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You Can’t Write Publishable Picture Books If You Don’t Know These 5 Things
5 red flags that tell me you don’t actually know what a picture book is
In the editing and manuscript development part of my work, I see a lot of people with drafts of picture books they want critiqued. Sometimes they think their story is already topnotch and they ask for copy editing and proofreading. But before I even open their Word file, I can tell from their request they don’t actually know the key elements of a picture book, and it means they will never get published until they do.
Picture books have very few words
Even fewer now than they used to! A few years ago, guidelines for texts were around the 800 words as a maximum. Now that’s 500 words. People send me stories that are 1500 or 2000 words. These aren’t picture books. They’re children’s stories, and there is a huge difference. Pick up any picture book nowadays and you’ll see maybe one or two sentences per double page spread. Probably not even that much. My first picture book was 130 words. Why have word counts reduced so much? Read on.
