"Why are picture books texts so hard to sell?" Short answer: THEY'RE NOT! This is one of the biggest misconceptions about children's publishing. After saying this for the twelfth millionth time this week, I wrote a looong post about it: https://writingcommunity.ca/kidlit-confusion-is-it-harder-to-sell-picture-book-texts/ #kidlit #picturebook #pb
Comments
(To be clear I’m not asking you to do more work; you’ve done tons! Just thinking out loud 🙂)
It’s hard selling a PB either way, that’s the only sure thing!
But respectfully, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't actually disprove the idea that picture books are harder to sell.
You very convincingly demonstrate that publishers buy more PBs than novels. But...
If you are just looking at the deals in PW, you'd see that the publisher had bought twice as many PBs as novels! That would suggest it's easier to sell a PB.
It's still kinda amazing that you have a large enough sampling to queries to be roughly the same as PM. Or do you think that's just a coincidence?