Writing with Jennifer

Much of my paid work has been ghostwriting. It's something I enjoy, especially when it comes to children's books. But it does present some challenges you don't encounter when writing a book of your own.  Ghostwriting articles or short pieces tends to be easy because in most cases you are dealing with clients who don't really care about writing. They want the articles to make sense, of course, and usually to have the right SEO content to collect all the clicks. But they aren't going to argue with you about creative choices.  Book authors are different. These are people who have nurtured an idea for a long time and have a strong connection to the process and the result. Children's book authors in need of ghostwriters are often artists who have done their own illustrations and know the story they want to tell but don't have the writing skills to make it happen in a way that can put the book on the shelf next to professionally written titles.  Occasionally, peop...

When I was working for a small publishing company, one of my jobs was to build relationships with bookstore owners. That way I could get information about what they liked to see, and I could try to sell them the books we were publishing. I learned a lot that way about what bookstores want to buy.  One of the things that often came up was size. I had no idea before talking to bookstore owners that size was such an issue. It used to be that you could only publish books in certain sizes because that's what the presses could print. A typical trade paperback is either 5.5 by 8.5 or 6 by 9. Mass market paperbacks tend to be 6.75 by 4.25.  Non-fiction books are printed in different sizes with certain genres or subjects conforming to a standard. Non-fiction books are often published in hardback, and those are usually  Today you can self-publish books in any size, but using the wrong size will make your book stand out as self-published. Bookstores don't like that, and you will hav...

The world of fiction has always been a little bit less than rigid when it comes to distinguishing categories of books for non-adults.  Once there was only fiction for children and fiction for adults. And even this was a bit bewildering. Little Women , for example, was considered a work for children, but the length and some of the themes are more fit for adults. I would argue that one of my favorite children's books, Alice in Wonderland , is strictly for adults. What child could appreciate Lewis Carrol's trippy imagery or sharp humor?  In more modern times we have had children's books, which included picture books and slightly longer books with chapters ( Ramona the Pest ) and young adult books ( Jacob Have I Loved ) with YA being a genre targeted toward teens. Then YA absolutely exploded,, and plenty of adults started reading these too. I know many fully adult readers, including myself, who find young adult fiction as mesmerizing as work created for adults. The YA label use...