How Long Does it Take for a Picture Book to be Published? By Pippa Goodhart

 

This is one of those questions that picture book makers often get asked, and its one where the annoying answer tends to be, ‘It depends.’

 

Back in 1981 when I worked in Heffers Children’s Bookshop in Cambridge I was lucky enough to go on a tour of the Ladybird Book factory in Loughborough. It was an exciting place! Full of noisy machines printing, folding, chopping pages, sticking on covers, then books shooting out onto conveyor belts at speed. But Ladybird didn’t just manufacture the physical books in that building. Upstairs were offices where creators wrote and drew and designed. And they proudly showed their Ladybird book of the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Their wedding was on the 29^th of July. The Ladybird book was created, manufactured, and distributed into shops to be published on August 3^rd. Not a picture book in the sense of a big format twelve-spread kind of picture book, but a book with more pictures than text, created and printed and published in just five days. 

 

Of my own picture books, the one that took the longest from the point of interesting a publisher to arriving in shops was Chapatti Moon. Looking back I see that the editor who published it first showed interest in May 2012, and publication finally happened in September 2017! So that one took more than five years, and that’s not counting the writing of it! But it’s a book I love, with wonderful illustrations by Lizzie Finlay, and it has remained in print and is still selling well, so proved worth the wait. 

 

 

But now I’m going to tell about a new picture book of mine which has taken a much more typical couple of years from publisher interest to being a book for sale in shops, but with very untypical timing of both ends of that process.

I actually made a note of the exact timings of the start of this publication journey because I knew I’d look back and not quite believe it. At 9.30 am on the 2^nd of October 2018 I sent All Sorts to my agent. She read it and sent it to Flying Eye. At 9.45am (really!) she got a response from Sam Arthur saying, ‘I like the new text’. An offer was made by Flying Eye within days, and contracts signed the following month. Emily Rand set to work on illustrations, and publication was set for May 2020. And then we all know what happened. Covid19, lockdown, bookshops shut, and many many book publications delayed. But as things eased in September, All Sorts was published, and I’m delighted with it –

The delayed publication actually meant that the little 'elephant' the book was dedicated to had time to be born before the book was. Here he is at two weeks old, being read his book! -

 

 

So how long does it take for a picture book to get published? It all depends … 

 

Downloadable worksheets worksheets for All Sorts

Giving It A Twist, by Pippa Goodhart

In my new picture book, Chapatti Moon, illustrated by Lizzie Finlay, I did something that writers get told not to do.  I added a design note to say, 'Could the next spread involve twisting the book to see the illustration in portrait rather than landscape/'  Why did I want that?  Because the story involved the runaway chapatti being kicked up into the sky by a donkey, and I wanted the audience's eyes to look up in the same way as Mrs Kapoor does.  So we go from -

...to ...

I'm not the first to have used that trick in a picture book by any means, and that thought set me looking for other examples.

This Is Not A Book by Jean Jullien uses the fold half way down the book on portrait to brilliant advantage, turning the book into a chair -

Or a computer -

Other books use that format with different purpose.  Emily Gravett's The Rabbit Problem makes the whole book a calendar which could be hung just like a real one -

And, another of my favourite picture books, Tadpole's Promise, written by Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Tony Ross, uses that horizontal gutter as the divide between water and air.

The problem with that idea is that the story action happens very much at the meeting place between those two elements, and so the main point of interest is sometimes a bit lost in the fold.  

Do you know of other examples that use this book orientation to a particular purpose?  Or can you think of one that might work well in a book?