How to Publish a Book Your Child Made in 3 Stages
We’ll take you through the ways on how to publish a kid’s book. Daisy Ashford was just a nine-year-old girl when she wrote her first story, The Young Visiters, in 1890. It was published nearly as is, full of childlike quirks in grammar and spelling. It turned out to be a literary success that was reprinted eighteen times. Peter Pan author, JM Barrie, penned the preface.
Your child may have written a book as well, but can you publish it? Learn how to publish a book your child made like the little Daisy Ashford.
So what if your precocious little one doesn’t just want to grow up to be an author, but actually be an author right now?
You and your child may have been slumped with the problem on how to get a book published if you are a kid. With the possibilities of kid author publishing though, there is no standard age you have to be to publish a book.
Stage 1: Practice makes perfect.
Before you publish your child’s book, start small.
Throwback Thursday or not, scrapbooking is a fun, time-honored hobby to pull your child away from that smartphone for once! Bond over the textures and pleasures of cutouts and layouts, then admire your handiwork. Making an illustrated book with your kid will make for priceless memories.
This will function as training ground prior to the real deal, teaching your child to tap into their feelings and translate them into words and images.
Stage 2: Prototypes and Parameters
Is this the part where you can finally produce the book? Not quite, not yet.
Template, mock-up, framework—it goes by many names. But its purpose remains the same: to give you a clue what the finished product is supposed to look like.
In this case, it’s a book stand-in for your kid’s writings. There are more rules to abide by here and less of the freestyle which characterizes scrapbooking.
Scan the illustrations to have digital files, because how else are you going to print a book written by a child?
You’re going to need higher-quality paper and a harder cardboard cover.
From leaving allowances in inches for the margins to binding the spine by either staples or stitches—these are the first of many nitty-gritty details you need to help your child with if you want to learn how to publish a kid’s book.
Stage 3: Self-publishing
This is the closest you’ll get to feeling like you’re being picked up by a publishing press. Instead of waiting for a literary agent to approach you though, create your own luck by getting your child’s work published yourself!
Self-publishing companies are like Santa’s little helpers, perfect for hardworking parents like you who need a helping hand or two.
Self-publishing companies handle everything from production to distribution and you can customize their level of involvement in your book-making process.
If you also want to know how to publish a book your child made, you can go for the specialists in the field.
There are also a lot of publishing companies for kid authors in the market. They’ll help you know how much money you can make from a children’s book.
The best part is anyone from friends and family to curious readers can order online and get their hands on a copy of your book. Who knows? You may have a bestseller in the making!
Let them write what they know.
On a parting note, “Write what you know.”
Grown-up authors who are just starting out hear this all the time. A book published for kids and written by kids isn’t so different.
It doesn’t mean your child has to be limited by their own life. Strike a balance between letting them incorporate what’s immediately around and about them while looking beyond themselves.
In these formative years, your child is still trying to make sense of the world and their place in it.
Parents, know talent when you see it and nurture it. If the kind of questions you’re waking up to are somewhere along the lines of “How do I make my child’s story into a book?” “My child wrote a book,” and “How do I get it published?” consider yourself lucky. Get your child’s work published now.
If other kids can make a book, yours can too.
