How To Write In The Children’s Market (Part 4)

This is going to be my fourth article of many to come. The article series is the how to when it comes to writing in the children’s market. It is going to be a considerably long series so keep checking back for new updates.

Chapter Books

First through fourth graders are reading on their own now but there still not quite ready for the longer traditional novels. The children are starting to make their own decisions now and they are usually buying their own books because they receive allowance now.


At this age kids absolutely want to read about other kids that are just like them. The characters need to be their age or a little older. At this age males and females want to read about strong characters of the same sex. In both cases these books should contain none or almost no adults at all. At all times the protagonist should be a child and all conflicts should be resolved by kids.

Chapter books have many short chapters but unlike easy readers they don’t rely very heavily on illustrations. The chapter book needs to stand alone on its story only and not rely on pictures. In the case of chapter books almost all illustrations are done with simple black and white shadings.

Text appears more deeply on the page than in the easy reader but lots of dialogue still helps to keep the story moving. The chapter books are usually faster paced and include complicated plots. The character list in a chapter book is usually small. The readers are at the age that they can handle more complicated issues. At this age kids love collecting so this explains the popularity of series books. However the readers of chapter books still like the predictability in these books.

When it comes to writing chapter books you can go ahead and use different kinds of sentence structures which can allow for more difficult vocabulary being used. This will make the story flow more like the natural language that it should sound like.

Dale Mazurek

Dale is presently trying to get his first novel published. He has been writing professionally on line for a couple years now. You can check out 3 of his very popular blogs at http://stcajo-readshortstories.blogspot.com/ or http://relationshiptidbits.blogspot.com/ and http://fishingtutor.blogspot.com/