How Not To Become A Children's Author

I'm always getting asked to look at manuscripts by people who have written a story for children and are looking for advice before sending their work off to an agent. Unfortunately, a lot of people accompany their manuscripts with statements that drastically undermine their chances of being taken seriously by an editor. So in case anyone reading this has been thinking of submitting a manuscript professionally for the first time, here are three things it's really not worth saying if you want to become a children's writer.

First there's the Quality Time Delusion. This is when the author confidently states, that she/he has read this story to her/his own children and they absolutely loved it. Now on the face of it, this sounds like a ringing endorsement from the target audience. So how could it be anything but a good idea?

Actually, what you're really saying when you make this assertion is that your child enjoyed the extra attention they got from being part of mummy's or daddy's project. They liked having their opinions taken seriously. They got caught up in their parent's dream about becoming an author and it excited them. The truth is that your child's enthusiasm is no guarantee of anything except that you spent some quality time with them and they liked it.

Next there's the Children Of All Ages Blunder. In this one the author glibly asserts that the story is intended for all children from the age of six to sixty, or some similarly hackneyed phrase.

Frankly, this is a stupid thing to say. A five year old lives in a different world to an eight year old, a ten year old lives in a different world to a thirteen year old. The idea that your story might work for all of them is an admission firstly that you don't know anything about the market for children's books, which is highly segmented, and secondly that you don't know much about children.

Finally there's the hoary old chestnut of the Friend Who's Done Some Illustrations to go with the story. Take it from me, unless your friend is an experienced professional illustrator of children's books, never include his or her drawings with your manuscript.

This is because even though authors see writing as an art, to publishers it's a business and, like every business, it involves an element of risk. An unknown author represents a risk to a publisher. An unknown author combined with an unknown illustrator doubles that risk.

So don't even include that art-work on the grounds that you think it will give the editor an idea of the kind of book you have in mind. The only idea it will give them is that they should put your manuscript on the rejection pile right away.

Idealised Story Syndrome

My next book, The Magical Detectives, comes out in just a few days time. A week ago I received advance copies. It’s always such a pleasure to finally hold the book in your hand. I can still remember the very first time I had that experience though it was over twenty five years ago. But I can’t help wondering how much longer there will be objects called books to hold proudly in your hand.

Right now I am trying to respond to the editor’s comments on the next book in the series, The Magical Detectives and the Forbidden Spell, which is due out in July. The thing is, I sent in this manuscript in December 2009. Consequently, I can’t remember all that much about it. I’m having to find my way back into the book emotionally. It’s like going back to a house you used to live in and trying to remember where everything was.

Then there’s the tricky business of deciding about each and every one of the editor’s suggestions. Mostly these are unimportant to me. For example I have written,

He felt a great temptation to close his eyes and drift away. But he forced himself to keep them open

and my editor would rather I wrote,

He felt a great temptation to close his eyes and drift away. But he forced them to stay open.

That sort of thing doesn’t bother me in the least. What I do find difficult, however, is the tendency that all editors have, to believe that a story is something real that exists independent of the words the writer uses to describe it. I call this Idealised Story Syndrome.

The truth is that there is no story behind the words; the words are the story. Tamper with them just a little and the story changes just a little; tamper with them too much and the whole glittering edifice comes tumbling down around your ears.

I honestly don’t think they realise what a fragile thing a story is. Sometimes they seem to me like burly physical education teachers, whistles strung on cords around their necks, knocking the spineless thing into shape while the author looks on like a parent gazing helplessly through the railings, trying to suppress a cry of dismay.

What Editors And Agents Are Really Thinking

Most aspiring authors assume that editors and agents are constantly on the look out for new and exciting talent. But a fact worth bearing in mind is that editors and agents are ordinary human beings.

Here’s a sample of the sort of thing that might really be going through the mind of an agent or editor while your manuscript is sitting on the desk in front of them.

Oh god, how I wish I was still on holiday in Italy!
I could really murder a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
Why has my car started making that weird noise every time I go over a bump?
I wonder if my partner still finds me attractive.
That mole on my left shoulder blade has started itching again.
What I really need is a new kitchen.
I'm not convinced my daughter is really happy at university.
Why am I always so tired?

You get the picture? They can be, and probably are, thinking of just about everything else except your manuscript. They’re at work, for god’s sake. Ok, so it’s a job they enjoy but it’s still a job, isn’t it?

Even published authors with long experience have little idea of what is really going on in the whole gigantic sausage machine that is publishing. If editors take a long time to get back to us, we start to think they don’t like the manuscript. Then we start to think they don’t like us. Then we start to think they might be right: we don’t like us either.

But really we are like someone trying to make their way round a room full of furniture in the dark with only a very small torch to aid us. All we can see is the bit of the room that the torch lights up; about the rest of the room we can only make assumptions.

The thing is that publishers don’t realise this either. They assume that the author must realise the reason for the delay with the book is that the art director has just announced that he's going freelance and the publishing director is off sick and the poor, harassed commissioning editor is trying to do about three jobs at once. Surely they can see that can't they?

That’s why so many editors think that authors are difficult or temperamental. Of course some authors are difficult and temperamental. But most of them are just blundering around in the dark with their pathetic little torch, stubbing their toes on something that could be a chest of drawers, or an upright piano, or even a stack of coffins.

I Hate To Tell You But Your Editor Is Cheating On You

A former editor once said to me that the relationship between an author and an editor is like that between lovers, except that the author believes he or she is involved in a monogamous relationship whereas the editor is secretly carrying on affairs with all the other authors.

It’s true. For the author there is only one book that matters. His or her own book. And when he or she speaks to the editor that’s essentially all they talk about. So the author exists in a permanent state of delusion imagining the editor going away from their meeting and thinking all the time about that special book.

In reality, of course, editors are thinking about umpteen things: all the other books they are handling in all their different stages, not to mention the myriad other things that might be going on in the company. Is their job safe? Will their workload increase dramatically when a colleague goes on maternity leave? Are they ever going to get a pay rise?

And then, of course, there is life outside work. Authors generally forget that editors have lives of their own, and that these private lives might sometimes leak into the professional sphere. So while you are busy outlining your plans for a sequel or even a whole series, they might secretly be wishing they were back on holiday in Italy, or worrying about the funny noise their car was making that morning, or trying to decide which character from a tv soap you remind them of.

Another way of looking it is in terms of cosmology. The author lives in a pre-Copernican word with his or her book at the centre and the editor (along with everything else) revolving around it. The editor lives in a post-Copernican world in which lots of little books orbit round individual editors in a galaxy of publishing houses that itself exists in a endlessly expanding media universe. Let’s face it, seen from that perspective we authors are nothing more than space dust.

It can be tough to negotiate a relationship which is founded on such misapprehensions. It gets worse when one of the parties introduces an element of comparison. You wouldn’t like it if a girlfriend or boyfriend compared you unfavourably with a former partner, would you? Yet that’s what it can feel like sometimes.

I parted company with my first publishing house when I asked for a higher royalty rate on a foreign rights deal and was told, ‘But Brian even (insert Big Name in Children’s Writing here) doesn’t get that much.’ That was it. I’d heard far too much about that particular Big Name In Children’s Writing already. (No, it wasn’t J K Rowling. This was years and years ago.) This particular comment was the last straw.

Maybe it was a good move, maybe it wasn’t. As with old love affairs, there is always a temptation to look back and think about what might have happened if you hadn’t gone your separate ways. But an author does like to feel wanted. That’s it really. Even if we are only deluding ourselves, we like to imagine that our editors really mean it when they stand up once a year at the Christmas party and propose a toast to the people without whom there would be no books at all, the authors.

Hope

I had lunch with my editor yesterday to discuss the First Draft of my new novel. This is a new editor. When isn’t it? Children’s publishing in the UK seems to be exclusively staffed by young women in their late twenties and early thirties, which means that they are inevitably leaving to have babies at regular intervals. I heard of one writer who had five editors during the course of one book. You hardly ever see any editors over forty. What do they do with them I wonder? Perhaps they all get remaindered

My new editor, Catherine, has possibly the trendiest haircut of any editor I have encountered. (I would hazard a guess that it’s an asymmetric bob but being fifty-five and never a real surfer of the zeitgeist I could be wrong.) Every time I have encountered her so far she looks as if she had it cut that very morning. However, this is all by the by. The point is that she was tremendously enthusiastic about my new book.

‘We believe it could be very commercial,’ she said.
'Well that's nice,' I replied.

One has to be restrained, doesn’t one? It wouldn’t do to start blowing a whistle or letting off fire-crackers because the thing to remember about publishing is this: it is fuelled by hope. Everybody in publishing lives and breathes the stuff. So there’s absolutely no point in getting excited just because someone throws you slightly more than your usual portion of crumbs. Nine times out of ten it means nothing at all.

I’ve had my share of success. I’ve been up for plenty of awards. My books are translated into lots of languages. Even now a book I wrote back in 1993, which has been in print somewhere in the world ever since, is doing very well in South America. But my publishers have never before said, ‘we think this could be very commercial’.

My problem is, I don’t actually try to write books that will sell. I just write the book that’s in my head. There was an album by the rock musician, Kevin Ayers about thirty years ago which I rather liked, entitled Whatever She Brings We Sing and that sums it up for me. Whatever the muse puts into my head is what comes out on paper.

It would be great to be one of those writers who surveys the market, understands the parameters of the industry, calculates the mood of the reading public and writes something that captures the spirit of the age. But that’s not how I work. I’m an author because I’m compelled to write and that’s all there is to it.

Anyway, there are at least twelve months before I find out whether Catherine of the trendy haircut was just being nice, or whether it’s true. And in the meantime I have another book coming out next month, Nathaniel Wolfe and the Bodysnatchers, which has at least managed to make it into the Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge. The Head of Sales, who was passing when I met up with Catherine, told me with a big smile that this was ‘very good news’.

He is one of the few men in the organisation. I like him and I think he likes me. However, our relationship did come under some considerable strain when I persuaded him to go to a dancing class. (Readers of this blog will know that I am a regular Lindy Hopper). He left half way through the class and told me that he had never been so humiliated in his life.

I know just how he felt. Being an author is a bit like going to a dance class for the first time. You think it’s going to be great fun until you realise that everybody else seems to know a great deal more than you do. They pull off all sorts of flashy moves with the greatest of ease while you are having trouble remembering which is your left foot and which is your right. By the time the class is over you have sworn never to return. But if you’ve got the bug, somehow or other you find yourself turning up a week later, full of hope and ready to make a fool of yourself all over again.