I hope I get asked this question a lot because I’m not from your atypical publishing background, and not because people think someone like me is incapable of it.
I’ve written about this before, but probably for a different audience as it was many years ago on my blog. Just saying the word blog makes me feel like the teacher in the room wearing cords before they were fashionable again…
It’s a question every single author/illustrator will answer differently. For me, it was all about the research beforehand. When I’ve talked about this in the past, I’ve focused on the details around creating the story, then crafting a dummy, then contacting agents that I carefully sought out, and the practical elements of the actual ‘doing’ parts.
What I haven’t talked about a lot is the groundwork, observation and research that went before all of that. How I fine tuned my sense of where I wanted to be, what I wanted to create, how to develop my own sense of taste, and creating work to a professional standard for a modern audience.
That’s a lot to cover in a Substack, but I’ll try and cover the basics of this over the coming months. My Patreon covers these things in more detail and is focused on development and thought processes, the publishing process (trad route) and the marketing stuff that goes on (or doesn’t) after publishing. That will be helpful if you want to go a bit deeper, but for casual readers, I will cover the basics here.
A little project for you before I start throwing these basics out there in January: read as many contemporary children’s books as you can. By contemporary, I mean CURRENT contemporary - like past 12 months. Join a library and just chill in there for a bit if you can. See if you can pinpoint why these books are different to the ones you read as a kid. No need for comparison in terms of which ones are best, just pin point the differences and make some notes on the art and the writing.
My advice applies to trad publishing as that’s the route I took, but I’m sure there’s some crossover on the self-publishing route too (not vanity publishing though - if you are paying a publisher to publish your book, they will publish it no matter what because they are exploiting you - no ifs, no buts - you deserve better).
Have a great Christmas/Winter Holiday, whatever that looks like for you, and I’ll see you all in 2023 x
Thank you for your posts! The creative part of the whole process, what comes before all the nuts and bolts of getting published isn't something I've seen discussed that much, strangely enough! Without denying the value of understanding the practical steps that follow, it's got to be the biggest part of the iceberg...