Publishing Children's Poetry

Video Transcript

"Publishing children's poetry is one of the few area where you might actually be able to make a living writing poetry. There is a fellow named Jack Prelutsky who was recently named the Children's Poet Laureate, because he writes wonderful poetry for kids, kids love it, parents love it, and it gets published and re-published all over the place. This is the big advantage of writing anything for kids. It gets published once, it may be published over and over again in different anthologies and journals. If you write a children's book in rhyme, after all a children's picture book has perhaps one hundred lines of text that could be one poem. It can stay in print forever. Your main source of information for anything about children's writing is SCBWI, the society of children's book writers and illustrators. S-C-B-W-I, and their website is scbwi.org. And they are out there to promote children's writing and help children's writers. A number of the dominant people in the field are members, and you can literally call on them for help. Otherwise, think about why you want to write for kids. What is it that you want to tell them? With children's poetry what you are teaching them is much more important than it is in a lot of other poetry. So think about that, and this again is going to effect where you want to get it published. If you want to teach children about how you believe they should related to God, for example. Then you need to stick with the children's religious magazines. If you want to teach them about science, obviously we're talking about a different set of markets. But the SCBWI has a database of markets which I don't know if you have to be a a member to belong, but the membership is not that expensive. And then you get access to all their databases, and all their considerable help. Including regional workshops, which you might want to look into."