You’ve written a picture book, have submitted it to agents and publishers, but you keep getting rejection slips or no answers at all. What are you doing wrong? The simplest answer to a complicated question is: are you sure you wrote a picture book? Picture books have very strict guidelines that you must respect if you want to be published. Let’s find out what a picture book is!

What is a children’s picture book?

A picture book is a sophisticated visual art form that celebrates the magic of childhood and the wonder of being alive in a world where everything is new. Concepts in picture books are simple, singular, and filled with joy. The best picture books are timeless because they captivate countless generations of children, and also offer an opportunity to the adults reading the book to their children to relive their own childhood. As a matter of fact, the capacity of a picture book to plug into the joy and wonder of childhood through the perfect combination of words and pictures – each element supporting and deepening the story in their own way – is what will make publishers publish it and readers buy it.

Picture books are different from other types of books for the following reasons:

It costs approximately $50 000/€45 000 for a picture book to be produced and published traditionally. This amount includes the cost of the writer, illustrator, editor, marketing, production, etc – and no publisher will publish a picture book unless it is worth the expenditure. Self-published picture books also cost more than other types of books to produce because of the cost of the illustrator.

They’re written for an audience who cannot read.

 They use both pictures and words to tell a story. The words create only half the story and the illustrations create the other half.

Although picture books are short, simple, fun, and written for children, you must take important elements of writing like character development, strong openings, and satisfying endings as seriously as writers of other genres. And what’s more, you must also think about elements like timely page turns and the poetry of prose that writers of other fiction do not have to think about.  

The format:

The different types of picture books:

0-2: board books. They are very basic books that deal with concepts like colors or body parts. Publishers often adapt existing picture books to board book format or commission writers to write one.

3-6: normally from 350 to 500 words for pre-school children. The manuscripts focus on situations and events that exist in children’s everyday lives. The humor is visual and is portrayed in the illustrations. They can be fiction or narrative nonfiction or plain nonfiction.

4-8: normally from pre-school to second-grade children (but they can be for younger children who are avid readers or for older children who enjoy reading picture books). The manuscript runs up to 1000 words at the very most BUT the sweet spot is around 500 words. These picture books lean towards fantasy, adventure, historical fiction… The humor and plot in these books are more sophisticated than in picture books for the 3-6 age group. They can be fiction or narrative nonfiction or plain nonfiction

Picture books are normally 32 pages long, giving you from 24-28/29 pages to tell the story. These pages will be made up of spreads with illustrations that span the whole spread or have a different illustration on each page.

These are the elements needed for you to be able to call your book a picture book. They exist because they are what works best for children – and children are your audience! Please don’t deviate from them as publishers do not bend the rules for writers, no matter how good their book.