Your Best Path to Publication in Kidlit…

Begins With You

Let’s start this post with a little quiz, and there are no right or wrong answers.

1. What age group do you write for? Picture book; early reader/chapter book; middle grade; young adult; combination.

2. How many books in your chosen age group(s) have you written, revised, had vetted by critique partners or editors, revised again and feel are close to ready for publication?

While there are no right or wrong answers to these questions, your path to publication depends on those answers. Let me tell you why.

Publishing Options Today

If you had asked me even ten years ago how to get a book published, I would have answered, “Write your best book; query agents.” Ten years ago, the idea of self or hybrid publishing¹ was still looked at as a second-best option. Gosh, twenty years ago self-publishing was vanity publishing – an expensive way to fill your garage with unwanted, unread, unsalable books.

Today, self and hybrid publishing are a welcome addition to traditional (what IBPA calls “Corporate Trade Publishers”) publishing, used by a number of authors with best-selling status and an even larger number finding their audience that way. The reasons for this include the current difficulty of landing an agent and selling to a traditional publisher, combined with the growing acceptance and ease of self-publishing.

Now, then, there are three (well, more than 3, but I’ll simplify) acceptable paths to getting your book in the hands of readers.

This map made by IBPA and shared with permission.

But what’s the best path for you?

What Agents Want

If the answer to your second question is that you have only one book in one age niche that has been revised and vetted and you feel is truly ready for the world, it’s not impossible to land an agent, but may be more difficult. Most agents want to represent you, not just one book. They want to see that you can sustain a career. Hopefully your first book is so fantastic that they can count on your continued momentum.

If you only have one book ready, here’s my advice: write more. Have a handful of solid ideas ready and flesh them out. You can go ahead a query your one and only, but the more books you have written and revised and made perfect and can pitch, the more likely your chances of landing a dream agent.

Not to mention, practice makes perfect.

Publishing Industry Truths

Since Covid, the publishing industry has been in, well, a state of confusion. It’s hard to say why, but we all feel it. My guess is that some combination of a sudden influx of manuscripts written by authors sidelined during the pandemic down-time, combined with social and economic forces, has created a backlog for agents who are open to queries and that’s resulted in a large number of agents who are closed except for special circumstances².

Publishing houses, marketing folks, and authors are struggling against a tidal wave of social posts/videos/advertisements etc. to try and get the word out about any one book, to try and rise above the constant social media noise. Which makes traditional publishing for many authors a frustrating experience: low advances, poor sales, out of print books.

That said, traditional publishing remains the high bar for most authors, and if that’s your dream go for it. Especially if you write picture books or early readers which need illustrations (and if you are not the illustrator) that is a preferred path because those books are bought at bookstores or through major distributors and not easily discovered otherwise.

If you write for older audiences, you should look carefully at self or hybrid publishing as a possible right path for you, especially if you have only one book, and don’t intend to write more.

Your Path is Your Choice

Here’s the good news: there has never been an easier time to find a path to publication. It might not be that the path is your early dream of signing with a big agent and selling to a traditional publisher. But many authors are now finding success with self or hybrid publishing.

There’s a lot more to be said about marketing, distribution, income, and I don’t have the space to go into depth on all the pros and cons in one post, but I will address it - especially the income angle, which is…surprising.

My message in this post: you, author or author/illustrator, have more options than you might think, and it is in your best interest to understand them.

1. Hybrid publishing: where you pay a company to do the self-publishing work for you, including distribution; expensive but maybe worth it, especially distribution.

2. Special circumstances include conferences, so get thee to an SCBWI conference at which the agents are accepting submissions from attendees.