On Wednesdays this fall, I’m
sharing the process of creating my recently-published book Ick! Delightfully
Disgusting Animals Dinners, Dwellings, and Defenses step-by-step. (To learn about the whole process in one sitting or to share an age-appropriate version with your students, check out this new resource on my website.)
involves figuring out the text’s major characteristics. You can scroll down and
read that post. Today, I’ll focus on what happened next, and how I got a bit of
a surprise.
If I’d been planning to write
a picture book, I would have started writing my rough draft at this point, but
because I’d collected so much great information about icky animals, I decided
to write three 48-page books for middle grade readers—one called Disgusting
Dinners, one called Disgusting Dwellings, and one called Disgusting Defenses.
Since the books would have the same design and text characteristics, I thought
I’d be able to sell the series with a proposal.
As you can see, my proposal included ideas about what the books
would physically look like, a description of the content, an outline, a list of
all the animals I’d include, and three writing samples.
Here you can see the writing sample for the black-backed jackal. At this point, I envisioned a main text with two additional text
features—a fast fact and a stat stack.
National Geographic loved the idea, but they wanted one 112-page
book instead of three 48-page books. They also wanted a larger trim size and a
lot more text on each page. I developed some ideas for additional sections , including Extra Ick! and a Critter Challenge math riddle, and
submitted a revised writing sample, which they approved.
Why don’t you see those Critter Challenge sidebars in the final
book? Eventually, we decided to cut them all.
next week.
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One Response
Hi Melissa, I just wanted to let you know how much I am enjoying this series and behind the scenes peek at your work. Thank you!