I think books are more playful now, too, and there are more that fit outside the normal boundaries for children’s books. Of course, there’s always room at the top: create an irresistible book and it has a better chance. It’s very competitive now, much harder to get a book published by a traditional publisher than 15 years ago, because of the competition. Now there’s a whole genre of hybrid novels/comic novels/graphic novels/highly-illustrated middle-grade novels.Īnimation studios closed and sent their art jobs overseas and as a result our industry is flooded with amazingly skilled illustrators.

Hybrid novels have become commonplace my first Ellie McDoodle book and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid landed onīookstore shelves just a month apart in 2007 and they were similar to each other and unlike any other books on the shelves. Picture books have a sweet spot for word count: 400 or fewer. How have children’s books changed since you have been writing them? She sold the book to Bloomsbury six months later and it became a series. Just two weeks after coming home I had 1000 emails from people I didn’t know, and 100 written and illustrated pages of a new sketch-journal-style children’s novel, and interest from a literary agent. I came home, put all 180 pages online, and it went viral.

I did, and I kept a sketch-journal of everything I saw. (Six is not many, but to me it was.) He suggested I come to the big SCBWI conference in NYC in 2005. In 2004 I met modern-day master Tomie dePaola at Borders bookstore in Rochester, Michigan, showed him my art, and told him of my six disheartening rejections. I started writing, illustrating, and researching children’s books in 2003. How long have you been doing children’s books? As a little teaser, here is the Q&A that we did with Ruth. Ruth will share her insights into children’s books at the upcoming A Rally of Writers. She and author-husband Charlie travel widely teaching writing workshops. Ruth McNally Barshaw wrote and illustrated six Ellie McDoodle Diaries, illustrated novel There’s No Base Like Home and picture book Leopold the Lion, and wrote four short stories for Amazon Rapids.

Ellie McDoodle by Ruth McNally Barshaw