Here are some useful resources and information on the children's book field.

• The Purple Crayon. This web site from the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children’s Books is a good place to start. Basic Information about the field is here. Answers to questions about agents — how to find one, and whether you need one — are here.

• Writing With Pictures, by Uri Shulevitz, is the best book on writing and illustrating picture books. Find it at your library or buy it from your local bookseller here, or from Amazon here.

• Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. SCBWI publishes a newsletter, holds conferences, and conducts guest speaker/panel discussion series. Here you can find other people interested in the field, share information and experience, and hash out the pleasures and frustrations of the field.

• Your local library. Look over the children’s collection with an author’s and artist’s and reader’s eye. Which books do you find most successful? Why?

• Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market. Edited by Alice Pope. Published annually by Writers Digest Books. A good guide to the hows and wheres of submitting work, with interviews with people in the field.

• For an unvarnished editor's perspective, there's the blog Editorial Anonymous. Here are revealed certain unsentimental realities of writing, submitting, and publishing.

• An archive of articles of special interest to authors and artists (practicing and aspiring) are at The Horn Book Magazine’s site here.

• Finally, a note to authors about illustrations: Unless you yourself are author and illustrator, editors prefer to receive manuscripts without art or an artist attached to a project, no matter how short the text, or how important the art will be to your story. It's part of the job of editors and art directors to know the work of illustrators, established and new, and to make good matches between texts and images. There are happy exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions; if you're waiting to find an illustrator before submitting your picture book manuscript, wait no more.

Best,
Brian Floca