Chapter Book Research

As I said on my last post, I received an invitation at The League of Utah Writers Fall Conference to submit the first installment of my chapter book series to an agent.  That's a big deal because it means I can slide right past the slush pile.  Since then, I've been researching the genre.  When I started Doomimals Book 1: Cock-a-doodle-DOOM, I thought I was writing a middle-grade fiction series.  I thought of it as akin to Animorphs, Spiderwick Chronicles, or anything along those lines.  I had no idea how all of this worked.  First, I did the research and read several comparables (I didn't even know I needed them when I went to talk to the agent in the first place).  Then I got to work on the manuscript.  I have now, after a month's hard labor, turned a rough manuscript into something that may be considered by publishers in the not so distant future.

Let me share something of what I've learned in the last month.  I am no expert, but I have discovered a few things.  One is that there are precise definitions and word counts for books in the children's book realm.  At least for your first book, you must stick to those.  You'll want to do more precise and authoritative research, but the best I can figure, children's books are divided up as follows: there's board book (roughly a sentence per page); picture book (up to 1000 words total, and the story relies heavily on pictures); early readers (around 5000 words, still reliant on pictures for much of the story but with short chapters); chapter books (8000-12,000 words, for slightly more advanced readers of roughly 7-10 years old); middle-grade books (30-55,000 words, though some sources say they can get shorter or longer); then up to young adult fiction, which is usually longer than that.  It turns out there's a whole science to all of this, knowing your readability statistics, comparables, the market, etc.  I'm not kidding.  There is a lot to know.  Oh, and the agent with whom I spoke said that current trend in middle-grade fiction is following young adult fiction into darker areas like suicide, death, and drugs.  If you want to write a fun romp, you may want to research younger age fiction, but then younger age fiction is hard to break into because it isn't much of a money-maker by comparison.  All of it kind of blows my mind.

At this point, I don't know if the agent will want to represent me simply because I found out (after talking to that agent who invited me to submit, different agent) my genre falls outside their agency's area of expertise.  Any which way, I have something publishable that I hope will find a home in the publishing world soon.  And that feels pretty dang good.