How To Help Your Kid Publish a Book

It is very inspiring to watch your kid put a lot of effort into something as creative as writing a book. This activity is quite rewarding financially and mentally. Encouraging your kid to write and publish their very own work gives them a unique opportunity to learn, grow and explore the boundaries of their own potential. Before you go along to get your kid to publish a book, get to know the importance of doing so first and the steps that you will take to publish the book.

Importance of writing

The first reason why your kid should write is to exercise his/her creative mind and practice using their imagination. It helps them develop the skill of coming up with alternatives and broadens their thought process which can lead to so many successes.

Not only are their minds exercised but they develop the ability of self-expression. Your kids may have difficulty just like many other children with understanding and expressing how they feel. But through writing, they have a safe place to explore and express their feeling. It helps to boost their self-confidence as well because it gives them more opportunity to look inward and get the voice to speak out through their writing.

Furthermore, a well-written piece has a lot more to it than imagination because it involves a lot of thinking, planning, organization and use of grammar especially for kids that are age 12 and above. I believe you have realized that our creativity diminishes as we grow older, as reality sets in. We no longer believe in fairy tales and another fairy like tales involving magic or so. Therefore, encourage your kid or children to continue to believe at their young age in order to help them use their imagination to the fullest and praise them when they do.

With all of these benefits that your kid gets from writing, there is no doubt that this activity is great for your kid and that is why their work needs to be published and you will have to help them do it.

Here are a few reasons why you should publish your kid’s book when they come to you for help:

1. It motivates them

Your kid will get motivated and excited about writing when they know it is for an authentic purpose. Knowing that their work will be published gives them a reason to prove read and edit their work making them efficient in what they do. Kids need this same motivation because when they know their work is to be published they take care and do it better.

2. They feel appreciated

When you publish your kid’s work, you send a powerful message, that they are worthy of publication. You are putting value to their effort and imagination and indirectly validating their creativity. It is a lot for a kid to feel appreciated so don’t miss the chance to do so.

Steps to take when publishing a book

There are several avenues where you can get your kids book published and the various methods you may select from.

1. Magazine

You may decide to publish your kids work through a magazine but you must first research to know which one is most suitable for your kids writing style and topics. They accept topics from a walk of life and many of them accept to publish children’s writings. Depending on the magazine, they can accept poetry, mysteries, comics and historical fiction. Any type of writing can be accepted by some of these magazines and depending on how young your kid is, they usually accept short writings a lot.

All you have to do is send them a copy of your child’s work and if it suits the type of publication they are into, they will publish it. Some of the preferable magazines are cricket, stone soup etc.

2. Writing Contest

A writing contest can be a great way to get your kids work published too. Encourage your child to participate in any writing contest for kids and make sure to help them follow the rules.

First, find a suitable writing contest online or offline in actuality and choose the right one that best suits your kid’s genre. You can do this by signing up through their website online of physically at their office.

Secondly, follow the rules governing the write up in order to increase the chances of your kids chance of winning.

Finally, send in your kids work for review or you can let your kid do it themselves if they are capable enough.

3. Self Publish

Most preferably, the best method would be to self-publish if your kid is going for an independent style. It would require some investment and time but it is the best way to show your kids talent.

It is easy and not as hard as you may think, just follow the steps below:

• Writing and Illustrating

Depending on the age of your kid, their writing and illustrating technique will differ. For younger children, you can have them draw their book as a series of pictures. For the older children, they can write out the story and then illustrate some scene. Depending on how long the story is, limit your word count to 50 words per page for those without illustration and with pages that are illustrated use 20 words on those pages. Let your kid make the drawing on a paper similar but slightly larger than the book you plan on using.

• Scanning the illustration

This would require you to get a scanner especially if you did not have one before. Digitizing the drawings could take about a minute per drawing with most scanners. You can get a scanner online from Amazon or any other online store. Try to go for well-known brands such as Canon, Epson, H.P. etc.

• Choose the right book printing service

You can create your kids book using many websites that have an easy handle. Some of them have templates that are storybook-oriented templates among other book lay-out tools.

• Laying out your book

If you had stick to the word count and during the illustration phase, then you will find your book layout easy and quick. You can choose your page layouts and fonts and then copy materials into pages. If you have choose a book that has a jacket, you may want to include a picture and bio of your kid.

• Publication

You may publish your kid’s book online or in hard copy through a printing agency. There are many publishing websites that are fully dedicated to publishing children’s book, so do a little research and contact them. Some of these sites can be quite helpful to you and your kid because they give great advice, tips and tricks on writing a book.

Promoting your kid’s book

So now that your kid’s book finished, it may seem worth the celebration. However, in today’s book world, you will need to look for ways to market your kid’s book. This can be done in many ways through online platforms i.e. social media. You can join groups online that are committed to promoting children’s books but you need to be participating in the conversations before posting your book on the forum.  You can let members know of your book and even give out special offers too.

Facebook is also a good way of promoting your book through there ‘boost’ method. You can create a page on Facebook for your kid’s book and then get people to like it. When you post, Facebook has an option for you to choose from if you want your post to reach a larger audience. They will ask you if you want to boost your post, if you say yes, you will be required to pay a certain fee depending or the amount of audience you want to reach. Once you have boosted, Facebook will send the item to pages that are like-minded.

Twitter is also a good platform to spread the word that your kid got a book published but you need to be very clever and brief in your posts because they are limited to just 140 characters. Remember to use hashtags because they make a huge difference in how many people see your tweets. You can also use Pinterest, which is a site of virtual bulletin boards where you can set up your Pinterest board and share your kids book title.

Finally, the last means of online promotion would be Goodreads. This is an Amazon owned site which allows individuals to search the extensive user populated database of books.  You can simply sign up and register your kid’s book to generate library catalogs and reading lists.

In conclusion, being a published writer in particular will bring that feeling of pride and happiness because you and your kid have achieved something together. Your kid will always be proud that his or her masterpiece is being read by thousands of people out there. No money in the world can substitute that feeling and excitement.