Karen Nespoli Bringing your picture book to life with beautiful illustrations is the next step for a self-published picture book. If you are publishing through a traditional press, their editorial team will pick and assign you an illustrator. New Book Our new book, Two Wins for Wiley, will be launched this fall. Typically, agented illustrators need a few months … Read more
How to write a picture book review is not as difficult as you might imagine. Everyone has an opinion about the items they buy. Reviewers are candid and honest, but when it comes to leaving a review about a book they enjoyed … they almost always stop. Reviews are critical to authors on Amazon, especially … Read more
You have written your picture book, but does your beginning grab your readers attention? Editors and agents to whom you are pitching your book specifically look for how you hook your reader. You want your reader to want to turn the page and keep reading. Here are a few suggestions. Start quickly Picture books are … Read more
Learning about your favorite authors and their books can be lots of fun. Author interviews give us insight into the author’s writing process. Interviews help readers to better understand how and why their stories were written. This week I would like you to meet Candace Spizzirri author of Fishing with Grandpa and Skye a books that explores … Read more
Professional editing is essential to the success of you book. When writing your first draft your goal is to get it all down on paper. Next comes the revision process. This is where we read for story flow, catch inconstancies, develop characters, insert missing information, eliminate redundancy, tighten up word choice, and revise, revise and … Read more
Author Interviews are a fun way to learn about authors and their books. Interviews can give us insight into the author’s writing process. Author interviews help readers to better understand how and why their stories were written. This week I would like you to meet Christine Van Zandt author of A Brief History of Underpants a … Read more
Marketing your picture book continues well after your book is published. The goal is to continue to market your book if you want to sell copies of your book. In my last post I discussed creating a media kit or a press kit for newspapers or podcasters. Now I would like to share how the … Read more
I am very happy to announce that I was recently a guest on You May Contribute A Verse Podcast. Brenna and Josh are the hosts of this podcast and are both children’s authors. Thus, the focus of their episodes revolves around children’s literature. The name of the episode is The Gertie Journey with Karen Nespoli. If … Read more
When you develop your main character you will find it can either be the most daunting task or the most fun. Gertie and Jeff were easy and fun for me to write. I could hear their conversations in my head which made writing the dialogue easy. I could close my eyes and visualize some of … Read more
Writing the story is where writers often get stuck. It is not as simple as writing words on a page. There are many things to consider before you put your pencil to the paper. As I mentioned in the prior post I have been writing the acupuncture story for 3 years. It started as one … Read more
