How to Help Your Child Become an Author

Here’s a simple and inexpensive way to help your young child become an author in just a few easy steps.

Children are already authors and illustrators! We should be teaching them that and encouraging them in that way. They don’t need to wait until they grow up to become an author, they are one already!

When my son was in 1st grade, he wanted to write a book and he wasn’t satisfied with a bundle of paper stapled together. He wanted to publish a book and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him he couldn’t. So I came up with a solution.

After writing my book, Adventure Girls, I was again faced with children who wanted to be authors and wondered how they could do it. Telling them they are already authors (which they are), wasn’t quite the feedback they were looking for. They wanted to publish a book. They wanted their words to appear important. 

There are publishing sites out there that work with schools to publish class books and even individual pieces. I haven’t personally tried these, but my daughter’s class worked with one and the cost was about $25 per student. 

I want to share with you how I published my son’s book (his own version of Fly Guy) and what I recommend parents do for their children when they want to publish their own book. 

Directions:

1. Your child writes a story or you write as they dictate. 
2. Type the story (you can type it or your child can type it, depending on their age). Put only the sentences that you want on each page like you want it to appear in your book. Make sure your page is set to landscape.
3. Use a text box to put the sentences at the top or bottom of the page and leave the rest of the page blank for the illustrations. 
4. Print the pages. Don’t forget the Cover page and the About the Author page.
5. Have your child illustrate each page. 
6. Take a picture of each page. Zoom in as close as possible or edit your pictures to crop out anything besides the actual page. 
7. Create a photo book online using your photos. We made ours into the 4×6 and 5×7 soft cover books (from Walgreens) because it was the best value and I wasn’t sure how many books we were going to be making. The covers were glossy and on the spine of the book you can include the Title and Author. 

That’s it! These simple steps can help your child publish a book, show them that their words are important, and reinforce the concept that they are already an author.