Do you know about the FREE Children’s Story Magic writing course?

New session begins February 1st!

Here's what you'll get, in 30 days:

• Character - creating heroes and villains that we'll love
• Wonderful words - choosing and using the best nouns, verbs, adjective and more
• Dialogue - tools to put words in your characters' mouths
• Plot - crafting a story that keeps us on our toes

Each day's email is a tasty, bite-sized 100 words long.  That’s super-short, because I know you’re super-busy. 

Every day, you’ll be challenged, through examples and exercises, to think about successful kids’ books… and about your own.  Let’s get YOUR book off your hard drive and into kids’ hands sooner than you could ever have dreamed.

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Idea theft: how safe is your story?

“That’s MINE!”

You can hear the cry in probably every kindergarten in the world… and perhaps every gathering of writers, as well.

Oh, we don’t shout it out loud.  But we THINK it, huddling protectively over our story ideas as though someone was going to steal them if we let them out of our sight for a second.

Well, I hate to break it to you:  you can’t copyright an idea.  You also can’t copyright your book’s title.  The only thing that’s protected by copyright is the story you write – the whole exact story.  (Here’s more on copyright and book titles, if you’re interested.)

But the happy flipside of that is that theft is really rare in the world of children’s writers.  So you can comfortably chat about your story ideas, your titles, or anything else.  Your ideas won’t be stolen, for instance, if you …

• workshop them in a class or course
• submit them to a mainstream publishing company
• talk about them at a party
• work on them on a laptop over a public network, like a coffee shop

Most writers actually have one of two main concerns when it comes to story theft: 

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Having trouble choosing a children’s-book writing course? I don’t blame you!

When I decided to take an online children’s picture book writing course, I had no idea where to start (I’ll tell you where I ended up later on, and offer a few more good suggestions as well.).

Googling “children’s picture-book writing course” turns up a dizzying range of courses, from universities (expensive!) to individual authors’ homemade courses (sketchy?).  Some claim to have been around for 30-some-odd years, while many others have popped up overnight.

All these courses claim to be the BEST.  How can you tell them apart? 

The good news is that you can find decent courses at a few different price levels.  As for which ones will actually help you get ahead… I’m convinced that has more to do with your attitude than with the teacher (as long as he/she is reasonably competent).

I’ve taken a bunch of creative writing classes, both online and in person.  Some were good, a couple were great… one (in-person at a major university) was pretty bad:  we spent much of the time looking at the professor’s own (mediocre) writing.

Here are three questions to help you narrow down what you’re looking for:

1.  What is my goal for the course?

Do you want to get your story down on paper?  Are you struggling with stilted language?  Or are you at the stage of figuring out how to get it in front of as many publishers as possible? 

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