He should have habits that make him stand out from other characters in the story, such as funny habits, and severe habits. You can also show him as a negative character at the start of the story, but he needs to realize his mistake and become good at the end of the story. However, don’t make the negative character severely characterless and evil, as that would not be good for children. This is an example of how you can make lesson-based stories for kids. Your character should be memorable. Think like this: You still remember a character from the stories you read in childhood; it had distinguishable and memorable qualities from other characters in the story. Similarly, your story needs a unique personality.
3. Start of the book
You don’t need to start a children’s book by describing the characters, discussing the plot and reading prolong first. Children don’t want to listen to such details. They are not interested in knowing a person’s history when they don’t know about him. You are not writing a novel. A children’s story usually starts with sentences like ‘Once Upon a Time, ‘There was a boy in the village’, ‘A duck was best friends with a cat’, etc. Things like these quickly grab the children’s attention.
4. Illustrations in Children’s books
A children’s book is not text-only; it contains pictures too. And when you write stories, you need to provide illustrations of them along with the text. Everyone is not an expert in making good drawings for children’s storybooks, so if you think you cannot make drawings yourself, you can hire a good cartoonist who can make excellent illustrations for your story. However, choose your illustrator after seeing his complete portfolio. Many people don’t like a particular way of drawing pictures, and then it sometimes becomes a clash between the illustrator and them. To avoid trouble, see the person’s work before you hire him. You can also use pre-built templates to make illustrations.
5. Trouble in the Story
Usually, children’s stories have single or multiple worries that center the story. For example, the problem with the Story Cinderella was that her stepmother and sisters were unjust toward her, and readers wanted to know when she would get out of all this trouble and live a happy life and who would the prince marry. And in the story Beauty and the Beast ‘ What would happen to the girl, and would she marry the beast, and if not, what would happen. And in the Goldilocks story, when the bears left their home, and a girl came into their home, she ate their honey bowls, making the audience think about what would happen to this girl when the bears would find out that ate their food.
Don’t make it all so easy. There should be stumbling blocks in your story. Whether you’re writing for kids or adults, the tension in the story attracts and makes it fun for people to read it.
6. Twist the plot
Bringing up a new story is essential, but it doesn’t hold such importance since children care little if they have read a similar story before. However, this doesn’t mean that you copy stories or plagiarise. For example, if there is a story about the friendship of a cat and dog, you can write a story about the cat and dog but twist its plot. That would be acceptable.
7. Laughable sentences in Story
Experts suggest that there should be repetition in your story. Many people love it, and they laugh at it. For example, read this sentence taken from the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, ‘I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.’ So, you can make such a funny composition of sentences with the repetition method in your story.
You need to avoid stretching the story in a children’s book. Keep it short and simple. Children would never like unnecessary details and side scenes that are not directly related to the story. So, keep it short and end the book without stretching it long.
8. Role of Book Cover in children’s books
The importance of a book cover is a lot more when you’re creating a children’s book. An adult might not consider covering a critical thing with the intensity of a child. Remember your childhood when you were attracted to magazine covers, brochures, and flyers just because of their colours and attractive colourful images on them? A child is interested in it a lot. A child won’t care about the book title or what’s inside it until he is attracted to its cover.
9. Writing for Children’s Parents
You need to write a story for children, but your story should attract the parents too. What does that mean? A child won’t go to the bookstore, buy a book and then come home to read it. His parents would do these things. They’d buy him the book. And parents don’t want their children to watch something or read that affects them. They’d first check if the book is good enough to narrate it to their children. So, as discussed above, your book shouldn’t contain material and text that is not suitable for children.
10. Book Title
Although we emphasised the importance of the book cover in this blog post, the book title also holds importance. Titles alone can make parents and even children themselves pick the book from the bookshelf at the bookstore. Titles like Beauty and the Beast ignite curiosity in the person, like what would that beast do to the girl, and he wants to know the complete story. The title of the children’s book must be simple, easy to read, fun, and should be understood by children. Don’t write titles like ‘Legends of something’ or ‘ten feet apart’. Kids don’t get these titles. Instead, use simple words like Grumpy Little Boy. You can also base your story title on a character name, such as famous characters like Minions or Doraemon.
11. Happy Ending
Usually, children’s stories end with a happy note. Children like happy endings, and so does everyone. So, avoid disastrous endings in kids’ stories unless you speak about a lesson. For example, the story of a herd who used to yell in the mountains that a lion eats him and needs help, but when people come to save him, he laughs at them and says that he made everyone a fool. He kept doing it until a day when a lion showed up, but upon his yelling, no one came to rescue him, as they knew he was a liar. This story can teach children that lying is a bad habit and shouldn’t lie. Children don’t want to read after the story has ended.
Moreover, after the problem is resolved, and people are happy, the book should be closed. So, end your story when everything fixes finally. Don’t drag it further to tell details.
Things to Avoid
1. Too many words
As discussed above, too many words are bad for a children’s book. Also, the publisher would reject your book if it is very long. And whether you are thinking about traditionally publishing your book or self-publishing it, you should not make it wordy. Even if you escape the barrier of traditional publishing and self-publish your wordy book, the audience would not like it. Eventually, it would not be beneficial for you to write a children’s book.
2. Using Simple Words only
Don’t be hesitant to use a wide range of vocabulary in a kid’s book because you think they won’t understand it. Many kids would not read and understand the book themselves. Their parents will read it to them. If they do not understand a word, they’ll find its meaning and tell it to the kid. And when the children would read alone, they’d ask about the meaning of the word to their parents. This would also help make them want to learn things. But this would only happen if the story is interesting. If the story is dull, children won’t bother to read it, leaving alone their want to know the meaning of the hard words in the story.
3. Serious Writing Tone
Above, we have talked about not using the basic words only and using a wide vocabulary range when writing a children’s book. However, you need to use a wide range of vocabulary, but your tone shouldn’t be dry, straightforward, and serious. You are not writing an article for some newspaper; you are writing a children’s book. Write in a way that doesn’t feel too serious. Keep in mind that you are writing for kids, and keep the age group of children in your mind for whom you’re writing the book.
4. Don’t Write on Irrelevant Topics
Children don’t take an interest in every genre. For example, they are not interested in politics. So your story must not involve topics that are not relevant to kids.
5. Don’t Directly Teach Them
You should not put lines like ‘Don’t do this, ‘Never do this in the morale of your story. You don’t need to lecture kids in your book. Instead, teach them indirectly in the story, especially if you are writing books for 3-7 years old kids. Just let them read or listen to the story and enjoy it. Subconsciously, they will learn the story’s lesson, and if not, their parents will tell them. Your story should be written well enough with such creativity that you don’t need to put ‘Do not do this in the outline section of your book.
6. Wrong Grammar
Don’t think that if you are writing to kids, grammar won’t matter. They are at the early stages of their life, and you don’t want them to read wrong grammar and get it fed into their brains. Also, no parent would want his kid to read such a book with terrible mistakes. Moreover, a publisher won’t accept your book if it has grammatical errors and other writing mistakes in it.
7. Paying Publishers
No publisher asks you to pay them so they will publish your book. If they ask you, don’t work with them. That’s not the legit way of publishing a book. Pay editors, book cover makers, proofreaders, but not publishers. Don’t pay anyone a penny to publish your book.
Can you make money with children’s books?
Yes! If your story is good enough to attract the children and their parents, it will get sold a lot. And if that happens, it can make you rich. Children’s books can make you a lot of money since they don’t get old. The story examples we discussed above are still known and read by people. Hence, if your children’s book is well written and its marketing is done well, it can bring you riches.
Publishing your Book
There are two ways you can publish your children’s book. a) Traditional publishing, b) Self-Publishing
a) Traditional publishing
If you want to publish your children’s book through a traditional publisher, you need to know that they can reject you multiple times, and it is normal. So, you need first to hire an expert editor who can help you polish your book and make it publishable. And you won’t get such an editor quickly. You might need to wait for months, and prominent editors charge more fees too. And you need to submit your manuscript to a literary agent. Most publishers don’t accept direct submissions. But some of them accept direct submissions for children’s books. But if you manage all these things and publish your book by a big publisher, you don’t worry about the printing cost, marketing, and distributing books to bookstores since your publisher will take care of all these processes.
b) Self-Publishing
You can easily publish your book on platforms like Amazon Kindle. There would be no hassle of writing letters to the editors, then the publisher, and waiting for months or even a year or more. You can self-publish a book in less than two days on KDP. However, we suggest that you still hire an expert editor who edits your book before publishing.
Before sending your book to Publisher
After you write your book completely, read it from the children’s perspective. Read it as a kid and analyse if you would like it if you had read it in your childhood. And be honest in it if the answer is yes. Then send it to the editor. Otherwise, you need to make some changes to it. Re-writing is important. If you feel overwhelmed doing it, you can keep the book aside and take a week off. Go out and enjoy a week’s holiday. After that, try to edit your text.
You can also send it to one of your close friends who has kids or any of your relative’s kids and ask them if they and their kids liked the story and ask how you can improve your story. This way, you can get free-of-cost suggestions that would help you improve your book. If you think you need help writing your book, you can contact our Mczell Book Writing service team. We will assist you in writing your perfect children’s book at very affordable rates. Not only do we help you write and complete your book, we provide you with our all-in-one package service which includes, Book cover making, Book promotion across the globe, book editing, and a book publishing guide, all of it at affordable rates.
In the End
We have learned what children’s books are and writing and publishing them. We have also discussed the mistakes you need to avoid making when writing a book for children. Let’s summarise what you have learned above.
Do’s
- Writing a Children’s Book is a big responsibility.
- Use the suitable word count according to the age group of children you’re writing the book for.
- Don’t exceed the 2000 words limit when writing stories for kids.
- Have a unique and memorable character in your story.
- Don’t begin a children’s book by first describing characters like in novels. Immediately start the story.
- Don’t create illustrations yourself unless you can draw them perfectly.
- See the portfolio of the expert illustrator before hiring him and appoint him if you like his work.
- There should be tension in your story that keeps the fun element alive.
- Compose a few funny sentences in your story by repetition technique.
- Don’t include things in children’s books that are unsuitable for them.
- Create a book title and cover that is suitable and attractive to children.
Don’ts
- Use not only simple words. You can use a wide variety of terms, including difficult ones.
- Don’t write in a serious tone like newspaper articles.
- Do not bring topics like politics into your stories.
- Don’t teach children with sentences like ‘Never do it.’ Indirectly tell them the morale.
- Don’t publish a book with grammatical mistakes in it.
Do not work with publishers who ask you to pay them.
