Questions childrens writers keep asking

Every writers' group in the Carolinas circles back to the same handful of questions, and the honest answer to most of them is: it depends, but here is what the field actually does. This page gathers the ones we hear most, with straight answers drawn from working agents and editors who have written about them publicly.

How long can my manuscript be?

Longer than you fear, and shorter than you hope. Picture books live under tight caps, a few hundred words at most, while a young adult fantasy can carry a heavy count if every scene earns its place. The ranges vary by age band and genre, and one agent at Kidlit, on manuscript length, has published the ballparks she works from, along with her candid reasons for groaning at a long query: her queue is full, and a big manuscript is a big time commitment for her, since she will reread it many times during revision.

Her deeper point is worth sitting with. A bloated count usually signals a draft that has not been revised enough, and cutting, which she calls killing your darlings, is a skill that comes only after many revision passes. If you want the discipline behind that, our guide to revising one problem at a time breaks the work into passes you can actually finish.

Why do agents care about word count at all?

Because words become pages and pages become money. A longer book costs more to print, ship and warehouse, and an editor has to estimate those costs, in a document the agent jokingly calls her Spreadsheet of Terror, before the house can even make an offer. Debut authors are already a marketplace risk in an editor's eyes, so a long manuscript from an untested writer stacks two risks on top of each other. That is the business logic hiding behind what feels like an arbitrary rule.

What does a query letter have to do?

One job, and it is smaller than writers think: get the agent interested enough to open your sample. The same site covers how to structure a query in detail, but the shape is simple. It is a one-page cover letter, roughly 250 to 450 words, and no set formula exists that guarantees a read. Agents have offered representation on manuscripts behind clumsy queries and passed on polished ones. The letter is a means to an end, and the end is the manuscript.

Should you self-publish your picture book?

Only with your eyes open, because you will wear every hat a publishing house wears. A writer who documented her own self-published picture book from idea to launch found that the work covered editing, illustration, design, printing, storage, a business license and months of advertising, with the biggest expense being the illustrator. Her book took eleven months from start to finish against roughly two years for a traditional cycle. The payoff was control: she chose her illustrator and guided the character herself. The cost was that writing fell to the bottom of her to-do list while the business side took over. If that trade sounds wrong for you, start with the basics in our starting-out suite instead.

Pick one question from this page that made you wince, open your current draft, and check it against the answer today. If the word count is the wince, run a cut pass with one rule: every scene must change something, or it goes.