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Keeping readers engaged in books without pictures
Children are as different as the many different books catering to their many different interests and desires. Because of this, children’s books offer a wealth of diversity in formats, shapes, sizes, and intended audiences. In this chapter, we explain the different formats that children’s books can fall into. We also show you a lot of examples of book covers so that you can get a feel for successful and representative formats that sell in various channels of the children’s book market. In Chapter 3, we talk about genres, another way to group children’s books. Each genre has its own conventions that you must address, as well.
Dissecting the Anatomy of a Book
Before we go dropping a lot of terminology on you, we want you to know the most basic parts of a book. If you at least kind of recognize these terms, you can more easily communicate about your book to other publishing professionals:
Cover: The face your book presents to the world after it’s published. You can have a hardcover book (also known as a hardback), meaning it has paper glued over hard cardboard on three sides (front cover, back cover, and spine); or you might have a softcover book (also known as a paperback), meaning it has thick bond cardstock paper for all three sides. You can also have paper over board.Hardcover: You call a hardcover book’s cover its case. The case is often one solid color that has the front cover and spine stamped with the name of the book and author. The jacket is a sheet of paper that wraps around this case and has some sort of illustration, depending on the format.Softcover: A softcover book’s front cover usually features the title, the author’s name, the illustrator’s name, and some graphic image. The back cover can include sell copy (words that describe what the book is about in brief and why it’s so great), the publisher’s name, copyright info, a barcode, a price, and other information that helps retailers categorize and sell it.Paper-over-board: When a hardcover book cover doesn’t have a jacket and looks more like a softcover book cover, it’s called a paper-over-board book. The paper is wrapped around and secured to the cardboard without a jacket covering it. (Note: For many board books and novelty books, the text and images begin right away on the inside front cover.)
Spine: The part of the book that usually hides the binding, which is where the pages are glued or sewn together. The spine is between both covers and usually displays, at minimum, the title, the author’s and illustrator’s last names, and the publisher’s name or logo.
Jacket: A separate piece of heavy-stock removable paper that you can wrap around the cover and tuck under the front and back covers of the book. The jacket can repeat all the information and images found on the front cover. But sometimes the book’s actual hardcover has only the title, the author’s name, the illustrator’s name (if there is one), and the publisher’s logo on the spine (which often occurs in picture books and hardcover young adult novels). In these cases, the jacket provides all the images and publishing information, including the title, credits, sell copy, author and illustrator bios, and dedication.Specifically, the front flap of the jacket usually has sell copy; the back flap of the jacket often has author (and illustrator) bios.
Pages: The sheets of paper onto which they print your story and any illustrations. Most children’s books are published in signatures (groups) of 8 pages each because of the way that the bindery prints, folds, and then cuts the pages. For this reason, most children’s picture books and leveled readers have pages in denominations of 8: such as 24 or 32 pages, 48 or 64 pages. While you move up into books that have chapters, the signatures are 16 pages long, so those book pages come in multiples of 16.
Trim: Also called trim size; the dimensions of the book. Page trim refers to the size of the book’s interior pages. Cover trim refers to the size of the cover, which may be larger than or the same size as the page trim.
Endpapers: The double leaves of paper added at the front and back of the book before it’s bound. Most of the time, endpapers are added to the book after it’s printed. The binder pastes the outer leaf of each page to the inner surface of the cover (they call this process the paste-down), the inner leaves (or free endpapers) form the first and last pages of the book when bound. Endpapers are mostly of heavier-stock paper than the rest of the text pages, and they’re often decorated or filled with mini-illustrations.
Front matter: The material that comes before the text or story of a book, including the title and copyright pages, a table of contents, an introduction, a dedication, and sometimes acknowledgments. Sometimes, the publisher makes the design decision to move this information to the back of the book.
Back matter: Various sections that come after the main text, mostly supporting material. For example, acknowledgements, an index, citations, a glossary, additional information about the creation of the story (if relevant), or more factual information about the story that can add to the reader’s experience (though this type of back matter is less common in fiction).
Spread: The left page and the right page of an open book constitute a spread. For example, pages 2 and 3 in a picture book usually constitute spread 1, pages 4 and 5 are spread 2, and so on.
Grouping Types of Children’s Books
You can group children’s books into two overarching categories:
Fiction: Made-up stories; a big plate onto which other derivative (and delicious!) morsels may fall
Nonfiction: Writing based on real facts, people, places, or events
Within those categories, you can also divide children’s books into formats based on the various ages the books serve, as well as the book’s size, shape, and content. Some examples of formats include picture books, board books, chapter books, and young adult (YA) books.
Formats help publishers group their titles by age appropriateness (meaning where children are developmentally), physical characteristics, or both. These groupings, in turn, help children’s book readers know what type of books will appeal to children in particular age ranges, or with certain interests or goals.
Note: Publishers often release downloadable digital copies and e-book versions simultaneously with the print versions across many children’s book formats. This is so consumers have many choices in how they read the book.
Illustrated Books
