Creative Gifts You Can Give Yourself in 2025: Education on the Craft and Business of Children's Books

The third in our series on the creative gifts you can give yourself in the coming year, today's post is about the continuing education that illustrating, translating, and writing children's books takes.

There's always more to learn from those further along in the journey, from those just starting out, and from your peers. And it turns out, sharing your knowledge with others is a great way to gain insights into your own work and process, too. Consider:

What works, and why?

Where can you apply it to your creative work in progress?

How can you best deal with the stumbling blocks that will pop up?

Whose advice will resonate with you, your process, and your creative work?

From courses to conferences, critique groups to one-on-one chats, we collect the wisdom of our community as we go. Much of the best education I've received in KidLit has been at SCBWI Conferences, and I'm excited to attend the upcoming Winter 2025 In-Person Conference in New York City.

Three of the most useful bits of wisdom I've collected over the years:

Bruce Coville suggesting that if you don't know how to get a character out of a sticky situation, brainstorm a list of 20 ways to resolve it. By the time you get to number 17 and 18, you're forced to really think out of the box! Every time I've tried this, I come on a solution I like long before I reach 20.

Linda Sue Park advising that if you're unsure which of two ways to tell your story (i.e., first or third person), rather than struggle with the problem in your head, go write the same chapter both ways. In doing so one way will probably resonate with you more. This totally works, and has saved me a lot of time!

Linda Sue Park (left) and me (Lee Wind) at the 2015 SCBWI Summer Conference.

Lesléa Newman explaining that rather than "submitting" our work to an editor, we can instead call it "offering" our work for their consideration. "Submitting" implies we're giving up a lot of our power as creators. "Offering" is more an exchange between equals, offering to collaborate with that editor and publishing house on putting that work out into the world. If they decline the offer, it is not a "rejection," and certainly not a rejection of you as the creator. It's just that the work wasn't something they chose to team up with you to publish. This has been a game-changer in how I emotionally approach things when my agent sends my manuscripts out "on offer"!

Keep on learning – and illustrating, translating, and writing!
Lee

P.S. If you haven't seen it yet, I invite you to check out the first two creative gift posts, Community and Time to Play.

Listen to the Newest SCBWI Podcast: A Conversation With Bruce Coville

Bruce Coville is the celebrated author of over 100 books for children and young readers. In this exclusive interview with Theo Baker, Bruce speaks of audiobooks, covers and titles, first lines, shares how he's “always attempting to write a book I would have wanted to read at age ten, or twelve,” offers some sage advice, and considers how literature can offer young people role models in a way that reality no longer does.

It's a wide-ranging, wonderful interview with one of our industry's most fabulous (and funniest) authors!

Listen to the episode trailer here.

Current SCBWI members can listen to the full episode here (log in first).

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Rethinking the Book Tour

There's an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about how authors today need to reconceptualize their whole approach to a book tour.  To rethink standing there and reading three chapters, and doing a Q&A.  That maybe, in the current climate, that's no longer enough.

The article includes some anecdotal reports from bookstores all over the country, and quotes from authors, including:

• Rainy Day Books, an independent bookstore in Kansas City, Kansas will only sponsor author events that feature a conversation or mini-lecture, a PowerPoint or slide show and maybe reading one or two paragraphs at the most from the book to illustrate a point. The owner Vivien Jennings says,

"I tell publicists 'it's no longer a reading,'"

• In lieu of readings, Roxanne Coady, the owner of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., will sometimes conduct an interview with an author. "Audiences feel they're getting something unusual and intimate, and sales of the book go up," she said.

 • Brad Meltzer, the best-selling author of thrillers like "The Book of Fate" and "The Book of Lies," stopped doing readings two books ago. "Jim Dale," he said, referring to the voice of the "Harry Potter" audio books, "and all the audio-book stars made most of us authors look like a bunch of misfits. We can't compete."

I asked Bruce Coville, the award-winning and best-selling author of over 100 books for children, and a master storyteller, if it's enough to just read from your book and do a Q&A.  Here's his response:

"Being a writer in these times requires a certain degree of professional schizophrenia. In order to write, you need to be able to work in isolation. Yet as soon as you're at all successful at it, people want you to come out and talk about it. So a writer needs to be able to deal with extended periods of solitude, and also with being asked to stand in front of crowds and speak. But in the end, it's all about communication, and that is, at heart, what we need to be: communicators. I think writers can reap great benefits from learning storytelling, from taking acting lessons, from getting voice training - all things that give you tools that will help you be effective in presenting your work to a live audience."        

What's your take?  When have a book event, how do you approach it?

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee