How can I get my 13 yo daughter's childrens book published?

July 22, 2013 8:40 AM

My daughter is 13 yo & is a pretty good artist. She is extremely creative & she has compiled a great deal of pictures that she has drawn. What i find incredibly unique about these pictures, is that they are all of Puns... like "Running out of time" with somebody running out of a giant clock.... etc., etc., etc... Again, they are VERY unique. Every time i look at them, she's added a few, and they are all very clever. I thought it would be terrific if she could compile them together... with either captions under each, or even putting some words to them to create a short story...etc. Thereby, resulting in a book... based on these puns, the target audience would be around her age (say maybe 10 yo or so) & up. How would i go about or rather who would i contact, to present it to a publishing company? I welcome all thoughts & suggestions!
posted by foodybat to Media & Arts (18 answers total)

I think self-publishing would be more interesting and less frustrating.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:49 AM on July 22, 2013 [7 favorites]

Unfortunately, this is not how traditional publishing works. If you want to go that route, your daughter would have to create a finished manuscript. Then, you would query for an agent that specializes in chapter books and juvenile fiction. Once she has an agent, that agent would then approach publishers on her behalf.

Some small press publishers still take unsolicited manuscripts, but their numbers are dwindling. Most of them specialize in a particular category or genre.

There are lots of resources on self-publishing if that's the route you'd like to take. Don't pay a company like AuthorHouse or PublishAmerica to put together your self published book. They're simply in the market to sell YOU copies of your own book.
posted by headspace at 8:51 AM on July 22, 2013 [5 favorites]

Your daughter's pictures can be awesome just because they're awesome, even if nobody wants to pay money for them. Does she have ambitions to publish them, or is that just you? Because if it's just you, then this is probably a bad idea.
posted by jon1270 at 8:59 AM on July 22, 2013 [29 favorites]

Scanning them onto a website (with comments all needing to be approved by you before they're published) might be another way to go.
posted by jaguar at 9:03 AM on July 22, 2013 [8 favorites]

Seconding just creating a website for her. She's a kid, she's not going to be published, in all likelihood.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:09 AM on July 22, 2013 [4 favorites]

What about self publishing them and then having your daughter sell them with x% of the profit going to some charity? She'd probably sell more that way, and she'd also be doing good for her community.
posted by PuppetMcSockerson at 9:10 AM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

Another vote for website-- or e-publishing. I doubt whether Tikatok would work at her level but in your situation I would search around.
posted by BibiRose at 9:18 AM on July 22, 2013

You can 100% make a hard-cover book and give to friends and family. It will have a similar effect and may encourage her to keep going! And -- it's super fast. Make a calendar while you're at it - I would love a calendar of amazing funny kid art from someone in my circle!
posted by barnone at 9:28 AM on July 22, 2013

I came in to say exactly what jon1270 said. What does your daughter want to do?

A few ideas:

If your daughter is into Doing Something with these drawings, it might be both more interesting, more educational, and more feasible to do some kind of ebook self published "kindle singles" style thing. If she's interested in children's books, education, working with kids, etc. She could also look into what's out there in terms of reading apps for younger kids, and whether any of them solicit unpublished material from young people.

If your daughter is not really into Doing Something Ambitious, but wants to share them with the world, she could always put the drawings online as a sporadic web comic, or something like Allie Brosh's blog. I also feel like Tumblr is pretty good for projects like this, if she maybe already has a Tumblr.

If she is really REALLY not into doing anything with these, and it's just a private little thing she does for herself, but YOU want to show her what it would be like to turn them into a book, maybe it could be something you guys could work on together and then turn it into just one single copy of a handmade book? Making books as a craft/art-form is pretty interesting, and if she's artistically inclined she might enjoy the process of physically turning her drawings into a unified art piece in book form. This way, she would always have the drawings together and saved as a beautiful thing for her to have later in life (and/or for you to have, now). Also, if she's thinking art school or ambitious art student type extracurriculars/summer camps/etc, that would make a nice portfolio piece.
posted by Sara C. at 9:29 AM on July 22, 2013 [2 favorites]

Nthing "let her tell you what she wants to do with them". Help her set up a Tumblr or an account on DeviantArt or a blog where she can keep updating the world with them herself, maybe.

One really, really good thing that setting up a blog would do - if she wants to work on art professionally - would be to open her up to public critique. I know that sounds harsh, but lemme tell you, my own writing took a HUGE step forward when I did that very same thing, via a regular column in my college newspaper. The paper was going to put up whatever I wrote, as long as it as a suitable length - they'd edit for obvious grammar mistakes, but that was that. But what helped me is having people come up to me sometimes after a hack job on something I've written, and having them say, "so, I saw your column today....that took you only three minutes to write, didn't it?" You learn how to get really good REALLY quick with that kind of feedback.

Another thing it will expose her to is that...well, to be perfectly frank, the one example you gave of her work is maybe not as unique as you might think. Having a blog of her own, or a Tumblr or a DeviantArt account, will also encourage her to see what other people are doing - which could encourage her to stretch herself a bit to even more unique work.

good luck.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:43 AM on July 22, 2013 [2 favorites]

I agree with those recommending a website or blog. One advantage of this route is that she's not done creating yet! She can just keep posting new pictures as she makes them. It'll also allow her to look back later and follow her development over time. And it's easy to share with friends and relatives. A book would be static--once you publish it, you can't change it and it can't grow any more.

But I also agree that the impetus for this should come from her and be guided by her. Maybe she just likes making these for herself and sharing them with you, and that's as far as she wants it to go. Maybe the joy is really more in the creating than in the showing. That's really great, too.
posted by pompelmo at 9:49 AM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

Even if she is interested in doing something with this work, I would personally discourage her from doing so. Sharing publicly opens you to public comment and ridicule, and as the case of Rebecca Black or the Star Wars kid shows, the internet doesn't care if you're 13 years old. They'll be dicks to you anyway.

A kid that age may not have the skills to handle the kind of criticism that comes from people who don't love you and have no interest in seeing you succeed. Let her develop as an artist in relative privacy and move into the public eye of her own volition when she's ready.
posted by Andrhia at 9:50 AM on July 22, 2013 [3 favorites]

I also suggest self-publishing instead of going through the traditional publishing route.

I think you and your daughter will have trouble finding a publisher for this book. It sounds like she's very clever and a good artist, but publishing is a dying industry, and the two most difficult genres to get published in are children's lit and adolescent lit.
posted by emilynoa at 9:52 AM on July 22, 2013

As a first step, the iPhoto "Book" feature will allow you to lay out the photos on pages with captions and have it printed as a landscape format 11"x8.5" hard cover picture book. I haven't done it myself but the templates look nice.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:04 AM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

Publish for the Amazon Kindle!
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:14 AM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

For some background to the pros and cons of self-publishing your child, here's a NYT article: Young Writers Dazzle Publisher (Mom and Dad) that might provide some context.
posted by amoeba at 12:00 PM on July 22, 2013

In addition to the iPhoto Book option, you could look at Shutterfly or other photo websites and very easily make a single copy of a hardcover book. I've made them from vacation photos and they are very nice. They look just like a picture book that you check out from a children's library. You could use a camera or a scanner to turn her hand-drawn pictures into .jpg files and make a book in a few hours.
posted by CathyG at 3:49 PM on July 22, 2013

Here's another self-publishing option: http://ondemandbooks.com/self_publishing.php
posted by bizwank at 8:11 PM on July 22, 2013