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

Don't Be Afraid to DOODLE: Fresh Inspiration for Marketing & Craft • by Natascha Biebow

To gain a fresh look at my craft, I’ve been experimenting with something that might seem counter-intuitive to writers – DOODLING.

Young children are instinctively visually literate long before they can read. It’s only later, when they are a bit older, that children and then adults begin to doubt their ability to draw and convey messaging through pictures. What if, I asked myself, I were to return to the DOODLE in an attempt to take a FRESH LOOK at things?

Rather than getting bogged down with the w-o-r-d-s, WHAT IF I released myself from the strictly written form, picked up a crayon and DOODLED alongside my words?

The Doodle Revolution by Sunni Brown

In an interview for PRINT magazine, author Sunni Brown says that by creating a doodle, "we are learning to not only sift through grains of content to find the meaningful pieces but we are also bringing those pieces to life by letting them live in multiple forms: a word, an image, color, a font, a shape".

So, as a children's book author, how could I practically apply the DOODLE, I wondered? 

DOODLING is a way to free you up to think outside the box – or even to throw away the box completely – so that you can come up with a solution to that plot problem, dream up that the missing ending, or even to come up with a whole new book idea. It can also be a way to get you unstuck and drum up new ideas for the strategy of being a working author.

I decided to have a go.

One of the most challenging aspects about creating picture books is digging deep for a unique story that will hook in and grab young readers, then making it pacey and concise.  Starting with Debbie Ohi’s helpful picture book page plan, I doodled the trajectory of a picture book plot:

Next, one could try this out on an actual picture book mentor text and eventually on your own work in progress. 
I tried it out on Lizzie Finlay's wonderful new book The (Ferocious) Chocolate Wolf:

From The (Ferocious) Chocolate Wolf by Lizzie Finlay

It’s incredibly helpful to be able to SEE your picture book (and its possible flaws) if you can doodle map it out like this.

Then I decided to see if I could doodle some ideas for marketing, post publication, one year on: 

After I got to this point, I realized I needed to keep going and think about how I could re-frame my MESSAGE in a new way. So I decided to try to DOODLE brainstorm about two topics and themes related to my book, THE CRAYON MAN: DRAWING and NATURE.

I realized that there are many jobs that involve DRAWING. Could some of these PEOPLE be book-buyers interested in my book's message? Or could I use this idea to create new content? I decided to brainstorm on a new page:

If I keep going, I hope to be able to relate these ideas back to my marketing plan and create new CONTENT to engage and CONNECT with new people, who might be interested in drawing and nature.

I’ve really enjoyed flexing my creative muscles by DOODLING with coloured crayons. It's taken me to cool new and unexpected places. 

Doodling is a really cool TOOL. How can you start? Allow yourself some TIME and SPACE, a notebook or some sheets of paper, some pens, pencils and crayons. Then, choose a starting point and start. Really LISTEN . . . and HAVE FUN! Your drawings and icons don't have to be artistic. Your DOODLES can be just for you! 

I was inspired to learn about doodling from experts such as Sunni Brown and Dave Gray

_______________________________________________________________________

Natascha Biebow, MBE, Author, Editor and Mentor

 

Natascha is the author of the award-winning The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons, illustrated by Steven Salerno, selected as a best STEM Book, editor of numerous prize-winning children’s books, and Co-Regional Advisor (Co-Chair) of SCBWI British Isles. She is currently writing more non-fiction picture books and a series of young fiction. She runs Blue Elephant Storyshaping, an editing, coaching and mentoring service aimed at empowering writers and illustrators to fine-tune their work pre-submission. She is also Editorial Director for Five Quills. Find her at www.nataschabiebow.com

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?