it seems more common than not to have both. I understand that if someone comes up with a great story but can’t draw, he or she has to find an illustrator or accept the publisher’s. I have recently read Creepy Carrots, This, Countdown to Kindergarten, and this one without a separate author. Dinotrux is how I imagine it should work: You can draw some good illustrations, so you think up a story to go with them. But “Countdown to Kindergarten”? Does someone just go in with “Ten days before the start of kindergarten, a preschooler can not tie her shoes by herself and fears the worst.” and get a contract as an author?
The question may be sharpest in the case of Babybug magazine, where there are one-page, very simple rhymes that have both illustrator and author.
Well, yeah. I can only assume the OP thinks that, at the level of a children’s picture book, one or both of these skills is so simple that virtually anyone could do it.
Which is very untrue. I know several children’s authors, and they work hard to get saleable copy. Both use the same illustrator, which is how I got to know them.
The wife and I are planning to write children’s lit after I retire. She’s the moderating influence, because I churn out stuff that would do Bull Shannon proud.
I think s/he doesn’t understand the skill or difficulty in writing a children’s book; and it’s not surprising - they don’t have a lot of words, or particularly complex themes.
OP: Why do comic books so often have a writer and an artist, and a colorist and maybe an inker and perhaps someone else doing the balloons? Children’s books don’t have a writer and illustrator because they are children’s books, but because they mix two forms of expression, the writing and the drawings.
Any media which mixes multiple forms of expression is likely to have different people handling them; sometimes a single person can perform several of those tasks and handle them well, sometimes it is better to split them. This applies to children’s books, comic books, manuals (writing them is a basic part of my job, and ours are very screenshot-intensive and need to follow very nitpicky formats; it’s not terribly unusual for someone to write the text with [screen] and someone else to fill in the pics, add titles etc), movies…
Next time you watch a film, look at the long list of credits at the end. OK, maybe giving the caterer is a stretch, but writer, screenplay, lighting, sound… all are specialist jobs. It’s not just the unions.
I imagine the children’s book business is intensely competitive… So you have authors who are very good at crafting stories that appeal to children (and parents for younger children). You also have people who have an innate talent for making pictures that appeal strongly to children. (Colour, composition, whimsicalness, whatever…) I’m sure bringing both talents together is an idea that occurred to several book publishers.
If you want to see the opposite, dig up the earlier “Adventures of Tintin” books. “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets”, or “Tintin in the Congo” (Herge was Belgian). “Tintin in America” was recently yanked of Canadian bookshelves for a while due to protests by local Indians - horrors, it depicted the cliché of savage Indians threatening to burn him at the stake…) Herge got his start in the 1920’s doing a serial comic strip when he could neither draw nor write coherent stories. He learned as he went along, and the business of the day in a small country allowed him to do so. His later books are masterpieces of writing and art - Tintin on the Moon, The Picaros…
Babar the Elephant is one of the first picture books both written and illustrated by the author that comes to mind. In fact, the original writing was art too, IIRC the story was handwritten in script rather than typeset.
When I was a child, a lot of the books I got (especially from grandparents in England) were classic fairy tales and old stories, repackaged and heavily illustrated. The Grimms and Hans Christian never left illustrations. (Heck, Lewis Carroll couldn’t draw either, he or the publisher engaged John Tenniel)
Modern North American publishing is too competitive - I doubt there’s room for someone to learn art or storytelling as they go along, let alone both.
When Carroll wrote the early version of Alice in Wonderland, Alice’s Adventures Underground, he drew his own pictures to go with it. They’re not nearly as professional or well done as Tenniel’s, but they’re not without their charm.
This is weird. Earlier today I was going through a bunch of old VHS tapes that were in my parent’s attic from when I was younger and that episode was on one of them.
Back to the OP: Any book with illustrations or artwork will have an expert who did that part. In the case of kids’ books, the artwork is a really large part of the book. In a novel for adults there might be cover art and that’s about it.
So the real difference is whether or not the illustrator’s contribution is large enough to warrant a big obvious credit vs. an acknowledgement buried in the foreword or preface, or no mention at all.
I am an author of seven children’s books (one self-published as an e-book) and have also had published more than one hundred short stories, poems, and plays for kids in magazines (including Babybug) for everyone from babies to YA.
I haven’t illustrated any of them. I am not an artist. Many people ask me how I find my illustrators. I don’t, except for the self-published book. Almost all publishers want to use their own illustrators. They don’t want you submitting work that’s already illustrated by someone else. If they like the story but not the art, or vice verse, they’ll reject the whole thing rather than cause trouble.
If a writer can also illustrate his or her work, then they can offer to buy just the story or ask him/her if he/she’d like to illustrate someone else’s work.
Oh, and as far as getting a contract for a work, the author needs a complete manuscript in almost all cases, not just a premise.
After looking through my collection of Babybugs in which my work appears, almost all of the illustrated only works are Mother Goose or other public domain works. Otherwise it would say, “Words and Art by Jane Doe.”