Another approach to getting published
Doing time in time out.
One of the long shots in this endeavor is that we’ve never been paid for our writing; not that we’ve never been published. However, we’ve seen some pretty encouraging feedback from a little something I posted over at writing.com. The majority of the responses to this post are positive. Many of the comments and emails we’ve received indicate, “…this would make a nice children’s book…” and “…I can see this as a children’s book…”
Hmm…got us to thinking. This is a 500+ word story we’re talking about. Yes, a children’s book would fit nicely with a few tweaks. Okay, so I wrote another one to go with it, again, just over 500 words. We can’t decide which one we like better. We decided not to post the second one so it would be absolutely new. Now, we are doing three or four more–three for sure. Besides, a good children’s book could keep a few kids out of time out.
When the short children’s books are done, we’ll run them past our “editors”. I put “editors” in quotation marks because our editors have to meet certain qualifications:
Friends
Relatives
Friends of relatives
Professionals in my online writing forums
Non-professional hopeful, up-and-coming writers in my online writing forums
Couch potatoes (Hello, Dan Quayle.)
Must have a sense of humor
Must know the alphabet and be able to tell a vowel from a consonant
Then we’ll get the comments and reviews from the “editors”. After a few more tweaks, we’ll submit the manuscripts and see how they fly with agents. There seem to be special markets and processes for submitting children’s books that differ from other genres. In the next post, I’ll tell you where we looked for information and a little of what we found.
The idea here is that we’re going to try to get published while continuing to work on the young-adult novel.
i like the pic. reminds me of me and my brothers. lol
Makes me wonder. So are you thinking that writing a children’s book is easier than writing the young-adult book you’re working on?
Not a bad move if you think you’ve got a ready for prime time book. If you can get that first one published, it’s a good foot in the door, but you’re still talking about two different genres. Also, I don’t think prior publication is a prerequisite to getting published. If it were, no one would ever get published.
8484skid-I don’t think they are saying that writing a children’s book is easier than writing young adult fiction. I think they are saying that getting the children’s book published will be easier since they already have them nearly completed.
Allgood22 is correct. We have already received good feedback on some of our writing. This isn’t something we know will work. We’re still learning as we go.
Thank you, wannawriter – your point is well-taken. Our research has proven your point that we don’t necessarily need to have been published first. Some of the references we list on our “Helps and Links” page state just that.