What an Editor Brings to a Children’s Book
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On the surface, children’s books might seem easier to write because of how short they are. On average, picture books are only 18 to 36 pages, or anywhere from 100 to 1000 words; early reader chapter books can be as many as 30,000 words (depending on the target reader’s age). Perhaps because there are less words overall, many authors think they can skip the editing process, but that would be a dire mistake.
With smaller word counts, errors stand out all the more. Further, children’s books are often more scrutinized for grammatical accuracy, spelling, and clarity than adult books by the very people who can make or break the success of a children’s book: teachers and librarians.
Today we’d like to highlight the crucial ways an editor can weigh in on — and improve — children’s book manuscripts. For an accessible one-stop-shop of editing, our Content Edit is the most common and robust editorial support available.
Verse
Books for younger readers often employ verse instead of standard prose, such as rhyming couplets or rhythmic patterns well-suited to being read aloud. Verse — a form of poetry — has a long history of rules and techniques that appear deceptively simple. However, poetry is deemed the highest form of literature, and it frequently needs massaging to work well.
Editors provide an outside view of the scansion, enjambment, stresses, rhyme scheme (if any), rhythm, and structure as well as ensuring these tools don’t end up making your texts inaccessible to young readers. Too many authors rely on convoluted sentence structures to force a rhyme, or they break their rhythmic pattern trying to squeeze in an extra syllable.
Even if you’re not writing in verse, picture books are still most successful when they have a consistent amount of text per page (or per image). An editor can help you determine where text might break across pages, thereby ensuring your story prints well on the page divisibility requirements of printers (created by papers that are printed, folded, and bound together to make the book’s pages).
Children’s books are used by parents, libraries, and schools as a teaching tool for those learning to read, so it’s imperative that they are as grammatically correct and technically clean as possible. These mechanical edits are part of our Content Edit, enabling your editor to suggest all their revisions in a single pass.
Pacing
Western storytelling traditions typically involve an inciting incident (what kicks off the action), rising action (trials or challenges to be overcome), a climax (conflict or turning point), and resolution (solving the problem, character growth, or reconciliation). While adult books get 50,000–100,000 words to establish their plots, children’s books are limited to a much smaller word count. That means the story needs to be pruned of any distracting segues, honed to a spotlighted focus, and executed with perfect timing. Easier said than done!
All this is achieved by pacing. An editor can help identify the meat of your story, recommending improvements for the plot’s set-up and resolution. Another way to think about it is from a marketing angle: what is your book about? Rather than just another book about a puppy or a grandchild — what makes your story unique? An editor will ask focused questions to get you thinking more deeply about the text, finding places to enrich the story you have to tell, and helping you stick the landing.
Pacing in children’s books also impacts the illustrations and layout, so making sure all your beats are on the page and spaced accordingly will make your process of working with the illustrator and/or designer go much smoother. Through developing your story, you’ll likely gain a clearer idea of which dramatic moments (or “beats”) will make the strongest illustrations and whether any words should be highlighted with callout text, special fonts, or dramatic pauses between turning pages.
Messaging
Most authors who want to write for children do so because they have a message that they think kids need to hear. But what that message is and how it is presented will change vastly depending on the age of those readers. There are standard brackets for children’s books based on the stages of childhood development, reading comprehension, and typical social experiences at a given age. Unless you’re also trained in childhood education, you might miss these marks, which results in added challenges when marketing your book.
Key ways an editor can support you in ensuring your messaging is appropriate are: word choice, language complexity, and theme. Editors assess the reading level of the text and can recommend alternate words or sentence structures that are more appropriate for the target reader — and, if you’re not sure which bracket is most appropriate for your story idea, the editor can also help you find that focal point and recommend language changes accordingly. Maybe you need to expand the story for an older reader based on the themes presented; maybe you need to simplify the language and subject matter because you want the book to be for early readers.
There are also some subjects that can be appropriate for multiple age brackets but how they are broached changes as children’s comprehension and emotional development advances. There may be other considerations that affect accessibility, like learning disabilities, chronic illness, or social backgrounds that mean word choice, length, or complexity need to be adjusted differently than the standard for that group. Understanding your goals, the editor can read for those intentions and ensure they come across in the finished text with maximum impact.
With a Content Edit, the editor is able to review developmental details (like messaging), structural choices (like pacing), and grammatical needs (like verse) all in one round. They’ll take a holistic view of your manuscript, assessing the needs of its intended readers, and will provide Track Changes suggestions on a line by line basis. If they have additional suggestions for recasting a sentence, developing a story beat, or adjusting the pairing of text and images, they’ll also leave you Comments in the margin to ponder and implement as you see fit.
So, whether you’re writing “baby’s first picture book” or a “the next great middle-grade chapter book series,” you can greatly improve your book’s chances of resonating with its intended audience by working with a professional editor to polish and perfect your story for generations to come.
