Children's Books discussion

How many words are appropriate for children's book for pre-scholers ( like Dr. Suess)

The immediate answer that springs to mind is... However many are required to tell the story.

You have to bear in mind that the attention span of children of that age is rarely very long, so you obviously don't want to make the story too long. But there's no right or wrong answer to the question, because there's not an exact number of words required to tell a good story; regardless of the age it's aimed at.

If it helps any, most - though not all - of the stories I've written for pre-school aged children are about 2500 words or less.

Like I said though, it's most important to write an enjoyable story, and you should focus more on that than the exact number of words you're writing.

I attended a conference last March (SCBWI's LA Writer's Days), and the general consensus on the length of picture books seemed to be "the shorter, the better." Many attendees (myself included) were surprised to learn that some editors even refuse to read picture book manuscripts that exceed 500 words! If you are looking to submit a manuscript, I got the impression that many lit agents/publishers prefer picture book submissions in the 300-500 word count range. Hope this helps!

I recently learned that most of Dr. Seuss's books are actually between 3rd and 4th grade reading level. Some of his wonderful classics are 6th grade or higher.

I love Dr. Seuss, but he came from a different era where the illustrations did very little story lifting, and picture books were not competing with the interactive media of today.

So if you are shooting for that prime pre-school real estate, rework your story until you have about 300 words where every word fights for its spot in your book.

In my opinion, it isn't so much about how many words but how many pages are you going to spread them out on. I think as long as you have enough words to fill at least 5 pages, it will work. Does anyone else feel the same about the amount of pages vs. word count?

I still stand by my original comment that it's most important to write an enjoyable story, rather than to write one that's x amount of words or pages.

Although, if it's not going to fill a minimum of 4 or 5 pages, you should consider doing a collection of short stories instead of publishing each separately.

I've always heard 1000 words or less for picture books. Preferably less---closer to 500, or even fewer. Kids that age have short attention spans. I have 2 daughters who are 4 and 2 and generally, the books they seem to enjoy most are on the shorter side.

One thing to keep in mind is that illustrations can do a lot of the storytelling for you. If your story is going to have pictures, you can probably get away with cutting out descriptions and even some of the action because the illustrations can show that. When I was trying to cut down the words in my WIP picture book, it helped me to ask, "Is this something that is necessary to tell the story, or is it something that could be more effectively shown in the illustrations?"

Here's an infographic on this subject:
https://bitsykemper.wordpress.com/201...