Thinking About Writing a Children’s Book?

Writing for children and young adults is quite different than writing for adults. Very young children often have limited vocabularies while those in grade school may still have difficulties with both vocabulary and complex sentence structure. And one of the most important things a children’s writer must do is to be sure he or she does not "write down" to the young readers.

How do you decide what age group to write for? What genres work best for children’s books? What’s the right ratio of illustrations to text?

The people who produce the "...for Dummies" line of books have you covered. They produced a short "cheat sheet" to help new writers produce a successful children’s or YA book. You won’t spend a lot of time reading about writing. Instead, you can use it to improve your book during editing, or as a guide to planning your work. You can find it here.