Collection note, 15/09/2026 Writing and illustrating children's books in the Carolinas

1. What does the Carolina children's book community actually offer?

The Carolinas have two SCBWI regions, one for each state, both run largely by volunteers. A regional chapter organizes conferences, portfolio reviews, critique meetups and newsletters. The Carolinas also have a magazine that covers this ground directly: The Carolina Kidlit Review, which writes about craft and revision, submission and critique, and the picture book as a physical object. You can read it at Carolina children's writing magazine. Its stated audience is beginners, illustrators and translators in North and South Carolina who are preparing a manuscript for children.

That last word matters. Translators are included, which is unusual for a regional writing publication. A translator preparing a children's book faces a specific problem: the text has to work aloud in the target language, and the page turns have to land where the original artist placed them. A regional magazine that names translators as part of its readership is at least acknowledging that the work exists.

2. How do you revise a children's manuscript?

Revision in children's books is not the same as revision in adult fiction, because the unit of composition is not the sentence or the chapter. It is the page turn.

A picture book text is usually laid out over 32 pages, which after front matter and back matter leaves roughly 24 to 28 pages of story. Each spread is two facing pages. The writer has to decide what happens on the left page and what happens on the right, because the turn from one to the next is where suspense lives. A line that reads well in a paragraph may fail completely when it is split across a spread.

The standard advice is to make a dummy. Take eight sheets of paper, fold them, staple them, and write or sketch the text onto the spreads. This is crude and it works. Problems that are invisible in a manuscript file become obvious in a dummy: a page with too much text, a page with nothing happening, a climax that lands on a left-hand page instead of a right-hand one.

Word counts by age band are a rough guide, not a rule. Board books run to a few dozen words. Picture books for ages 4 to 8 are commonly 300 to 800 words, sometimes up to 1,000. Early readers are built around controlled vocabulary and short sentences. Chapter books for ages 7 to 10 often run 5,000 to 15,000 words. Middle grade is generally 25,000 to 50,000. Young adult is often 50,000 to 80,000. These numbers describe what publishers buy, not what is possible.

Targeted revision passes are more useful than a single general pass. One pass for structure: does the character want something, and does the want change? One pass for voice: does the narration sound like one person? One pass for the read-aloud: read it out loud and mark every place you stumble. One pass for the page turns. One pass for word count. Doing these separately keeps you from trying to fix everything at once, which usually means fixing nothing.

Reading as a writer means reading current children's books in your category with a pencil. Not to admire them. To see how they solve the problems you have.

3. What does a submission package contain?

For a picture book, the manuscript is formatted in a standard way: double-spaced, 12-point type, a header with your name and contact information, the title, and the word count. Illustration notes are a contested subject. Some agents want them, some do not. The usual compromise is to include a note only where the text is genuinely unclear without it, and to keep it in brackets and in the present tense.

For an illustrator, the portfolio is the submission. Six to eight pieces is the common recommendation, enough to show range without diluting the impression. A portfolio review, whether at a conference or with an art director, is a short conversation about what the work is and who it is for. Bring the original work or good prints, not a phone screen.

The cover letter is short. It says what the book is, who it is for, what the word count is, and why you are sending it to this person. It does not summarize the plot in three paragraphs. It does not explain that you have been writing since childhood.

Agents matter more in children's books than in some other categories, because the market is small and the editors are few. Many children's imprints do not accept unagented submissions at all. Others do, and a regional conference is often the only realistic way to get a manuscript in front of an editor without an agent.

4. How do critique groups work, and what are the rules?

A critique group is a small number of writers or illustrators who read each other's work on a schedule. Three to six people is workable. More than that and the reading load becomes impossible.

The rules that keep groups alive are usually unwritten until they are broken. Send your pages on time. Read everyone else's pages before the meeting. Say what is working before you say what is not. Ask questions instead of issuing verdicts: "I lost track of who was speaking here" is more useful than "the dialogue is bad." Do not defend your work during the critique. Take notes, say thank you, and decide later what to use.

For illustrators, the equivalent is a portfolio swap. The questions are different: does the character read the same way on every page, does the composition leave room for the text, does the palette hold together across a spread.

5. What about the picture book as a physical object?

A picture book is a manufactured object before it is a story. The trim size, the paper stock, the binding and the placement of the gutter all affect what the reader sees. A double-page spread has a fold down the middle, and anything important placed there disappears into the binding. Illustrators learn to keep faces and key objects away from the gutter.

The layout is planned in spreads, not in single pages, and the text is placed after the art in most cases, or in negotiation with it. A dummy at this stage is a maquette: a physical model of the book at actual trim size, with the art and text in position. It is how you find out whether the book works as an object before anyone commits to printing it.

6. Where do independent bookstores fit?

Independent bookstores in the Carolinas are the places where regional children's books actually get handsold. A store with a children's section and a events calendar will often take a local author for a story time or a signing, and a store that has hosted you once will remember you. This is not a marketing strategy so much as a relationship, and it takes years.

A volunteer regional chapter is often the connective tissue between writers, illustrators, bookstores and the few editors who come through town. It is run by people with day jobs. The programming is uneven. It is also, in most of the Carolinas, the only in-person children's book community there is.