What book titles attract your attention by their words alone? Don’t consider the cover design or who the author is—just the content of the words.

School visits and library visits are a way to interact with our intended readers and get them excited about reading our books. An author’s visit should be entertaining but also offer something more.

I’ve had my head buried in my dog novel revision for the last few months. But as the work draws to a close, I need to start thinking about what comes next. Or rather, what comes after the book is acquired by a publishing company. Yes, there will be more edits and revisions, but the next steps I’m thinking about are how to get the book into readers’ hands.

The important part is to be thinking about where readers will find your book. If your book were in a curated list like on Good Reads or A Mighty Girl, what other books would you want on that list?

Having a strong sense of who you’re writing your book for will make your work stronger. It’ll help you speak knowledgeably about your audience with agents and editors. And it will remind you that you’re not writing this for yourself.

One of the most common pieces of writing advice I heard over the years at children’s writing conferences was “Don’t write to the market.”
But the problem was that I interpreted that advice to mean something else. I thought “Don’t write to the market” meant that I shouldn’t consider the marketplace at all, that I should write what I want and then see where it would fit.
That was a fundamental error on my part.