Some Do Do's

I can’t believe I am posting another blog so soon. Up to now, my blogs have come out rather sporadically. But tomorrow morning early,  I will be giving a talk in a break-out session at the 2012 Biennial Writers’ Conference presented by the National League of American Pen Women (Honolulu Branch). 

Part of my talk will center on what I posted earlier today, but another part will be to discuss a few simple rules for those considering self-publishing. These rules don’t have so much to do with how to write or illustrate a children’s book. Rather, they have everything to do with layout and design. After all, if you are going to self-publish, make the book look as professional as you can. People will judge your book by its cover, the type you use and the layout . . . then they’ll get to your beautifully crafted story.

Here are my Do Do’s. One for picture books and one for chapter books. My advice: keep the layout simple and do do these things.

10 Do Do’s for Picture Books

1  Pay attention to the rhythm of pictures and words.

There are three basic layouts: words on pictures, words below pictures, words following pictures: If you choose the first layout, put the text in the same place on each page. If you choose the second option, vary the rhythm according to the story.

2  Make sure that your story is evenly distributed through your book.

You can always tell if a book is well-done, if there are the same number of words on each page. This is not a must, but it helps bring order to the book.

3  Keep all of the pictures the same size and make them all either full bleed or with a margin.

4  Trim your story to as few words as possible.

Picture books work because the pictures tell the story as much as the words do. If the book looks word heavy in the layout, it is probably not well-edited. Let the art do the heavy lifting.

5  Make your story look as though it were written in free-verse.

My feeling is that a picture book is a poem. I don’t mean a poem that rhymes, but a poem in the sense that it is a slice of life, a poetic look at some one, some thing, some event. If you think that way, your book will have few words and the pictures will do the work of telling the story. And, if you break up the text so that it looks like a poem, you are inviting the reader to treat your work as poetry.

6  Consider the sound of the words.

This has nothing to do with layout--at least in printed books, but in digital books, where a voice can be recorded, this is extremely important.

7  Use difficult words.

Again, like #6, this has little to do with layout, but in the digital world, where the reader can tap a word and the definition comes up instantly, it makes no sense whatsoever to limit the vocabulary. In the past, teachers and educators put a stranglehold on books. Each book had to meet a grade-level standard. No more is that the case, as far as I am concerned.  A first grader can tap on the word and find out what it means, hear how it is pronounced just as easily as anyone else. What’s so hard about that—unless you enjoy dumbing everything down.

8  Make sure everything is accurate and fully researched.

In the digital world, not only can a reader tap on the word to find out what it means, but the reader can search the word or group of words on the internet….instantly. If your facts are wrong, even the first grader will know it. If not the first grader, the teacher or the parent.

9  Make everything consistent: words, colors used, layout.

Take a good look at books by Chris Van Allsburg and William Joyce. They both have a brilliant sense of color, and, their designers were meticulous, insuring that their books hung together as a whole. This point number 9 is a summary of all I have said above.

10  Go to the library and check out as many different looking books as possible.

Finally, take a look at these books. Match each one with the points I have made above. Some will match up; others will not. Make a note of the variations.

10 Do Do’s for Chapter Books

1 Be generous with margins and consider the following rules when laying out a page.

The standard POD chapter book measures 8 inches tall by 5 inches wide. Use these margins.

Why be generous? Because a few pages added to a POD book don’t add to the cost, and for a iBook, page-count doesn’t matter at all.

2 Be generous with the leading (the space between the lines).

I would say that 14 point type with 18 point leading would be fine for a children’s picture book. Remember that in an iBook the point size is irrelevant. The reader can change type size to fit his or her own needs.

3 Indent the first line of the paragraph as much as the width of the capital W of the font you are using. 

If you make the indentation too wide, you will throw everything off balance and make reading difficult.

4 Start the first paragraph of each chapter about a third of the way down the page.

5 Make a classical title page such as this with everything center-justified

In 1818, this title page was made about the typography of Giambattista Bodoni [1740-1813]. Why not copy its simplicity? 

6 Get someone to check grammars, speling; and punctuation

I know you know about this, but the problem is with books, long ones, there are bound to be mistakes. Proof reading and editing is a must. Spell checking programs can’t distinguish between there, their, and they’re, for example; so read everything over and get a proof-reader. As far as the grammar is concerned, you must find someone who is qualified to make judgements about the way you write.

7 Check and double-check the facts in your book.

This is just good practice, but, in the case of ebooks, absolutely a must. The reader can instantly check up on you by searching the words or phrases in your book on the web.

8 Justify the entire text.

Ragged edges make for a ragged look and feel. Paragraphs, if short, won’t look like paragraphs.

9  Choose two fonts only: one for the titles of the chapters and the title page, and one for the text of the book.  

Be conservative. If you choose a font that is too wild or quirky, the book will be difficult to read. Choose a classical font: Garamont, Caslon, or Palatino. Stay away from Times. It is overused. The choice of font is irrelevant for ebooks. The reader gets to choose the font. 

10 Make everything simple—even the cover.

 What Bodoni did with the title page, you could do with the cover. You don’t always need an image. I would rather see a well designed cover without an image than one with a poorly drawn image that is as confusing as it is amaturish. Book covers are important, but don’t be scared. Simple ones can be powerful.  Here is a book cover for a recent book [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon]. It is very much in the style of Bodoni.

And one last word of advice:  Be innovative—with your next book.

The eBook Tango

A logo I have designed for the Children’s Literature Hawai‘i Conference this coming June, 

in which I’ll talk about my tango with ebooks and PODs

By now I had hoped to have several print-on-demand books [POD’s] available on Amazon and an equal number sitting on the digital bookshelves of the Apple bookstore, but I do not. Not yet, anyway.

It turns out that POD’s don’t quite measure up to my standards of what a children’s picture book should look like and ebooks are just too darn hard to make.

First POD’s. These are quite simple to make. By this, I mean, once you have done the writing and the illustrating and the book designing, it is but a tap of a button, if you are using Adobe InDesign, to turn what you have created into a press-ready PDF and send it off to either CreateSpace [ https://www.createspace.com]or Lightning Source [https://www1.lightningsource.com:443]. Within minutes, or so it seems, either company will send you a paper proof of the book, and, depending on how much you want to pay for shipping, you will see your proof in a matter of days. It is simple and cheap. 

CreateSpace charges about $10. LightningSource: $75. Unfortunately, the results are pretty dismal for both. They both use the same presses. The colors are not always bright. CreateSpace uses cheap, thin paper, and both companies won’t let you put any words on the spine, which seems ridiculous to me. How will a person find the book on a home bookshelf let alone at a public library?

The results for chapter books are more encouraging. In fact, the whole POD way of making books is actually geared for making books with lots of words. Because that is the case, and because the technology just doesn’t meet my standards, I’ve put my dozen or so books with CreateSpace on hold, believing that things will get better rather soon. 

In the meantime, I have turned to making electronic books. I have looked at Kindle and Nook and iBooks. Only iBooks shows real possibilities for me as a picture book maker. The colors are bright. There is more functionality, because after all, the iPad, on which you have to view the iBook, is a mini-computer, while Kindle and Nook are simply screens for viewing static pdfs. 

iBooks does have a catch, however: it is pretty difficult to turn a book you have created into an epub document. An epub uses html coding and makes a mini-web page out of your book. It is the coding that is difficult. Adobe InDesign will turn your book into an epub document in the blink of an eye, but the results aren’t always what you might expect. Pictures show up in odd places in the iBook. Sentences can end up anywhere. This is because iBooks are not really made for picture books….unless you understand the present functioning epub formatting. 

It turns out that there are two kinds of iBooks. One in which the text and pictures flow as you turn the digital pages. The other is one in which the formatting is fixed. It is the fixed formatting that you must have to make a picture book work; otherwise, pictures and text get separated in weird ways after they have gone through the epub meat grinder.

You have several options at this point. You can learn html coding and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and all of the other necessary codes to turn your book into an epub. You can hire someone like Telemachus Press ( http://telemachuspress.com ) to do this for you for a small bag of money. Or you can use some of the software out there which claim to be able to turn your book into an epub. 

The best software I have found—and one of the cheapest—is a little app for the iPad called Book Creator [http://www.redjumper.net/bookcreator]. It is only $5. With it, you can design pages, put text on top of pictures, and do a fair amount of things before the little thing runs out of steam. For example, you can’t use italics and roman in the same sentence. You can’t put pictures on top of pictures and you are stuck with only three different book sizes: square, portrait, and landscape. Still, you can do a lot. Check it out at the website mentioned. There’s a simple video to watch. After you see the video, you’ll have a million ideas of your own. 

The one nice thing about Book Creator is that it is DRM-free. DRM means ‘digital rights management.’ I don’t pretend to understand all of the legal ramifications of DRM, but I understand that if you use software that is not DRM-free, you may run into problems down the road. You may not be able to sell your books in all of the venus you would like. 

iBooks and iTunes have come out with iAuthor

 [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iauthor/id439057242?mt=8]. 

This is really cheap software, but it is not DRM-free. If you create something with iAuthor, you can only sell what you create as an iBook. Apple is not the only one doing this. Many companies that claim to help you out have DRM clauses. Unless you are a lawyer, I’d be wary of giving any of my rights away.

Even so, in order to sell books for the iPad, you have to sign an agreement. I signed the agreement which contained some pretty scary stuff about rights. Why? Because either party can break the agreement with a 30-day written notice. I figured that was fair. After all, when I sell through iBooks, I come away with a 70% share. See if a legacy publisher will give you that much. And with a legacy publisher you sign everything away.

Story Pictures

The other day, during an interview, I was asked, “What makes a picture narrative?” I remember pausing . . . for quite a while . . . before answering. No one had ever asked me a question like that. So, marshaling what few thoughts I had in my brain under the category “picture + narrative,” I tried to respond as best I could. I blathered out something, and interviewer and I found ourselves exploring the relationship between picture and story, between image and words—you know: René Magritte’s famous picture that either destroys the bond between word and picture or reinforces the notion that pictures are not real by saying “this is not a pipe.”

My interviewer and I also explored the yin and yang of words and pictures: if a word is worth a thousand pictures then a picture is worth a thousand words. (It has just occurred to me that I could illustrate this with my own take on Magritte’s picture.) 

But the central question—what gives a picture its narrative quality?—I don’t think I ever fully answered. 

Pictures have been used to help tell stories from very ancient times. The cave paintings at Lascaux, the friezes at Luxor, the mosaics in Libya all attest to that. After the Renaissance, painting was all about story telling, or so it seemed. Huge paintings were done not only to remind the faithful of biblical stories but the literati of the myths from Greece and Rome. Somewhere along the way, perhaps from the schools that flourished in the low countries, another type of painting emerged. One that could generate a story never told but understood by all who viewed the painting. I am thinking in particular of Vermeer’s work.

By the nineteenth century, this type of narrative painting was in full flower. Tired field hands, laboring peasants, lonely women sipping wine all became worthy subjects like this one done by Ramón Casas i Carbó about 1891. 

Along with this, printing techniques evolved to such a point that book illustration took off. For children, this was the time of Randolph Caldecott, N. C. Wyeth, and Kate Greenaway. 

Then, suddenly, or so it seems to me, a split occurred. People began to differentiate between illustration and painting, between narrative painting and real art. Narrative painting was the stuff of book illustrators, advertisers, propagandists. 

Let those guys tell the stories. Let the world go to blazes. Real art doesn’t need to tell a story. Real art exists to arouse the non-story neurons in the brain, the ones sensitive to color and design, darks and lights, dynamic and static compositions. After all, every one accepts that music is non-narrative. Why couldn’t people accept that art is as well? By 1950, the answer was: they’d damn well better. Here’s Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist”:

Sometime in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have won a bet to see who could write the shortest story. His winning story: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” I mentioned this to my interviewer and wondered whether anyone had attempted to tell a story with just one picture using the least visual information possible. You have probably seen a million of these, but these “minimal” illustrations have accompanying words. But what if there are no words, just one threadbare image that tells a story? If any one has any candidate, I’d like to see it. 

On the other hand, if you were allowed more than one image, it would be easy to string a series of them together to tell a story. This is what graphic novels do. This is what some of the best children’s books ever to come out do. With a series of pictures the illustrator can establish all the elements of a story: the beginning, middle, and end as well as arouse emotions much in the same way that Hemingway’s six-word story did. Here’s a fine example by Monique Félix, called The Plane, done in 1980.

I have never actually written a wordless picture book, although I have made several attempts. The closest I have come is my book Mango Rain, which has recently been published in English. (It has up to now only been available in Brazilian Portuguese.) In this book, the words and pictures by and large tell the story of Thomas, who makes a toy pick-up truck. But the pictures tell an additional story: of the mango tree and how it blossoms and produces fruit.

There is nothing unusual here. Good illustrators often show something outside of the words, almost beyond the words. Look at Olga Dugina and Andrej Dagin’s work. Here are some examples from their interpretation of the brave little tailor:

Then there are pictures that words can never describe no matter how hard one might try. These pictures assail those parts of the brain that have nothing to do with words but have everything to do with how we interpret the world around up. Chris Van Allsburg’s illustrations for his The Mysteries of Harris Burdick are part of a whole genre of visual art that takes us to Escher and back to Magritte, where I started.

Of course, the ability to interpret illustrations, to know what is paradoxical or contra-factual and what is not depends a large part on one’s culture. There have been a lot of studies about how poor children interpret illustrations vs how middle-class children look at pictures. When I was a professor at the Université Nationale du Rwanda, some of my graduate students were very much interested in how textbooks for teaching English printed in Europe presented Rwandan children with real problems. One student chose a lesson from a French-printed English language book that showed Johnny taking a bath. “How,” my student asked, “was a Rwandan child going to interpret a scene so different from his own experience of taking a bath?” My glib answer was: if the picture is not too obscure, such a picture becomes an occasion to teach the students about a world different from the one they experience.

I often think about these “cultural problems” when I illustrate my own books. In the opening scene of my book Rain School, I purposely presented the viewer with a picture which would be very easy for a Chadian to interpret but very difficult for an American to fully appreciate. Whenever American students ask me about the picture, I am happy to tell them what I drew. Here is that scene with notes overlaid.

Culture, paradox, the imaginative interpretation of the text by the illustrator, the emotions aroused—these are all part of what gives a narrative quality to a picture. They are what makes a picture tell a story. And telling a story is what makes us human. 

Illustration by Charlynn A., Kapolei Elementary School, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.

On Being or Not Being a Pal

Since my last posting, I have been busy with producing print-on-demand books (PODs). I have had several proofs done and have learned a great deal—mostly about paper and binding and other technical aspects of the physical book itself. I’ll share all of that in my next post.

What I’d like to talk about this time is another aspect of POD books and their cousins, e-books. That aspect is acceptance. No, not acceptance by the public but by organizations.  Since POD books are really self-published books, they don’t have the cachet of some big publisher to give them rank and glory. They are often considered to be nothing more than vanity books—you know—the kind of book that an Aunt Naomi would want to pay for to be published about her girlhood or some crazy self-styled historian would want to get out on his theory of the true meaning of the Egyptian pyramids.

These—let’s call them—fringe books are still being published, perhaps more than ever with the ease of POD books and e-books. But serious books, quality books, are also being self-published which rival the books published by the big guys in New York and Boston. And, what is more, these self-published books are selling. 

This fact has changed the connotation of the phrase “self-published book.” They are not all written by crackpots. They are not all poorly illustrated or poorly designed. So, with this in mind, I decided to write to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (www.scbwi.org) and question them on their policy of differentiating between members who have PAL (Published And Listed) status and those who do not. Here is the e-mail I wrote the other day:

Steve Mooser, president

Lin Oliver, Executive Director

Aloha:

In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg brought about a profound revolution that affected the medieval publishing world. Within a few years, copyists and illuminators were thrown out of work. The publishing industry, as we know it: businessmen taking on the expense of printing an author’s work, began to take shape. To the mid-fifteenth-century person, such change must have been bewildering. The whole notion of guilds and who had access to knowledge was transformed the minute Gutenberg first turned the screw of his wooden press.

Today we are faced with a similar transformation. It is as profound as the one that Gutenberg began. It is as bewildering. Now Gutenberg belongs to the past. What lies ahead are electronic books and print-on-demand services that can make a published author out of anyone—or, as is happening more and more, allow published authors to publish work that was rejected by traditional houses.

Some say that we are witnessing the end of quality books, the end of the editor’s role in producing those books, the end of reading. I couldn’t disagree more. Who said that publishers in the past (now called legacy publishers) always turned out quality books? Who said that every editor did a good job or that authors didn’t need someone to edit their work? Who said that only excellent authors were published? More often than not, in the past 500 years, only what was salable was published. Publishing was and is a business.

E-books and print-on-demand books are changing all of this: if you have something to say, research to share, a picture book that is dear to your heart, you can publish it. Will it be good? Will it be read? Will it be purchased? Who knows? But with as little as ten dollars, a person can publish.

So, what does “published author” mean these days? Is an e-book author who sells a million copies a published author? Is a POD author, who sells through Ingrams to libraries and schools a published author?  According to the Pen Women of America, that person—or any person who publishes—is. Yet, according to SCBWI, that person is not, as far as I can tell. 

As a legacy-published-author friend of mine put it in a recent letter to me:

Pen Women, the world’s most staid and conservative group at the national level, had to consider changes to their membership criteria a few years ago, and self-published and POD works are now acceptable as “Letters” credentials in many cases.  Credentials in “Arts” and “Music” also were liberalized in keeping with new media opportunities.  Surprisingly, there have not been the number of outcries everyone expected against “liberalizing” or “weakening” the criteria.  NLAPW-Honolulu, I’m proud to say, played a part in that, especially one of our music members, Claire Rivero, who petitioned for the changes.  I personally think that the caliber of our members is even better than before, and we see more young and energetic members doing cutting-edge creations on our roster.  “We’re not your mother’s, or great-grandmother’s, Pen Women anymore!”

Believe me, if Pen Women can look to the future after 114 years or so of status-quo, any national organization can consider the basics.

From my friend’s letter, it is clear that times are changing. Has SCBWI begun to change? If so, I’d like to know what these changes are before I renew my membership. Why support an organization that is not in step with the changing times?

Aloha,

James Rumford,

legacy-published author and illustrator

and SCBWI member since 1997.

I received an answer right away and a follow-up letter, which I’ll quote in full:

Hi James—As I remarked earlier we are, of course, very aware of the changes taking place(or have already taken place) in publishing. Many books that are now self published or POD are very good and we have provisions set up to approve those individuals and publishers for PAL status, which I know you and your work enjoys.  We are introducing sessions in conferences and Bulletin articles that also guide self publishers, and warn them of the pitfalls as well. But as to giving Pal status to everyone who has a book we have moved cautiously, because there should be some distinction between a well produced and written book and one sloppily done—and we are expanding our criteria, but slowly and deliberately.

The SCBWI would benefit considerably by opening PAL membership to everyone—we have lost members over the last year due to the current policy, and no doubt could increase membership by changing our criteria, but that is something our Board would not approve, nor would we endorse.

So, we are adapting and will continue to do so, but only in a way that respects quality children’s books, no matter in what form they may take.

Thanks, again, for taking the time to let us know your thoughts. We are most appreciative of your opinion—all best wishes, Steve

I wasn’t surprised by Mr. Mooser’s response. It takes a while for an organization to make big changes. Even so, I immediately sat down and wrote:

Aloha, e Steve,

I was glad to see that SCBWI is changing, albeit slowly, but I would like to see more.

My argument runs like this:

1  SCBWI gives PAL status to e-authors and POD authors.

2  With this open-arms approach, membership grows, attracting not just new talent but even more editors and designers than it does now. Now SCBWI truly becomes a meeting place of like-minded people who can help each other improve.

3  SCBWI ramps up its workshops for self-published authors not just in areas of story and illustration but book design as well.

4  As more and more members turn to electronic and POD publishing, SCBWI puts pressure on the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble to continue to make improvements especially in the area of electronic children’s picture books. This goes for the POD industry as well.

5 SCBWI puts pressure on legacy publishers to offer fair and reasonable royalties for the electronic editions they produce of a given author’s work. 

Although SCBWI offers many valuable services to its members, it exists, I believe to help people get published for the first time or, if published, stay published. SCBWI attracts new members by telling them that if they mention in their query letters that they are SCBWI members, their submission will carry more weight. Thus, the link that connects SCBWI to the publishing world is a strong one, and SCBWI has status among the guys that matter. It is no wonder that the board is reluctant to make changes to its policies. But what if people begin to bypass publishers? Then what? I know several well-established authors and illustrators who are doing just that.

It is nice to have standards. But who decides these standards? Right now it is the publishers. Do they always turn out good books? Not really. So why are they the arbiters of what makes a good children’s book—especially now that the publishers have largely been hijacked by corporate interests and bottom-liners who are more interested in signing up a movie star than they are some talented nobody? 

Fortunately, for the talented nobodys of this world, recent technology has made it possible for them to put their stuff out there. The question is, and obviously, your board has wrestled with finding an answer, is their stuff good enough? Without a publisher’s stamp of approval, it is hard to tell. Yet you write that SCBWI has set up provisions to pass judgment on the work of self-published authors. This sounds like a fine idea, but SCBWI should also apply these same provisions to legacy-published works; otherwise, SCBWI becomes an organization for publishers, more of a club than a meeting place of ideas. Let the Caldecott and Newberry awards of this world decide what’s good. Let SCBWI get on with what it does best: helping people turn out good books.

I spoke of guilds in my initial letter. They had Europe in a stranglehold. New ideas were stifled. The status quo was maintained until the guilds were swept away by a wave of change, one brought about by the invention of printing. Today the computer and the internet and all that goes with it are bringing about a similar change. Children’s books aren’t going to be just paper and ink but light and sound and movement. They are going to be unimaginable jewels of human ingenuity. Change is happening rapidly. The trend is irreversible. If SCBWI doesn’t embrace this change, they will become irrelevant. Someone will start a new organization, an SSCBWI: Society of Self-Published Book Writers and Illusrtators.

Aloha,

Jim

The ease of self-publishing, using the internet to self-promote, the attractiveness of retaining all of the profits—all of these things have really turned the publishing world and organizations like SCBWI upside down. They are faced with making uncomfortable changes to their business models, their policies, their notions of what is a book. The questions I have raised aren’t going away, and I am sure I’ll have more to say in a future post because, these days it isn’t just a matter of whether a non-paper-ink book is a book but whether self-published ones are equal to those put out by the big guys. 

The Author’s Lament

I have hesitated writing about editor-author relations because I don’t know if I can be honest and fair. Over the last sixteen or so years, I have had my ups and downs. Sometimes, I have enjoyed working with a particular editor, sometimes not. A good friend of mine, who has worked with many editors told me recently that, although he is a positive person, he never found an editor he liked!

I suppose that there is truth in my friend’s statement. Editors are like bosses. They aren’t there to be liked. They are there to get the job done. This, of course, destroys a bit the romantic notion of having a martini over lunch with one’s editor—you know—the stuff that happened in the old days of publishing, when publishers cared about their authors and considered it important to nurture the fragile egos they had taken under their wing.

Even so, a couple of months ago, I was in Boston and had a wonderful lunch with my editor Kate O’Sullivan at Houghton Mifflin and the book designer for Rain School, Carol Goldenberg. So, the author-editor culture does still exist. In fact, when I sold my first book to Houghton Mifflin, they were definitely in the nurturing mode. They took me under their wing and nursed me along, encouraging me to do better and better work. 

I’d like to think that this culture still exists, but I find, in talking with other authors, that it really doesn’t in spite of my lunch in Boston a few months back. At least, those I have talked to haven’t seen any evidence of it. I don’t know what the reason is. Has publishing become too much of a business? I don’t think so. It always was a business. Perhaps something else has changed. Maybe it is that publishers have gotten too big. They are part of huge corporations with thousands of employees and thousands of rules and a marketing division that rules the roost.

There is something else that has changed the dynamic. Published authors are turning more and more to self-publishing. The money is better. There are fewer hassles. And with hundreds of editors out of a job and looking for free-lance work, it is a simple matter to get a top-notch editor to look over one’s manuscript and make suggestions. 

Editors do have an important function, which I forgot to mention at the outset. If they are good, they know how to tighten the prose, enhance the plot, and ask really good “what if” questions—you know: what if Mortimer kissed Eloise just as they were going into the school cafeteria . . . right in front of everybody? 

Unpublished authors and many self-published authors don’t know the value of a good editor. Unpublished authors are often sure they have the perfect story. Published authors aren’t so cocksure. They have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous reviewers. They have done booksignings where only one or two books are sold. They know that they really have to listen to what others say about their manuscripts before they go into print.

So, yes, editors are important, but are they always right? When should an author stick to his guns and refuse to change a word or remove a paragraph or have Mortimer kiss Eloise in front of everybody? I don’t have an answer. I do know that when I have solid reasons for not taking the editor’s suggestions, the editor usually bends and lets me have my way. There are rarely any fights. Most editors realize that you know the book better than they do, and, as I said, if your reasons are rock solid, they will usually acquiesce. 

So far, I have only been talking about authors. What about illustrators? Over the years I have gotten the feeling that editors do not treat authors and illustrators in the same way. There seems to be more give and take with words and plot outlines, but not so with pictures. 

“We don’t want yellow in this picture.” 

“We want that girl’s hair longer.” 

“We don’t want gloomy pictures.” 

Editors sometimes treat illustrators as hired help.

Editors are only part of the problem. In big publishing houses there are art directors, too. Their job it is to make sure that the illustrations and the overall design of the book are up to par. Many art directors are sympathetic to illustrators. There is compromise, but there is also the attitude of “my way or the highway.”

I am not solely an illustrator; so I rarely have seen that attitude. I am treated as an author who can draw; I am not just an illustrator who was hired to do a job. This makes a big difference, and over the years, I have enjoyed very good relations with both editors and art directors. Okay, once I took a book away from a publisher because they told me after the book was finished that they didn’t like the art at all. I had no choice in that instance, but, as I said, I have had in general few problems . . . until recently.

Neal Porter, at Roaring Brook Press, and I got in a tug of war over the cover for my next book. Months ago, we had agreed on a cover. I painted it and it was vetted by the marketing guys. All was set . . . until I saw the proof. I no longer liked the cover. I made some changes, drastic ones, and told Neal to stop the presses. Neal took one look at my revised cover and basically said, “No way. We’re sticking with the cover we both agreed on months ago.”

“But it is a terrible cover. I don’t like it at all. It doesn’t fit the vision I have for the book.”

Neal, whom I admire immensely, wouldn’t budge. There was nothing I could do, short of sending back the advance and asking for my manuscript returned. I decided not “to go nuclear,” as my agent put it.

Did Neal overstep his bounds? Did he trample over me as an artist? Did he treat me as a hireling?  Or did I not play fair? Was I too arrogant, thinking that I knew better than he what would make a more appealing cover?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. What I do know is this: writing and illustrating a book is art by committee. Once the editor, the art director, the marketeer have all had their say, a book rarely emerges unchanged. The artist’s work is either improved or his vision is destroyed. This is the way of things, and, to be fair, I should have understood this. 

“Once you hand your book over to the editor,” said the same friend who told me he disliked editors, “you have to realize that it is no longer your book.  It is “our” book. By using the word “our,” you can avoid huge problems because you consider the editor and his or her staff part of the team.”

But I think that for my friend’s advice to be effective—indeed, for publishing even to survive—publishing has to go back to the old days when the houses were smaller, when editors took the time to nurture, when they moved out of the way to let the artist blossom.

This is the third time I have used the word “artist” in this posting. It is an important point to remember these days, as this huge sub species Homo sapiens artiste begins fleeing to the creative freedom that print-on-demand and e-books can offer.