Books for toddlers - role of artist v writer?

Cafe Society
1

I’m reading a lot of books to my 18 month old son at the moment, and I see that quite a few are written by someone, illustrated by someone else. I’m wondering what the writer brings to the table for these books?

For example, That’s not my dinosaur. Written by Fiona Watt, Illustrated by Rachel Wells

Pages 1: Massive purple dinosaur with squashy green spots.
Text: That’s not my dinosaur. Its body is too squashy. (No apostrophe for its, a nice touch).

Repeat formula for 5 pages.

I’m struggling to see what the writer has done here, couldn’t the artist just have come up with the text herself? There seems to be such a large inequality between contributions to the book between writer and artist. I am curious if anyone knows how the creative process is broken down for books at this level.

Say I have an idea for a toddlers book - it’s about a big frog called Colin that hops through the zoo saying hello to all his animal friends. With the right illustrator this could be the most popular book for 2 year olds in the English-speaking world. It could be a franchise: Colin goes shopping, Colin goes to the farm etc. If I tried to draw it myself, not so much. What is the scope for getting involved in writing at this level, if you’re not an artist?

2

Writer here.

With my children’s books, it breaks out like this:

I create the story line, write out the text, and break it up into pages. During that process, I have to remain aware of spreads (facing pages) where there’s an opportunity for a big double-page picture. I create a big grid, one row per page. The first box is the page number, second is a description of the illustrations I want and general layout of the page, third is the text for the page, and fourth is the sidebar, if any (they’re nature/science books, so I put a lot of trivia in sidebars).

Once I have the whole thing laid out, it goes to the illustrator, who draws all of the pictures and fits the text into them - basically doing full mockup pages as b&w sketches. I, the proofreader, and the editor go through everything and make comments (use a different butterfly species, change the kid’s hair to match the previous page…). Then the illustrator produces final colored pages, which go through another pass with the editor and me.

There is a lot of creative input from both writer and illustrator, and we have to work together as a team. I’ve worked with two different illustrators with different skillsets, but the process was similar.

Incidentally, the writing may seem to be the simple part, but a huge amount of work goes into it. You want the text to be age-appropriate, the pages to be balanced, the dialog to be believable, and the characters to grab the kids’ attention when they read it.

If you have other questions, I’m happy to answer them, and there are other authors on the SDMB as well that might be able to help. If you’re curious about my books, see the appropriate section of my website.

3

Unless the author published her own book, why are you blaming the author for this? The author didn’t set the book into type. That’s what publishers do.

4

And they did their job well. There is no apostrophe in “its” when it’s used in the possessive.

5

But the fact is that the artist DIDN’T come up with the text herself, the writer did. As Gary Robson said, it’s a collaborative process.

If you found an illustrator who was interested in your idea, the two of you could collaborate on a book. You would legitimately be the writer.

6

I could recite this in my sleep: body too squashy, tail too fuzzy, teeth too bumpy, flippers too slippery, horns too rough, spines so soft.

Anyway, this book strikes me as a special case, since the “story” is wholly dependent on what materials they were able to embed in the pages, i.e. the sandpaper and sequins. I would hope that the author at least was the one with the ideas about what fabrics to use.

7

[moderating]
I got so caught up in answering the question, I failed to notice that this thread wasn’t in the right forum. I’ve moved it from General Questions to Cafe Society.
[/moderating]

8

I have nothing to add to this thread, except to say that reading your clear and informative description of the process, and then clicking on your link, made me fall out of my chair.

9

In a good way, I hope :wink:

I like your custom title, by the way. The SDMB is just oozing creativity this week!

10

Thanks for your detailed reply Gary, plus interesting link - you have a pretty cool niche there by the looks of it. I can see how an artist will work with a writers idea under direction. I guess it’s the artists who’re creative outwith the illustrating that really clean up. As many do, Eric Hill, Dr Seuss etc.

11

You’re quite welcome. If you’re serious about writing children’s books, by the way, I strongly suggest joining the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (http://www.scbwi.org). Their membership packet alone is a treasure trove of information, including sample contracts.

There are a ton of different compensation models, too: I went with advance + royalty for me, and flat fee for the illustrator. He gets a lot more than me upfront, but if the book has legs, I do better in the long run. A lot of others do a straight royalty split between the writer and illustrator.

12

I read a book about writing for children a couple of years ago, and there was only one part of the book that surprised me: a comment that many writers of picture books feel that it’s unfair that artists often get the same royalty percentages as writers do. First my mind is blown that the writer would feel miffed by that, and second it never occurred to me that the writer would make as much as the artist; the art just seems so much more time intensive that I assumed that artists were paid more by quite a bit. There are picture books for older kids with fully-developed, and interesting stories, but for the youngest kids’ books like the OP is talking about the text really does seem to be almost incidental.

13

I wonder about some of those, too. When the book has three words per page, and it’s just “doggy loves you” - “kitty loves you” - “mommy loves you”, why does the illustrator need a writer?

I know how much my illustrators are worth, but I think they also know how many hundreds of hours went into researching each of my Who Pooped in the Park? books to make sure I had the right critters for each ecosystem, and exemplar pictures of critters, tracks, and scats for the artist to work from. And that’s before I even start with the writing and page planning.

14

On the books like that, at the toddler level, the author gets credit for those words because often they came up with the concept for the book. The illustrator took the authors ideas and words and illustrated those, but the main ideas about what would be on each page is the authors. So even though they didn’t draw the pictures they are still responsible for the composition of the book.

Although, with the particular book you are discussing, that was most likely done by a staff writer/illustrator team. Which I’m sure is a bit of a different process. (I’m guessing staff because that publisher has a series of at least 20 of those books with the same theme/pattern to them.)

15

One thing I always wonder woth toddler book illustrations is how do they determine what’s a sufficient quality of illustrating to get puplished? It seems like there’s such a huge range. I’m thinking in particularly of things like http://www.miffy.com/ which has become a huge industry on pretty basic illustrations.