New Year's Resolutions

Well it has been one year since I actively started blogging so I thought my first post of 2015 should be a review of 2014 and establish some New Year Resolutions.  In my very first post I stated that my aims were to document my quest of becoming a picture book Author and Illustrator, I still haven’t made it as an Author and Illustrator yet as it requires a lot of hard work, so this blog will continue along those lines again this year.

So what did I achieve last year? 

• I completed Dr Mira Reisberg's Children's Book Academy course on writing children's picture books where I came out with my best manuscript so far and an illustration for its first spread which went on to be selected for the 2014 SCBWI BI Illustration Showcase.  This was a goal I set for myself here. 
• I took part in Julie Hedlund's 12 x 12 challenge to write twelve picture book drafts in one year, one per month.  I didn’t quite manage twelve, more like six which is better than nothing.  It was really worthwhile doing it, the community there is great and they share their knowledge.  I’ve enrolled again this year too, at Gold level, eek!
• I successfully completed PiBoIdMo, Tara Lazar's Picture Book Idea Month which runs in November where the challenge is to come up with 30 picture book ideas in the 30 days of November.  So I have 30 more ideas in the bank than I did before.
• The most daring thing I have done this year was submit a manuscript to two agents.  One via a pitching webinar and the other via #PITMAD on Twitter.  Both came back as rejections, one with feedback too.  I’m not as discouraged about it as I thought I would be and I am looking forward to making more submissions soon.
• I’m still a member of SCBWI, the Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators, and I attend my supportive SCBWI crit group once a month at Seven Stories.  Once of the group was taken on by an agent so I’m looking forward to seeing how that develops.
• I released a free Picture Book Template for Scrivener and an accompanying video on YouTube which have been well-received and they have certainly raised the profile of my online platform.
• I was a member of the CBI, the Children's Book Insider, a paid subscription website and Facebook group all about writing children's books.  I didn’t renew my membership this year, if I am honest their website was a bit of a let down for me as I found that lots of their pages were randomly offline and the Facebook group was mainly full of members’ self promotion.
• New web adventures have included a few of my blog posts being featured in the SCBWI British Isles online magazine Words and Pictures.  And I loved getting my weekly email from Kidlit411, it’s so full of useful information to children’s authors and illustrators as is KidLitTV (I had the honour of naming their programme “Storymakers”).
• Regarding learning and working on my craft I have been using Craftsy, Linda.com, Skillshare and Udemy videos and the brilliant Path to Publishing with The Plot Whisperer, Martha Alderson and Agent, Jill Corcoran.
• Oh I went to the hottest ticket gig of the century when I went to see Kate Bush at her residency at the Hammersmith Apollo.  It was so amazing and inspiring, words don't do it justice, I'm still thinking about it!

Kate Bush - Before The Dawn - 2014

My New Year’s resolutions are to:

• Improve my portfolio via my critical findings
• Write more manuscripts and improve my writing craft
• Increase the frequency of my blogging, post at least 18 posts this year.
• Submit to agents with an aim of representation
• Produce more videos and develop my YouTube channel 
• Read more picture books

I wish you all the best with your own resolutions and I hope to see you back here soon.

Picture Book Anatomy - How a Picture Book is Made Affects How you Write One.

When writing a picture book you need to be aware of their strict formatting which is dictated by how they are made.  Picture books are commonly made up of 32 pages, only it is not as simple as that, you don't have all of those 32 pages to tell your story.

Here is a video that I have made that examines picture book anatomy, its contents are:

00.00 - Introduction

00.19 - Hardcovers

02.50 - Softcovers

03.18 - Signatures, Spreads and Pages

06.07 - Self-ended Hardcover and Softcover Comparison

06.54 - Separate-ended book

07.37 - Conclusions

08.33 - Using this information to write your own picture books

Things I learned making this video are that Hardcovers sometimes have the same amount of pages as softcovers if they are self-ended, but more pages if separate ended.  I learned how to fold and cut a paper signature and how the pages are laid out, out of sequence due to the folds.  And most importantly that a 32 page picture book only has 13 spreads to work with rather than my previously thought 14.

The books featured in this video are:

  

  

The links featured in this video are:

Tara Lazar - Picture Book Dummy, Picture Book Construction: Know Your Layout 

Editorial Annonymous - Basic Book Construction

Elizabeth O Dulemba - Creating Picture Book Dummies

My own Scrivener Picture Book Template

Scrivener writing software 

My Youtube Channel

How to use my Scrivener Picture Book Template - A Free Video Tutorial

I have finally created a video tutorial for my Scrivener Picture Book Template which I released a couple of months ago. I hope that it is useful as it is my first go at demonstrating software on video. If it is please like it in YouTube and subscribe to my channel for more videos coming soon. If anything is unclear I’m happy to answer further questions and any other feedback would be welcome in the comments below, thanks.

 

Update! - Scrivener Picture Book Template for the PC

In my last blog post I shared with you my Scrivener Picture Book Template and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had over 200 downloads!  I had some great feedback from the kidlit community, especially the Mac users among them.  It seems the file doesn't always open in a PC for Windows users.

So I've had a look at it and created a new version for Windows that looks closer to how it looks on a Mac.  I've also incorporated a comment from bungld to change the name of the manuscript folder from "Picture Book Template" to "Picture Book Manuscript" in keeping with Scrivener nomenclature.

I also suspect people may have trouble opening a zip file, if so here is a useful video to help you through the process.  Speaking of videos, I am currently working on my own tutorial video on how to use this template which I hope to post soon.  Here are the links to the Windows templates:

Windows US Scrivener Picture Book Template

Windows UK Scrivener Picture Book Template

Writing a Picture Book in Scrivener - Free Scrivener Template

Isn’t Scrivener just the best writing app in the world?  It is so versatile and reasonably priced.  Many different sorts of writers use it for lots of kinds of work.  Personally, I’ve got the start of a Young Adult (YA) novel on the go, using the standard novel template that comes with Scrivener.  But what I really love to write are children’s picture books. Scrivener doesn’t come with a picture book template and I couldn’t find one online, so I made my own which I’m happy to share with you here on my blog:

US Scrivener Picture Book Template

UK Scrivener Picture Book Template

The two different versions are formatted for US letter paper and UK A4 paper and while they open on a PC they don't look anything like they do on a Mac. I will produce a PC version soon.  Disclaimer, I’m not a published picture book author and I’m not a Scrivener expert, I’m aiming to be published and I just love using Scrivener and what it can do for me.

So once you've downloaded the zip file, extract and move the .scriv file to your writing folder and when you open it up it should look like this:



On the left, in the

Binder

window, we see a list of documents either entitled

Spread …

or

Untitled Document

.  As most picture book writers know, picture books adhere to a very strict form due to the way they are physically constructed.  The pages are printed, in multiples of eight, onto large sheets of paper, which are called a signatures.  So most modern picture books are told across fourteen double page spreads (each single page is a spread) totalling thirty two pages and the story usually begins on page four or five.  So in my template there are 14 Spread documents which serve, when writing your picture book, as headings to help you plan your page breaks.

The first document in the

Binder

is the

Title Page

, I have included this to help with submission to editors and agents. In the

Editor

window, in the middle, add your name, address, telephone number and email on the top left and the manuscript wordcount on the top right.  Your title of your picture book must be centred and wirtten in capitals, your name should be below that and then your story begins.  The template has centred page numbers in the footer and a right-aligned header of the Scrivener document file name (which you should name as your “surname - title” of your story). The whole template is formatted using

SCBWI

's recommended 12pt Times New Roman font, double line spacing and 1 inch margins. 

If you wish to write without the

Spread

headings visible in the manuscript, select only, by

Command-Clicking

the

Untitled Documents

in the

Binder

window as shown below:

 

The

Corkboard

view in Scrivener is really useful for plotting your writing, it is switched on by pressing this icon:



In the

Binder

,

Shift-Click

select the first

Spread

document and the last

Untitled Document

to display the

Corkboard

as I intend it:



Picture Books have a generally acknowledged plot structure consisting of a beginning, middle and end, three problems to solve, etc., so I have used this structure to create plot prompts that are visible on the

Spread index cards

in the

Corkboard

view.  You can then write synopses on the

Untitled Document index cards

and/or add images.  I have more to add on using the

Corkboard

which I will put in a video tutorial.  

Well I hope that this is useful to the Scrivener-using, picture book writers out there. Please check back soon for the PC version and a video tutorial on how to use the template.  Any feedback is welcome, especially if I need to fix something.  If it has been useful to you then please comment below,

follow my blog

,

like my Facebook page

, share on your own social media channels and send me a tip via Paypal:

Thanks for stopping by and thank you to

Marcie Atkins

,

Michelle Cusolito

,

Darshana Khiani

and Sian Mole for testing the template and the plot prompts can be credited to

Rob Sanders

.