Now that I've begun, in my kooky way, a novel for kids rather than yet another book for adults, I wanted to see what kind of word count I ought to be aiming for. After all, while I read huge numbers of children's books growing up and occasionally still read some, this is not an area of publishing that I've really followed.
Well, I found that middle-grade books tend to be somewhere in the 40,000 to 69,000 word range, which sounds just right for what I'm expecting to end up with. But I also found out a whole lot more.
Children's author Hannah Holt has compiled an amazing and incredibly useful set of statistics about middle-grade authors and their books. While for some things it would be nice to have a larger author sample size (76 authors participated), for the most part she was able to offer a fascinating view into this particular subset of publishing, with lots of handy graphs (and I'm not even big on graphs, but these really worked for me).
Not only did she find the usual word count range (in the middle of a surprisingly wide total range) for books for this age group, but she got data on advance sizes for large and small publishers, how advances correlated to agented vs unagented authors (guess what, having an agent makes a big difference in the size of your advance--not a surprise but good to have confirmed), how much this set of authors tend to make per year from their writing, how many hours a week they tend to write, and a whole host of other interesting data.
Major kudos to Hannah Holt for surveying authors and putting together such a detailed and well organized account of what she found! She also surveyed YA authors, chapter book authors (chapter books are for the age group between picture books and middle-grade), and picture book authors (in three parts, starting with this page). It looks like Hannah Holt has lots of other great stuff on her site too, so if children's books and how they are written and published is of interest to you, definitely check her out!
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