The Japanese are so weird:

The last time I posted, I gave you some tips on how to write successful children’s books. Equally important is how to sell children’s books, because let’s face it: the only reason anyone writes this stuff is for the money. And the MILFs at book signings.

Some of the stuff I mentioned previously will help you move your inventory – write about princesses for girls and monsters for boys but don’t say “fuck” — but nothing pushes paper like a good title. Cover art helps too, but we’ll get to that later.

Your first inclination will be to make the title say a lot about what’s in the book, but in reality it’s not very important. Say you have a story about a gnome who farts rainbows; your first stab at a title might be The Gnome Who Farted Rainbows, but you run the risk of tipping your hand too early. The reader will think, “Well now I know that it’s about a hideous deformed midget who emits colored light from its supposedly whimsical ass. What more do I need to know?” See? The title gives you nowhere to go but down. In the end, I called it Rumplefartskin, which is equally whimsical but doesn’t give away the whole rainbow schtick. It’s also a take-off of a famous children’s story, so you might fool some people into thinking it’s the original or at least a gritty reboot.

So if you can’t give away too much in the title, how do you still get people interested? I like to pick a single thing that’s important to the plot but doesn’t say too much about the plot, and zero in on that. Then stick the word “prince” in it somewhere. That’s what I did with my book Zardak, Prince of Accounting, which was kind of sneaky because Zardak was really just a CPA — a commoner CPA — which not only helped sell the book but gave poseur hipster parents an excuse to come up with bullshit literature criticism explanations for the title. Also, Zardak was a unicorn.

You’ll want to stay away from titles that are too contemporary or that piggy-back on current fads. It may seem like a good way to make a quick buck, but I’m here to tell you that you’re better off with a book that keeps selling for decades than one that gets pulled off the shelf once the boy band you based it on dissolves in a disgraced cloud of cocaine and hookers. My book ¡Menudo Sleepover! doesn’t sell worth shit anymore. At least Groovy Gary’s Orange-Balorange Shag Carpet still sells a bit at folk music festivals.

Sometimes it takes two or three tries to get just the right title. I don’t know why. But I had a tough time with one book title a while back. My editor rejected the initial title, The Thalidomide Gang, because it was too controversial. We eventually agreed on a title, and the book was initially released as The Birth Defectors, which we thought had a neat science-fictiony ring to it. But everyone else thought it had a questionable-tastey ring to it. So after about a year, it was re-released as Stumpy’s Heroes, and the rest is history!

Now it also makes a lot of sense to have great cover art that kind of goes along with the title. Space Weasels had weasels in space suits on the cover, which was obvious, but Cheetah Spotting had a kind of lion thing on the front because no matter how many times I tried I just couldn’t get the fucking cheetah to look right. I think my problem was that it kept on looking like Chester Cheetah, and I didn’t want another trademark suit on my hands. Not after the whole Whidden and the Ganong Factory mess. Whatever you do, though, don’t try to make your cover art obscure or abstract. Nobody buys children’s books with floating eyeballs or tentacles, except the Japanese.

In my next installment, I’ll tell you all how to get into the business — how to get a publisher to notice you, how to work with an editor, and whether you should use a  pseudonym for your adult erotic gladiator fiction.

Seems like the Mighty Carp are humming along at their customary .380 winning percentage. Sure, that’s a lousy record, but a) it’s the Carp’s lousy record, and they own it with great affection, and; b) it’s still better than the Baystars’ ancestor-shaming .359.

Fucking Baystars.

Writing children’s literature is hard. You have to know your audience, and your audience is young and naive, and won’t appreciate a lot of your best jokes about Jews. On top of that, it’s difficult to really say what you want to say in language that kids will understand and that parents won’t give you crap for using. So you end up writing things like:

“The Prince saw the beautiful maiden, and his heart was filled with love!”

when what you really want to say is:

“The Prince wanted to plow her like a farmer with a brand new John Deere”

Under no circumstances can you mention the Prince’s boner.

Rhyming is tricky, too. When you’re writing for older kids, you can be more verbose and even use more grown-up words (though you usually can’t use “fuck”), but for younger kids they expect things to rhyme. Luckily, I learned how to rhyme in the army, where we used to march and chant things like:

I don’t know but I’ve been told
Nipples get hard when they’re cold

But not every story involves nipples, so you have to get creative with rhyming. I find it helps to pick character names and plot devices that lend themselves to easy rhyming. If you call your prince “Jack”, then there are lots of good rhymes, like “black” and “sack” and probably a few more. I made the mistake once of having a character called Enis the Pet Rock, which was really hard because “rock” doesn’t really rhyme with anything.

Smaller kids like animal characters. I don’t know why. But animals are usually easier to draw, which is good when you illustrate your own stories, like I do. That’s another thing I learned in the army, by the way. During my second tour of duty in Vietnam, I ended up with a bad poontang infection and spent a lot of time in sickbay, so I took up drawing to pass the time between morphine shots. One of my cartoons even became kind of famous and lots of copies circulated among the grunts. In it, a doctor tells a soldier that he has crabs, and the soldier replies, “I’m allergic to shellfish?!” I was even able to reuse that one for my book Winkie’s Magic Waterbed, though I had to change the soldier into a bunny rabbit.

When you combine good rhymes with animal characters, it’s hard to go wrong. Unless your story is about a duck, which I stay away from because the best possible rhyme is the one word you should never use.

Girls love horses and princes. I don’t know why. But one of my best sellers was Arvalon the Horse Prince, which is a clever social commentary about miscegenation disguised as story about a royal horse who wants to plow a beautiful maiden.

Boys love monsters. I don’t know why. But you have to make them kind of goofy looking monsters, because parents won’t buy merchandise of characters that make their kids shit their pants in terror. The guy who wrote Where the Wild Things Are knew this, which is why he dialed way back on the tentacles. I learned that the hard way when my book Orville Meets the Ovipositor sold poorly. There were some great rhymes in that one, too, as you can imagine.

But like everything else in life, writing for kids is mostly trial and error. For every success I’ve had, like Superwallaby and Stinky Blinky Likes A Drinky, there are disappointments like Poop Adventures and Charlie The Chimp Chases Chinamen. I’ll have some thoughts on how to give snappy titles to your books next time.

Seriously.

From 25 Horribly Sexist Vintage Ads