The majority of writers working on children’s books end up with fiction. It’s understandable – kids love cute anthropomorphic characters and rhyming text, and there’s certainly a big market for fiction. However, nonfiction books for kids can be fun to write and are much easier to publish. If you want to take a chance at this genre, here are some tips that can help:
Find a Niche Topic
One of the main stumbling blocks authors encounter when trying to write nonfiction books for kids is the difficulty of finding a topic. This is a result of the misguided thinking that kids won’t be able to handle general nonfiction topics like history, literature, and engineering. They can. You just need to approach it in a way that will make it easier for kids to understand and less boring to their eyes. You can do this by finding a niche within the topic. For instance, if the topic is civil war, you can focus on civil war nurses, or the soldiers’ uniforms or even the childhood of a famous war hero.
Read Everything about the Topic
Just because you’re trying to simplify a subject for kids doesn’t mean you can skimp out on the research. You have to do your research like you would when writing any kind of book. Look at footnotes, bibliographies, prefaces, and hunt down other sources. Having as much knowledge as possible on a subject will make it easier when distilling it down to its simplest form.
Draft an Outline
You can organize your thoughts better if you draft a rudimentary outline at first, using any method that will be comfortable. For instance, you can write down thoughts and information on index cards, which you can file and then read later when trying to write the first rough draft.
Don’t Follow Trends
It’s a little bit easy for authors to fall into the trap of following trends. Seeing a bunch of books on certain trendy topics in a single shelf might look like it’s a good idea to jump on the bandwagon, but chances are only a handful of those “me-too” books will find a decent amount of readership. That doesn’t mean you can’t write about the topic if you want to, it just means that you should find a fresh new take on it in order to avoid being buried under the rubble.
Find Fascinating and Quirky Facts about your Subject
If there’s one thing that kids love in books, it’s quirky facts. Kids are just finding out all sorts of new things about the world that they live in, and facts that they never would have known on their own are a guaranteed hit. In fact, the appeal of quirky facts is a little bit universal and you may find your books read even by people older than your target audience, so do your research.
And Don’t Forget: Have Fun Writing the Book
Books, even nonfiction ones, are mirrors of your emotion. They will reflect what you are feeling when writing the words. So if you want your book to be enjoyed by kids, you have to enjoy yourself while writing it as well. So don’t turn the whole process into a boring chore. Have fun and enjoy being given the opportunity to encourage reading among kids.
Image credit: Wellspring Community School on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]