Once upon a time, when I first started out writing for children, it was picture books I wanted to create. I wrote numerous manuscripts, polished them, and sent them out to publishers. But for many of us authors, 32-page picture books can be an even harder sale than novels.
Picture books may look easy to write, but not only does every single word have to be perfect, nowadays these word-counts are getting shorter and shorter.
Quite a few publishers limit their picture book submissions to less than 500 words. 500 words!
And with so many wonderful picture books already on the market (often they don’t become dated as quickly as children’s novels) the competition is steep.
I’m not a wordy writer (my novels are usually under 40,000 words), and my picture book manuscripts used to come out to around 1200 words.
In the same way I feel there should be a Tween age…