I'm currently writing a series of children's picture books aimed at 5-6 year olds and have got the first two out the way. The only thing is I've been looking at various sites and asking advice around how long a children's picture book should be (word count) and I'm getting a lot of conflicting advice. Some say it's 1000, others say it's 600-800 and some say it's around 500.
Does anyone have any advice on how long picture books should be?
For own experience what its worth....
I wrote one Picture Book draft at over 1200 words and during the editing a few weeks later I found to my surprise that I could almost get 2 different books (stories) out of the original draft. It ended up being 2 stories with a 750 and a 500 both of which I'm still editing down 4 months later.
PS - as a dad who regularly reads PB's to kids at night I prefer less words (200-400) as the kids (and me) get tired having to position/hold book to enable both reader and listener to see the pages. Also less words lets me ad-lib a bit in he story telling if the kid is still not that sleepy.
I also noted that if the story text is very short (
The first two books are a little over 700 words and all the books are fiction. They were originally 800 but I cut them down to try and make them a bit simpler.
I've done a lot of research reading picture books in libraries and book shops and some are really long and some are much much shorter.
With everyone's advice on here, I think the way I'm going to go about it is write the story, cut out anything that's not so necessary to the story line and edit until it's as concise as some of the works I've read.
Thank you all for your advice, it's been really helpful having ideas to bounce around with people!
Hi Eleni
The research I've done seems to point at the 500-800 word count for a children's picture book. Different sources give different figures like you say but the average seems to be in that bracket. Having said that, if a publisher really likes and wants your story, it may be okay to go over that word count slightly.
It'll be interesting to see how you get on. I'm kind of I the same boat. My word count is a lot higher so I'm working on trimming it down.