Ali Standish Breaks Down Mid/YA Debut Author Stats
I hope everyone had a great Easter Weekend! It was my families' once every three year reunion. We hosted in Raleigh this year so I had 60 awesome relatives to spend time with. It was fun and exhausting.
Back to our authorial interests.
Ali Standish, the author of the recently released The Ethan I Was Before, surveyed 100 debut Middle Grade and YA authors about their journey to getting published. She compiled some very interesting data in an article called Becoming a Children's Author: By the Numbers that I suggest everyone check out. Andrew and I are always excited and intrigued to see data like this. As she mentions very few people take the time and spend the effort to compile stats like this so it is a real service to aspiring and even working published authors. Here is the opening but she gets into number of novels written before author's first sales, advances, and a ton of other great info. The whole article can be found on her blog here.
Ever wonder what life is like for a children’s author? Or are you a Snoopy Sally like me who wonders what life is like for OTHER children’s authors?
Then this, my friend, is a post for you!
A couple weeks back, I was preparing to give a presentation to a group of aspiring authors, and I thought that—instead of just speaking from my own experience—it might be helpful to have some data points that show larger trends among debuting children’s authors. I haven’t really seen statistics like these compiled anywhere else, and I thought they might help illuminate what the process is like and maybe dispel some myths about publishing. So I dusted off my old SurveyMonkey account and got to working.
I created a survey and invited members of the 2017 and 2018 debut children's authors groups to take it. (Membership in these groups is restricted to first-time YA or Middle Grade authors whose debut book deals are with traditional U.S. publishers.)
Hope everyone gets through their tax day relatively unscathed, I am off to file an extension!
