<span class="vcard">Written Well</span>
Written Well

Should I Write Children’s Books?

The number one reason (and possibly the only reason with the state of the current business model) is that you love them. The pictures, the poetry, the capacity to appeal to both the child and the child inside all of us. If that is your focus, you will do well. Even in traditional publishing, advances are normally very small for picture books. Trad publishers face the same expense issues you do, mostly high printing costs, and paying both an author and an illustrator. So, throw profit considerations out the window (it can happen, but it's tough), and do it for the love of the books and the children who read them.

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Children’s Books Study Materials

Back to children’s Remember to read the articles in the Essentials section. These cover all the essential skills you’ll need as a self-published author. They are not just for beginners either. They go in depth on how to successfully write, publish, and market your own books. Online Resources 8 other programs to format your children’s ebooks. 8 Tips for formatting your ebook — good description of margins and gutters in this article. Consider joining SCBWI, or going to one of their conferences. They are one of the most supportive professional organizations I have ever been part of. Books to Read...

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Children’s Guide

Children’s books are delightful, endearing, important, and very hard to make any money at. Due to the natural format of picture books (as wide or wider than they are high, filled with color illustrations), they don’t look good in ebooks making the market for them thin, and the paperback/hardcover books are expensive to print and hard to format. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can self-publish picture books and there are even a few independent authors making money doing so. Let’s dive into what makes a picture book. Pictures, Obviously Without pictures, it’s just a book,...

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Young Adult Study Materials

If you want to write in a genre, you have to read that genre. Experts in the industry are consistent with their advice that you must be an avid reader of a genre to write well in it. The books below are a few staples of the genre, but with a genre this big, you'll need to go to your particular subgenre in the Amazon Top 100 to really get a feel for things.

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Should I Write Young Adult?

Do you feel younger than your age? More importantly, do you feel you can, as Susan Cooper puts it, "look again at a mystery through the eyes we used to have?" Because that is the essence of writing for the young: the ability to look at things through their eyes — which are, indeed, our eyes just, as Cooper again says, "not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time."

If you can put aside time's weighty coat and douse yourself in the heady perfume of having an entire life yet spread out before you, then you are ready to write YA.

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Young Adult Guide

Young adult (YA), new adult, middle-grade, and early reader are all what we call addon genres, in that they mostly only exist when added on to another genre: YA thriller, middle-grade fantasy, etc. They are also defined entirely by the age group of their readers, though there are style, plot, and theme considerations for each group. The age ranges are: Books obviously get longer as the readership gets older. The guidelines for book length in trad publishing are: This is also adjusted by genre, most notably fantasy books that are allowed to go a bit longer. In self-publishing, we are...

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Should I Write Post-Apocalyptic?

Post-apocalyptic books are often long and brutal. There can definitely be an emotional toil to writing them. I mean, they start with the destruction of the world as we know it. That's heavy stuff. Even if the tone of the book is light, a certain amount of nihilism is required to destroy the world before you even get to your characters.

Just beware of this when the dreams come.

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Genetic Engineering Study Materials

Back to genetic engineering Remember to read the articles in the Essentials section. These cover all the essential skills you’ll need as a self-published author. They are not just for beginners either. They go in depth on how to successfully write, publish, and market your own books. Books to Read If you want to write in a genre, you have to read that genre. Experts in the industry are consistent with their advice that you must be an avid reader of a genre to write well in it. The books below should give you a feel for the genre, both current...

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