Who’s looked at your book?

Lets be honest about this one difficult conversation.

Pick and choose your battles.

So you’ve gotten to the written story, it’s got the solid beginning-middle-end sorted out. Have you had a professional proofreader look it over? Did you know there are lots of editors with different services to help your writing? You can find an editor just to check for typos, ones who will review and revise story design and structure, those who specialize in children’s picture books, novellas, young adult novels or full sized novels. Make sure you’ve gotten through this step. Your hard work and creativity deserve to be recognized for the writing, not the silly typo that everyone caught after they bought a copy.

Have you shared this story with friends and family? Parents or teacher friends who can shed insight into what they’d read to their children? Make sure you get after your target audience. I’ll touch on this later but the kids and parents are both a part of your audience, especially with picture books. Are you reaching the right people? Find out! Ask! People love being a part of someone’s wiring process, feeling that you value their insight, so get out there and see what people think of it. It may inspire you to add a new character, tweak the way a scene plays out, or deleting a part of the story that someone brought to your attention (now you see how it doesn’t fit right and can’t unsee it, which is okay! Better now than when you’re looking at a printed copy you can’t fix!)

It’s incredibly helpful to take an unillustrated book to a classroom and read it to the kids for their feedback. They’ll want to participate and they can come up with some beautiful artwork themselves that are inspired by your words. This can even become marketing material for you, showing the world what an impact you make with this story. It’s never too early to start talking about what your writing and what you want to do with it. The more people learn about the process you take and the hard work invested in the book, the more attached people get to your work and will want to grab presale copies!

I know it’s a lot of work to do all of this, but trust me, it’s soooo worth it. You’re worth it! And once you’re book is printed and published, you’ll have the rest of your life to share it with the world. So make it count, make it special, and make yourself proud!

Basically, if you take nothing else from this post, understand that writing requires feedback. Once you’re done writing your beautiful story, if you do nothing else for your manuscript, get a professional proofreader at the bare minimum. It may seem like 3-4 sentences per page should be easy to manage but I promise you, typos and grammar mistakes can make or break your book. And especially with less words on the page - it’s going to an audience that is learning to read, and parents will care that it’s not written correctly, but more often than not the kids are the ones who catch these mistakes because they’re learning about writing and reading so they’re fine tuned to the rules of grammar. Invest in your story, it is worth it!