Almost everyone who has had even the vaguest idea at some
point of becoming a writer has a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’
Yearbook lurking somewhere on the bookshelves. It might be the most
recent edition, it might be years old, but it sits there, be it a statement
of intent or a well-thumbed reference work. It’s difficult to imagine how
the writing and publishing worlds got along without it. But while it’s true
that the Yearbook manages to be most things to all people, the nature of
publishing shifts year by year, and there are some parts of the jungle that
need their own rough guides. Given the soaring interest, post-Pullman,
post-Rowling, in writing for children, A & C Black have done the most
sensible thing in the world and brought out the first edition of the
Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.
At a glance, it looks like a slimline version of its
stablemate, with reassuringly familiar typography on the cover. Inside,
however, there’s a whole new world of lists and guides and advice to
explore. Some elements of the world are reasonably familiar to anyone who
has written or published work for adults, with maybe a slight twist. But
children’s publishing can take on so many different aspects – there are more
opportunities, for example, for publishing heavily illustrated books, or
educational texts, and the variety of potential formats can be quite
bewildering: board books, pop-up books, early readers. It really is a jungle
out there.
Which is not to say that the Children’s Writers’ and
Artists’ Yearbook is going to take the prospective author gently by the
hand and steer him or her round the pitfall, mind that large, scary animal
lurking behind the tree, turn left at the ants’ nest over there, throw a
six, and lo, there is your book, all neatly published. It’s not what the
Yearbook is about. In common with its older sibling, the Yearbook
deals primarily in information. It’s then up to you the reader to use that
information as constructively as possible. And there’s an awful lot of it to
work with. I for one didn’t realise there were so many publishers handling
children’s books, but the Yearbook has a list of them, with comments
on what they’re looking for, and what they’re not looking for.
(Always pay attention to that bit.)
But as I noted earlier, the children’s publishing world
is a very varied world, with many different specialities lurking under the
innocuous heading ‘children’s’, and the Yearbook does a great job in helping
you explore them. There’s an extensive section on illustrating books for
children, another on writing for film, television and radio, and for the
theatre. And poetry. For that matter, there are listings of courses focusing
on how to write for children, right next to the highly encouraging section
on prizes.
And because, although this is not a how-to book, the
editors are nevertheless good and decent people who want to help writers get
along, there are words of wisdom and encouragement from a number of
people involved in children’s publishing, including, perhaps inevitably, J.K.
Rowling. The majority of the articles are summaries of what different
parts of the industry tend to be looking for in terms of, say, ‘humour for
children’ or ‘teenage fiction’, alongside the almost mandatory ‘how I got my
book into print’ stories. If I have one slight cavil with this Yearbook,
it is that the encouraging words from authors can be faintly irritating
because, of course, they’ve succeeded in getting published. They may have
sent the manuscript out numerous times, but the fact remains that in a
bookshop, not so far away, their book is on the shelf, and yours is not. And
curiously, this is not always as encouraging as it might seem.
Nonetheless, this book is going to be a fantastically
valuable resource for anyone who wants to venture into this highly
specialised area of publishing, and I congratulate A & C Black for
having had the wit to recognise the need for a specialist publication to sit
alongside the ubiquitous Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook on the shelf.
Reviewed by Maureen
Kincaid Speller
