Coaching KidLit Episode 32: Demystifying Early KidLit Categories with Guest Laurie Calkhoven

Coaching KidLit Episode 32: Demystifying Early KidLit Categories with Guest Laurie Calkhoven

In this episode of Coaching KidLit, hosts Sharon and Christy talk with fellow Author Accelerator Book Coach Laurie Calkoven about the differences between various early KidLit categories, including picture books, early readers, and chapter books.

Laurie, a prolific children’s book author with extensive experience across picture books, early readers, chapter books, and middle grade novels, sheds light on the key differences between these early KidLit categories, using examples like Fancy Nancy to illustrate her points. She discusses writing techniques, market considerations, and offers practical advice for KidLit writers.

The conversation also touches on the importance of understanding your target audience and having a clear vision of where your work fits in the publishing landscape.

Key Topics Covered:

00:00 Introduction to Coaching KidLit
00:46 Meet Laurie Calkoven: A Prolific KidLit Author
01:44 Understanding Early KidLit Categories: Picture Books to Middle Grade
03:59 Diving Deep into Early Readers
05:11 The Puzzle of Writing Early Readers
07:52 Exploring Chapter Books
12:58 The Importance of Series in KidLit
18:25 Tips for Aspiring KidLit Writers
34:04 Action Items and Final Thoughts

Books Mentioned:

• Fancy Nancy by Krista Tucker (PB Illustrations by Grace Lee)
• Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
• Leo a ghost story by Mac Barnett, Illustrated by Christian Robinson
• Desmond Cole Ghost Patrol by Andres Miedoso
• Hardly Haunted by Jessie Sima
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Mary Downing Hanh Novels
• Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
• Pinkalicious by Elizabeth Kann and Victoria Kann
• Pete the Cat by Kimberly and James Dean
• Dragon Master Series by Tracey West
• The Last Firehawk Series by Katrina Charmin
• Children’s Writer’s Word Book by Alijandra Mogilner

Listen:

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Sharon Skinner: Welcome to Coaching KidLit, a podcast about writing and publishing good KidLit.

[00:00:07] Christy Yaros: We dig into various aspects of writing craft through a KidLit lens and provide inspiration and clear actionable items to help writers like you move forward on their KidLit writing journeys.

[00:00:19] Sharon Skinner: I’m Sharon Skinner, author accelerator, certified book coach, and author of speculative fiction and KidLit, including picture books, middle grade, and young adult.

[00:00:31] Christy Yaros: And I’m Christy Yaros, author accelerator certified book coach and story editor, focusing on KidLit, including middle grade and young adult.

[00:00:41] Sharon Skinner: Hey, Christy.

[00:00:43] Christy Yaros: Hey, Sharon, how are you?

[00:00:45] Sharon Skinner: I’m good. We have a guest today.

00:46 Meet Laurie Calkoven: A Prolific KidLit Author

[00:00:47] Christy Yaros: We do have a guest. We have one of our fellow author accelerator certified book coaches, Laurie Calkoven and. Let me tell you a little bit about her.

She loves capturing young readers and inspiring them to love books, reading, and writing as much as she does. She’s the author of more than 50 books for children and teens, ranging from beginner readers and chapter books to middle grade and YA. She’s just all over the place. She’s had experience with all genres of children’s fiction, including mysteries, fantasies, thrillers, and historical novels.

She’s also created non fiction titles for children, just learning to read, established middle grade readers, and teenagers. Before she became a full time writer, Laurie spent many years working in book publishing. She was the founding editor of the Teen People Book Club, and was an executive editor with Scholastic Book Clubs.

So, we’ve got like so much experience there. What should we talk to Laurie about today?

01:44 Understanding Early KidLit Categories: Picture Books to Middle Grade

[00:01:44] Sharon Skinner: Yeah, so Laurie’s super well rounded and I thought that today, because we’ve been hearing a lot from people that we’ve been talking to about not understanding very clearly the difference between categories for KidLit, the early KidLit categories, that Laurie could help us to help them understand more about the difference between picture books and early readers, chapter books, and middle grade. So, welcome Laurie.

[00:02:11] Laurie Calkhoven: Thank you. I am delighted to be here. I sometimes teach a workshop for the Highlights Foundation on writing early readers and transitional chapter books. And we find that there is a lot of confusion among writers over those different categories of books. And one way to look at them and to understand the differences is to look at Fancy Nancy.

Because Fancy Nancy has conquered many different levels of children’s books, beginning with the very first Fancy Nancy picture book. Now there are Fancy Nancy early readers, and as those readers got older, they wanted more Fancy Nancy, because you could never have enough. And so now there are Fancy Nancy chapter books.

And so, I would encourage your listeners , if there’s confusion about these categories of books, to go out and look at these different Fancy Nancy books, beginning with the picture books. The picture books are designed to be read to a child. That doesn’t mean a child can’t read them on their own, but they are designed to be read to a child by an adult. And so the picture books can have sort of a more complex storyline than an early reader. The illustrations in a picture book can add another emotional layer to the story. They can tell a separate parallel story to the text. But picture books can be more complicated. The language can be more complicated than that in an early reader.

And picture books, As I’m sure you know, most editors will tell you today they need to be 500 words or less. A picture book would really top out at a thousand words, and even those are hard to find. I once heard an editor say that a parent or a grandparent needs to be able to read a picture book in about five minutes in Barnes Noble before they make their decision.

03:59 Diving Deep into Early Readers

So that’s why picture books have gotten so much shorter than they were when we were kids. So picture books are designed to be read to a child. But when kids are learning to read, they are starting to read what we call early readers or beginning readers. And when I talk about early readers, I’m mostly talking about the leveled reading programs that a lot of publishers have.

Harper has I Can Read. Simon Schuster has Ready to Read. I write for that program. Random House has Step Into Reading. DK and National Geographic both have non fiction early reader programs. And so when we talk about early readers, we are mostly talking about those books. And those books are designed to be read by a child.

By a child who is just beginning to learn to read. They’re learning to string words together in a sentence. They’re training their eye muscles to move from the beginning of the line to the end of the line. That’s really hard. It’s not a natural thing for our eyes to do. That’s something kids have to learn to do as they’re learning to read.

So early readers are, as I said, designed to be read By a child who is just beginning to sound out words and learn to read. So early readers generally are, anywhere from 32 to 48 pages depending on the level. And they can be anywhere from 25 words to 2, 000 words. My Simon nonfiction books are in their highest level, level 3, and those top out at 2, 000 words.

05:11 The Puzzle of Writing Early Readers

[00:05:11] Sharon Skinner: So, when you’re writing early readers, is that something that tends to be more work for hire, or are these books that someone could write and then pitch to an agent what’s the nature of how you get into early readers?

[00:05:27] Laurie Calkhoven: Good question. Yeah, I think it’s hard to break into early readers if you are not already published, and I will say that a lot of agents aren’t excited to take on early readers because the advances tend to be lower than those for chapter books or middle grade or YA novels. I started writing early readers because Simon Schuster came to me.

I’d written a lot of, non fiction for slightly older kids and they came to me and asked me to write for a series they were starting. And I thought, well, this will open me up to being able to talk to even younger grades on my school visits. So that’s really why I first got started writing early readers.

And I found I really enjoyed it. It’s somewhat of a puzzle to put together because your language is much more, limited. And if you are writing early readers, I would suggest to everyone to pick up a copy of the Children’s Writer’s Word Book, which lists vocabulary words by grade level, which is really useful to have around.

But also, the number of words in a sentence is pretty closely defined depending on grade level, and whether or not you can run a sentence from one line to the next, things like that., there’s a lot of puzzle pieces you have to think about when you’re writing, an early reader.

It’s almost like when you’re trying to write a poem in a particular format,

So there are a lot of different puzzle pieces you have to put together. But for the most part, especially for nonfiction, publishers usually establish series and then go out and try and find writers to write those books.

[00:06:48] Christy Yaros: And then you’re given very specific, specifications.

[00:06:51] Laurie Calkhoven: Very specific guidelines as to word count reading level, number of sentences per page, for instance. All of those things are important. So another big difference between early readers and picture books is that the illustrations are there not to provide another layer to the story, but to support the reading.

So that if a child is trying to sound out the word squirrel, a picture of a squirrel on the page can really help them with that. The word apple, things like that. So the illustrations are there not to provide another layer to the story, but to provide reading support.

There’s a lot more white space on the page. There are illustrations on every single spread, like in a picture book, but there’s a lot more white space. So, those are the biggest differences between picture books and early readers.

And really, even up to the highest levels of early readers, kids are still learning to read.

They’re not necessarily reading to learn. But hopefully, they’re building those muscles so that when they’re ready for chapter books, they are ready to read to learn, read for entertainment, read for story, read for character, read to discover something new about the world in a non fiction book.

07:52 Exploring Chapter Books

But even, chapter books, I’d say in the last 10 years or so, publishers have sort of identified a new market. You know, publishers are always trying to slice and dice the market to earn more money, and it really started with Scholastic’s Branches imprint, which is an early chapter book, imprint at Scholastic, and it features books written at the second grade level, some with four color art, some with two color art, but they’re sort of easier chapter books than what we tend to think of as chapter books. And Scholastic did so well with branches that they started another chapter book line called Acorn. And those books are all written at the first grade level. So there’s a lot of overlap between these different categories. The Acorn books published by any other publisher would fall into an early reading program probably.

But Scholastic treats them as early chapter books.

[00:08:38] Christy Yaros: So with the early readers, how do the levels correlate?

[00:08:43] Laurie Calkhoven: Well, this is interesting because the early reading programs are published by trade publishers and not educational publishers. The levels were created in house by in house experts, so that they don’t necessarily correlate to the reading levels in educational publishing, and Harper’s I can read levels are not the same as Simon Schuster’s, ready to read levels.

[00:09:04] Christy Yaros: So super easy for parents to figure out which, books their kids would fall into, huh?

[00:09:09] Laurie Calkhoven: Well, the publishers do try to make it as easy as possible because all of these early readers, if you walk into a Barnes Noble or an independent bookstore or a library, and you look at the back cover of any of these early readers, every publisher does tell you what their different levels mean.

For the most part, except for sometimes, Everything we say about publishing is true except for sometimes, right? Most part, they don’t put grade levels on their books an editor at Harper told me that’s because they don’t want to create reading shame in a third grader who is reading level one books that are written at a first grade level.

But Random House, for instance, does put grade levels on their books. So really, parents sort of have to read the back cover of the book and try and figure out what’s right for their child.

[00:09:52] Christy Yaros: So then how does that work when you’re considering, what age the characters are in the stories.

[00:09:59] Laurie Calkhoven: I have to say age doesn’t seem to come up a lot in early readers. There’s a lot of animal characters. The kid characters in early readers tend to be kindergarten or first graders, so if you were writing for, say, the upper levels in the early reading programs, in Harper, Simon Schuster, Random House, you might use a second grader, but by that point, they’re probably wanting to read chapter books. But yeah, I have to say age and grade level doesn’t come up a lot in early readers, but the very first Fancy Nancy early readers, she’s in first grade in those books.

[00:10:30] Christy Yaros: How old is she in the picture book?

[00:10:31] Laurie Calkhoven: I don’t think they give an age in the picture books, maybe five or six.

[00:10:35] Christy Yaros: So then when you get into chapter books,

[00:10:38] Laurie Calkhoven: When you get into chapter books, more publishers, as I said, have started to publish these, sort of, transitional chapter books, or early chapter books, largely as a result of, Scholastic’s, success with Branches. And these early chapter books have always been around, but that is, like, now suddenly a new category, and I’m curious to see whether it will stick around or not, because I don’t know if you remember, like, ten years ago, there was a big push for tween books. And that’s sort of went by the wayside, and primarily because there isn’t a shelf in the bookstore for tween books. There isn’t a shelf in the library for tween books. They’re sort of all mixed in with middle grade, and that’s also true for these transitional chapter books. They’re mixed in with chapter books in general, so the transitional chapter books, They tend to be about 6, 000 words, tops, the acorn books can be as few as a thousand, but traditional chapter books, like the First Fancy Nancy chapter book, they tend to be about 7, 500 words.

And I think that’s why publishers needed this new sort of in between, because to go from a 2, 000 word early reader to a 7, 500 word chapter book is a big difference for most kids. Chapter books, they don’t have color illustrations on every page the way a transitional chapter book might. There’s a lot of spreads that are just type, which can be hard for someone who’s still learning to read.

And they have much more complex plots. Like the first Fancy Nancy chapter book is a mystery, and she solves not one but two mysteries. And there’s a lot of, characters. You know, there’s her classmates, there’s her teacher, there’s her family, there’s her best friend, there’s the twins who live nearby.

Whereas in the first Fancy Nancy Early Reader, there’s just Nancy, her teacher, and her buddy on the class field trip. The rest of the class is in the background, but they don’t really take part in the story. So in a chapter book, you can get away with a lot more characters, the plots are more complex, the language is more complex, you can actually run a sentence from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, which you really can’t do in an early reader.

So those are the big differences. The kids, by the time they’re reading chapter books, they are really, reading for, character for plot, for information, for entertainment. They’ve done the really hard work of learning to read and now they are reading to learn. Those are the biggest differences.

12:58 The Importance of Series in KidLit

And yeah, most chapter books are anywhere between 5, 000 and maybe 12, 500 words. That’s on the long side for a chapter book. And all of these books are series. Much more so than in middle grade. In middle grade, you can get away with standalone titles. In early readers and chapter books almost everything is part of a series.

And that’s because readers find comfort in that. When they are, still learning to read, they find comfort in the familiar. They’ve done it once. They know they can do it. They’re building those reading muscles. So once you get to middle grade, you can have a standalone book, but in chapter books, that’s very unusual.

[00:13:25] Sharon Skinner: It seems like if say you have a character who’s a squirrel and you’ve learned the word squirrel in your early on and then you start to read in your chapter books, you start to read about, say, Sammy the squirrel, that character would be somebody that you could breeze over the words with.

So that familiarity, I think, would be really important.

[00:13:45] Laurie Calkhoven: It is. And it builds confidence. I remember the first time I read a book all by myself. I just remember being how proud I was. So it builds that reading confidence in kids and they do feel really good when they can read a book. And come to the end. And then they want the next one because they want the, they want that same thing but different.

[00:14:02] Christy Yaros: yeah, and then the speed at which they’re going through these books is different than a middle grade or YA aged audience, right? Because you can have a kid starts out in an early leveled reader and in the same semester at, you know, a quarter of school, they’ve moved on to something else, whereas other students might need to stay there longer.

So having the series I can see would be helpful for those who need to be there longer they can sort of feel like they’re getting more of an experience out of staying with the same character and living in that world for longer. without feeling bad that they’re there.

[00:14:40] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah. They can’t read as fast as other kids.

[00:14:43] Sharon Skinner: Well, the more series that you get through, the more books you’ve finished. And so you feel like you’re reading faster as well. And I think that that also engenders a certain amount of, Hey, I read another book. I read another book. And I don’t know if you grew up in a house like mine with my kids, you got rewarded for the books that you read.

[00:15:03] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, it’s all about for those younger kids. It’s really about building that reading confidence, building those reading muscles, because, we all need that to be successful in life. But we also want them to move on and start reading middle grade and YA novels and nonfiction when they get a little older.

[00:15:18] Sharon Skinner: And we know that comprehension takes time to build as well, so reading comprehension is also a part of that, and being able to talk about or maybe do a book report or draw a picture of a story that you’ve read, based on your comprehension of that story. We talk all the time about the earlier stories have to be simpler.

We can’t have subplots, and like you said with Fancy Nancy, the, growth of the story Matches the Growth of the Reader in a lot of Ways, because you can add Characters, you can add things to the Story as they get to a point where their reading comprehension has increased and they can hold more in their heads.

[00:15:57] Laurie Calkhoven: exactly. It’s really hard when they first start reading to get from the beginning of a sentence to the end of a sentence and know at the end of the sentence how it started. That can be really difficult in the very beginning.

[00:16:07] Christy Yaros: and even how long is it taking them to do that? And how much are they accomplishing in one sitting where you want them to feel like they’ve accomplished something, but then also remember what they read, right? For the next time they sit down to continue,

[00:16:20] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah. And that’s a big part of how those, these books are written and designed as well, because the Acorn books, that Scholastic publishes at the first grade level, there are, I think, three to five chapters in each book, but each one is a short story in and of itself. Like it comes to an end and the reader doesn’t feel pushed to turn to the next chapter immediately.

But in the Branches books, the chapters all end on a cliffhanger. So that the kids are, encouraged to keep reading. So even the way the stories are written and designed. They want to either feel pushed to the next chapter or complete in the one they’ve just finished.

[00:16:54] Christy Yaros: Well, I mean, at that age level, homework is usually read for 20 minutes or like, what can a teacher accomplish if they’re reading it out loud to them? How far can they get? And still have that comprehension. So then the intentionality behind early readers and leveled readers and chapter books is just different than those of us who are writing middle grade and young adult.

[00:17:15] Laurie Calkhoven: Right. When you’re writing middle grade and young adult, in a novel, you just want to tell a good story. You want it to have a point and a purpose, but you just want to tell a good story about characters, you hope your readers will love as much as you do. With early readers, especially, but also with chapter books, there’s more going on there.

[00:17:30] Sharon Skinner: Yeah, there’s a lot more to think about and a lot more to juggle and manage when you’re writing in those Categories. And I think that that’s something that A lot of people don’t get. It’s like, people think that it’s easy to write a picture book because, oh, it’s mostly pictures and it’s only so many words but there is just so much to writing a picture book beyond what you see when you dig in the format, the structure, the page turns, all of the really important things that go into a picture book. It’s a little bit like the growth of the reader when you start to get up into the early readers, it gets more complicated to write for those kiddos.

But in a different way than a novel. In a novel, you’ve got subplots and all sorts of additional themes and things like that that go into that, right? But in the early readers, like you said, it’s like trying to write structured poetry.

[00:18:23] Laurie Calkhoven: Exactly. Yeah.

18:25 Tips for Aspiring KidLit Writers

[00:18:25] Christy Yaros: So what’s the difference between a series, for the younger readers versus a middle grade series?

[00:18:31] Laurie Calkhoven: Well, I think one of the biggest differences is that, in middle grade and YA, we expect our characters to change and grow in some way. Early readers and chapter book series, we don’t necessarily want or need that. I mean, kids want those characters to show up in essentially the same way in every single book.

So a character can learn something about the world or themselves. in the course of a story, but that character is essentially the same character at the end of the book. So I think that’s one of the biggest differences between chapter books and middle grade is that arc of change. We don’t have that in chapter books as much.

[00:19:07] Christy Yaros: Do you think that’s also because publishers want you to find book 12 and pick it up and read it and feel like you know what’s going on and then go back to book one and start them.

[00:19:18] Laurie Calkhoven: I think that’s true, and I think also because early readers in chapter books are so skinny, and they’re face out, for the most part, face out on the shelf in the bookstore, you know, the longer row of chapter books you have, the more likely somebody is to find it. So they want to leave room for a lot of books in those chapter book series’.

[00:19:35] Christy Yaros: Well, we were in, Target the other day and Wimpy Kid is still coming out. My daughter is 22 and she read those when she was of the age, and she looked at them and she was like, what? They’re on book 17, like book 18, but that’s the only ones that were there, at Target, say, right, are the new, ones that have just come out, so it seems like you would need to be able to grab that new hardcover book that just came out, but then still feel like you could read that one without, having read the other ones and then go back to it, because you have kids coming to it at different ages.

The series has been out for so many years, but I’m just becoming that age where I can start reading it. I should have an entry point anywhere

[00:20:15] Laurie Calkhoven: Right. I think that’s true. And I think Wimpy Kid is almost an exception. It’s one of those rare middle grade books that is sustained over, that big wide shelf. Not many middle grade series go on for that long.

[00:20:27] Christy Yaros: Yeah. And I think she’s would still at 22, pick it up because she was so invested,

I can’t tell you how many times book one of Wimpy Kid was, when she had to like, when Sharon was saying, you get points or, you know, summer reading.

And I was like, okay, like, how many times can you read the same one and it counts? But that was like her go to. I don’t know why, but that was her go to for many years.

[00:20:48] Sharon Skinner: It’s like comfort food, right?

It’s just like what you were saying. It’s familiar. It’s something we know we enjoy, so it doesn’t feel like we’re having to, stretch too far and we can have that appreciation. Who doesn’t want to reread a good book? I mean, I rarely do it anymore because there are just so many books and I just don’t have enough time, but there are some books that I just want to go back and revisit.

[00:21:12] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, because I love the characters and I love the world. Yeah, I think that’s, that starts with early readers. One hopes for kids that that starts with early readers and moves on up through chapter books and middle grade. That they find that comfort and joy in them.

[00:21:26] Christy Yaros: One of the questions that, Sharon and I both came across on a Q& A that we were on was where somebody was not sure whether the book they wrote was an early reader or a middle grade. And in the marketplace, it’s about intentionality. It doesn’t seem like it’s something that you should not realize whether your book falls into one category or the other as you’re writing, correct?

[00:21:50] Laurie Calkhoven: Right, I mean, it helps to, when you’re beginning, to know who you think your reader is going to be. I mean, that’s one of the basic questions we ask ourselves before we begin in story development or non fiction development. But, yeah, I think if you really don’t know, you have to think about the information in front of you and what age child can understand that information or how you can simplify it.

If you really want to write a book for a first grader, but, You’ve got a 5, 000 word book written at a fourth grade level, you have to figure out how to simplify that for the first grader, or you need to adjust it for the fourth grader. So a lot of times the information in front of you can answer that question for you, but, one of the exercises I’ve had my highlight students do is to, think about a topic and think about how that might work at different, levels.

And I always use it as an example. A ghost story. So if you were writing a picture book ghost story, you might write something like Mac Barnett’s Leo, a ghost story, which is about a lonely ghost who leaves the house that he’s been living in because no one can see him. He’s lonely and so he goes out into the world and finally he’s on the sidewalk in a city and a little girl sees him and takes him nome with her.

That’s a picture book ghost story. Or there’s another one gosh, I can’t remember the author’s name or the title of the book, but it’s about a haunted house that’s lonely. And people come to look at the house but they don’t like it, they’re scared, and finally a family of ghosts moves in, and the house is happy, and the ghosts are happy, and so that’s a picture book ghost story, but in a chapter book ghost story, you have people like Desmond Cole, Ghost Patrol, and he moves into a new house, which is haunted, and a next door neighbor who is in the same grade as him, who I think is second grade, is a ghost hunter.

So together they think they want to banish this ghost, but it turns out that ghost too is lonely and is tired of having to move from house to house to house because people are afraid of him. And so they make friends with the ghost. So the ghost becomes a sort of a pet for Desmond Cole.

And then you get into, Novels, there’s the Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman or any of the Mary Downing Hahn novels, ghost stories. So those are a little bit scarier. They’re longer. They’re older. There’s a lot more going on in the ghost world. And then you get into young adult novels, like , Elatso by Darcy Little Badger, much more complex ghost stories.

So, I always challenged my students to take their idea and think about how that would work at the different age levels and what they would do with that idea. If you’re playing that game, I try to think of these exercises as games, not as exercises, so they’re more fun that way.

But if you’re playing that game and you realize you’re happiest, coming up with the middle grade idea or their chapter book idea, then that will give you a clear indication of what age level you want to be writing that for. And you can do the same thing With nonfiction, if you look at any of the DK books or the, National Geographic books and then look at middle grade books about dolphins or about whales or about hurricanes, look at your idea and see where that would fit in that hierarchy.

[00:24:38] Sharon Skinner: And I think your recommendation earlier on to get the children’s writer’s word book, would help also, when you start to think in terms of who am I writing for and what gives me joy in how I write. If you like putting together puzzles, then maybe early readers are your thing, right?

It’s maybe that’s the thing you want to do, but if you are wanting to write a story with character arc and all of that, then maybe you’re in middle grade or YA at that point, you’re writing novels.

[00:25:07] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. And that Children’s Writers Wordbook, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s got this great thesaurus at the end, so if you’re looking up the word disaster, you might discover, that it’s a fifth grade word, but it’ll give you kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth grade words.

So you can substitute that if you’re writing for a second grader.

[00:25:26] Sharon Skinner: So if you have a story and you realize that you want to write for second graders, but you’ve written words that are more fifth grade level, you can use that tool to go in and revise because we know writing is rewriting. So you could go in and revise it to better fit that target audience.

[00:25:42] Christy Yaros: And usually , the simpler word is a broader word for it. And it’s the nuance that comes in because it’s not just reading the word on the page, but the understanding behind the word.

[00:25:53] Laurie Calkhoven: That’s very true. And sentence length is also important. If you’re writing for younger kids, your sentences need to be shorter and more direct. As you move up, you can start to use compound sentences, things like that.

[00:26:06] Christy Yaros: Yeah. My background is educational publishing and I did textbooks for K 12. I did a lot of math textbooks, unfortunately, but I did a lot of reading comprehension, passages and things for testing, unfortunately, I know how people feel about that, but that was the same sort of thing, very specific, like here you have 200 words, it needs to be on this reading level, and then on top of that, you need to be able to ask 10 questions about this.

Everything needs to be on level, and then you need one or two vocabulary words that are grade level or two grade levels ahead, and we need to be able to ask what the main idea was, or how the character changed, or. In a, in such a short space.

And for me, after doing that for so many years, like that’s how I think now and I struggle more when I’m writing my novels. My writing is still very, is very short and succinct.

[00:26:55] Laurie Calkhoven: Interesting. Yeah, we fall into habits.

[00:26:58] Christy Yaros: but I can tell you what grade level something is written on. I know exactly how to, maneuver the stuff, like you said, chopping up the sentence, shorter. You can have these compound sentences and then just the word choice.

And, it is kind of like a game. Like, how can I take this and now make it a fourth grade level?

[00:27:13] Laurie Calkhoven: And you really have to treat it like a game. Otherwise, you’ll end up pulling your hair out.

[00:27:17] Christy Yaros: I think after years of doing it, it’s a lot of pattern recognition. You just know when you look at something, and so for people who are writing that, it’s, the same advice, right, that we would give to anybody who wants to write novels in a particular genre or age category.

Just go sit Barnes Noble, but they’re usually on the little spinny things or in the thing in the middle, right? And just, You could go through a whole series in one sitting.

[00:27:42] Laurie Calkhoven: You literally can, two hours at the library or Barnes and Noble, you can read 50 or 60 early readers.

[00:27:48] Sharon Skinner: Which is a great way to do research on, what you’re thinking you’re going to want to do. So anything else that you want to talk about regarding the categories that we’ve discussed, Laurie?

[00:28:00] Laurie Calkhoven: I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered all of it. I would encourage your listeners to go out and look at, characters like Fancy Nancy, or Pinkalicious, or Pete the Cat that are published over different age levels, and really look at the differences in the books to understand them.

And also, just read a bunch of early readers, read a bunch of Transitional chapter books, read a bunch of chapter books. And I think if you read enough of them, you’ll start to really just understand the differences without having to think about it very much.

[00:28:30] Sharon Skinner: That pattern recognition that christy was talking about.

[00:28:33] Laurie Calkhoven: Right. I remember hearing Linda Sue Park speak once and she said you have to read a thousand books before you can write one, and I don’t know that you quite need to read a thousand, but I would say read a hundred of each of those different, categories of books and you’ll really will understand the differences in a way that I could talk to you for, ten years that wouldn’t become clear.

[00:28:52] Christy Yaros: So if I’m a writer and I am sitting down and I’m writing a story and I’m not sure if I’m writing an early reader or if I’m writing a chapter book or a middle grade, Besides looking at it, what other considerations should a new writer have about, like, is it worth it for me to try to write an early reader if I’m a brand new writer and I don’t have an agent and I have no experience?

Realistically, what are the odds that someone can write a standalone early reader, a standalone chapter book, and actually be able to do something with that?

[00:29:22] Laurie Calkhoven: I think the odds are very, very small. I think the odds are very small of being able to sell a certainly a standalone early reader or chapter book without having other experience. But I also think that when you’re writing your first draft, that’s not the time to worry about necessarily where am I going to squeeze this into the market.

I think when you’re writing your first draft, when you’re coming up with your idea, developing your idea, I think that’s the time to be free and creative and to let yourself go and see where it leads. But when it’s time to sit down and revise, I’m not even talking about sending it out to agents or editors yet, when it’s time to sit down and revise, you are going to have to have some idea of where it’s going to fit in the marketplace. And you need to know that before you start submitting to agents or editors, because that’s going to be part of your cover letter. And if you don’t know where it fits, then they’re probably not going to figure that out, either. But the idea of selling a standalone early reader, I think is impossible. The idea of selling a standalone chapter book is not entirely impossible, but your chances are much more difficult.

And I’d say if you have what you think is a great chapter book idea, be ready to have three more ready to go.

[00:30:27] Sharon Skinner: Right? So, so that you can sell it as, I have this book, but I also have ideas for a series.

[00:30:34] Laurie Calkhoven: It’s a standalone chapter book with series potential is the way you would word it in your query letter.

[00:30:39] Christy Yaros: and then even understanding that just because you think this book is good for six year olds or seven year olds or eight year olds doesn’t necessarily mean that what you’ve written is an early reader or a chapter book.

[00:30:51] Laurie Calkhoven: Exactly. And when I say chapter book, a lot of people think that if you say chapter book, it simply means a book with chapters. In publishing, chapter book is a particular category because there are early readers with chapters and there are middle grade novels with chapters, but they’re not technically chapter books.

Chapter books are those books written for seven to 10 year olds at that, 7, 500 word. Roughly, written at the second, third grade level for kids who have just moved out of early readers and are ready to move on up, but not quite ready for the books for eight to 12 year olds. It’s very confusing if you’re brand new to publishing and writing for kids.

[00:31:24] Sharon Skinner: Chapter books are more of a transitional, to get you from that early reading, I know how now, to, hey, I can take and absorb an entire novel.

[00:31:34] Christy Yaros: but also even in the marketplace the speed at which they are released . Doesn’t acorn aim for two a year in a series?

[00:31:42] Laurie Calkhoven: I think they start with four and then aim for two a year.

[00:31:45] Christy Yaros: four wow that come out at the same time?

[00:31:48] Laurie Calkhoven: I don’t know off the top of my head. They probably published the first two and then a few months later, the next two. And I think it also depends on the success of the series. I remember talking to Tracey West about the Dragon Master series, which is hugely successful for Branches. And I think she was doing four a year.

That may have slowed down some now, but her books are also on the new York Times bestseller list. So there’s that. A thing we can all hope for.

[00:32:12] Sharon Skinner: Yeah, absolutely. And, when you’ve got somebody who likes a series, you want to keep them in the series for as long as possible, right? I mean, that’s pretty standard, and you’ve got to deliver on it. Otherwise, they will shift their attention and their focus somewhere else.

And they may even forget that series, as much as they loved the first two books or four books, they may have moved on to another series that they love just as well. So that delivery schedule it’s important because kiddos are going to want that next book and that next book and that next book.

I know my granddaughter is all about it, right? I get a list for birthday and a list for Christmas of all the next books that I need to supply.

[00:32:52] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, my seven year old great nephew cried when he realized he was coming to the last book in The Last Firehawk series. And then we got him started on Dragon Master, so now he’s happy. But he literally cried when he discovered there were no more.

[00:33:05] Christy Yaros: Also i think there’s that consideration like we were saying that they’re only especially early readers And chapter books. There’s relative to the rest of your reading life, short amount of time that you are in that. And readers can’t wait a year for the next book to come out because they’ll have aged out and moved on and maybe they’ll go back and read it if it’s something like a Wimpy Kid but for the most part, when these series are new and are coming out, they need to come out fast enough to keep up with the reader. Whereas, middle grade will come out, usually about a year apart, they’re still there.

[00:33:37] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, they haven’t moved on yet to the next category.

[00:33:40] Sharon Skinner: And I think that’s something to take into consideration when you decide where you want to plant your flag as far as what you want to be writing. If you are focused on doing chapter books and that’s where your passion is, and that’s what you really want to do, and you want to break into that, know that it’s not a one and done.

Know that you’re going to have to deliver on a regular schedule.

[00:34:02] Laurie Calkhoven: Yeah, you do. You have to be ready for that.

34:04 Action Items and Final Thoughts

[00:34:04] Christy Yaros: So action items, I think we are ready for. And Laurie you’ve already given us so many of them around this, between the exercises and the going to check out, Fancy Nancy, all that. Did you have a separate action item?

[00:34:18] Laurie Calkhoven: No, I really had those two is take your idea and see what it would look like in a picture book or an early reader or a chapter book or a middle grade. And then, yeah, just read those different categories of books so that you can get a really internal, firm understanding of what those differences are.

[00:34:33] Christy Yaros: Sharon, what do you got?

[00:34:34] Sharon Skinner: So I’m going to circle back to what I just said and recommend to our listeners that they choose wisely and know what they’re getting into. Because I know even if you are writing at the young adult level and you deliver a really solid novel, chances are your agent, your editor, they’re going to want you to deliver another novel in a very short order.

You may even get a nice contract that says, oh, two novels, and the first one’s written, and then the second one, they haven’t even agreed what it’s going to be, and you may have to come up with ideas to float to them, and then, They may not like the first idea or the second idea. I’ve seen this happen, and the third or fourth idea is what they want and then they want it delivered in a very short amount of time. So just know what you’re getting into. Don’t stop writing when you’re querying. Start writing the next thing. Be prepared and know what the lay of the land is as you move forward because I think sometimes we get gobsmacked because we work so hard to get that first book, or that first agent, or what have you, and then we realize, oh, then the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing have to take place.

So my action item for listeners is to figure out what it is you really are wanting to do, and willing to do, and target your passion in that direction.

So, Christy, what have you got for us?

[00:35:57] Christy Yaros: All right, so I am going to say one of the great things I think about chapter books and early readers is that they are a Easy to find in catalogs from the publishers and I, remember advice that I had been given a long time ago at an SCBWI conference was to look at the catalogs for each of the publishing companies where you can see not only the types of books that they are publishing in series like that, but also what ones are current so that you could pitch yourself in order to figure out, this is where I would fall into that.

But see, like, what is it? What kind of idea can be sustained in a chapter book? And there’s so many, I mean, there’s so many crazy series out there about, the mermaid school, or it’s a dog but really that research of knowing what is out there.

And if A story just comes to you and you feel like that’s a chapter book, like really think about, I think we do see some of these one and done kind of people, like they just have a singular idea and they feel like it’s going to work like that. And then use Laurie’s exercise and see, can you age this up and make this into something that, if marketable is what you’re looking for to do that.

So it’s kind of two action items, I guess, but that’s what I’ve got for you. Thank you so much, Laurie, for being with us today to talk about those different levels. And hopefully our listeners have come away with some more clarification around that.

[00:37:19] Sharon Skinner: I know I learned a lot.

[00:37:21] Christy Yaros: So where can we find you?

[00:37:23] Laurie Calkhoven: On my website, primarily, it’s, www. lauriecalkhoven. com, I’m on Facebook and I’m supposedly on Twitter and Instagram, but you won’t find any posts by me there. So, my website is the best place to find me.

I primarily work with, middle grade and YA writers so far, but happy to talk to people about early readers and chapter books.

[00:37:43] Christy Yaros: So there you go. We can find you there. And thank you so much for being here with us.

[00:37:48] Sharon Skinner: Thank you so much.

[00:37:50] Laurie Calkhoven: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[00:37:52] Christy Yaros: Bye, everybody.

[00:37:53] Sharon Skinner: Bye for now.

[00:37:54] Christy Yaros: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Coaching KidLit, a writing and book coaching podcast for writers who want to level up their KidLit writing game.

[00:38:01] Sharon Skinner: For more about us and to discover what a book coach can do for you, check out coachingkidlit. com and follow us on social media.

 

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For more information about Sharon Skinner, visit bookcoachingbysharon.com or follow her on Instagram @sharon_skinner_author_bookcoach and Twitter @SharonSkinner56.

For more information about Christy Yaros, visit christyyaros.com or follow her on Instagram and Twitter @ChristyYaros.

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