What We'll Cover in 2024

Take a peek at our kidlit topics for the year!

In January, we’re kicking off our paid posts! Our current plan is to post free and paid posts on alternating weeks. Our free posts will be top of mind kidlit topics. Our paid posts will get into the details of craft and business. To help you decide if you would like to become a paid subscriber, we thought we should give you a heads up of our planned topics for 2024! We’ll just talk about the first half of the year for now, as we may want to shift depending on the feedback we receive along the way.

Paid Post Topics

January

Writing Early Readers
Vicky shares her process and real world examples for crafting early readers. She’ll provide tips and exercises for you to tackle your own early reader project, from idea to pitch.

Lyrical Writing
Christine will help you write lyrical books with plenty of examples and resources.

February

Going on Sub—What’s Your Strategy?
Vicky and her agent, Elizabeth Bennett, talk about their approach to going on sub. When do we go wide vs exclusive? Do we go on simultaneous sub? Who crafts the pitch? How do we handle R&Rs? Vicky will talk about how she thinks she affects her subs, and then Elizabeth will explain what actually happens.

Book Contracts—What do you negotiate?
Christine and Vicky discuss book contracts! What do they pay attention to and why? What do they look for now that they didn’t watch for in the beginning?

March

Becoming an Illustrator
Vicky talks about how she moved from author only to author-illustrator, including classes and tools. She’ll explain how she got her first illustration job, how she chooses which projects to illustrate, and how being an author-illustrator has changed how she works.

School Visits
Christine talks about the logistics of getting invited to schools, crafting presentations, selling books at events, and more.

April

Writing Series
Christine and Vicky have both sold multiple series. We will break down how to go about writing and pitching your own series.

Writing Chapter Books
We share our process for approaching chapter books with real-world examples from her work.

May

The Art of the Pitch
With examples from their own successful sales, Christine and Vicky share how they pitch different types of manuscripts and advice from their experiences.

Marketing—What’s worked for us?
Christine and Vicky talk about where they put their efforts when it comes to marketing and why.

June

The Agent Relationship
Christine talks about how she works with her agent, Elizabeth Bennett (yes, Christine and Vicky have the same agent!). From projects to career conversations, Christine will share how often they communicate and how they approach book business talk.

Free Topics

We’ll think of our free topics as we go, but some ideas are around author retreats, conferences we’ve enjoyed, how we handle book launches, etc. These topics will be more fluid based on whatever we might be thinking about in the moment!

What do you think?

Do you have any thoughts for topics you’d like us to cover, either in a free or paid post? Do you have any specific questions you’d like us to tackle within these topics? We look forward to having a great conversation with you and we hope you’ll join us!