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Thursday 19 June 2014

Childrens Book Authors In Los Angeles; How They Go About It

By Ina Hunt


All over the world, authors strive to write books for kids. In Los Angeles, authors have formed writing groups for various reasons, all of which are meant to be helpful in their writing. Childrens book authors in Los Angeles do so many activities together. The activities range from pooling their money, thoughts and ideas to discussing literary elements such as plots, themes, writing styles and characters.

In this city, writers also organize conferences with the intention of sharing their experiences and ideas in writing for children. In most of their conferences, they invite experienced editors, writers and publishers to guide upcoming writers on issues involved in the publishing process. They also provide information concerning the market. Such knowledge is very essential for writers since it helps them know what to touch on in order to be accepted by their readers. Children are very choosy, and any slight error in writing may lead to rejection of their books.

These conferences are very crucial since they afford writers the opportunity of meeting and networking with people who have the most influence in the field. Almost all stakeholders; publishers, unpublished authors, published authors, and editors meet to address various key issues. Some amount of money is paid out as registration fees. This comes after dully going through a session of filling online forms. It is only after this that one qualifies to attend the conferences.

Besides conferences, writers in this city came up with independent groups of writers with similar goals to those of conferences. The Torrance Group is a nice example of associations of writers in the city. This group recruits members only after paying an amount totaling thirty dollars in a year or 50 dollars for every two years. This association is run by volunteers; registration fees only cater for all expenses incurred in the day to day activities of the group.

After registering with the group, authors are able to access a number of benefits. The benefits include being handled better, and receiving invitations to each critique session, subsidized prices for entry into workshops and accessing a large amount of data available on the websites of the group. The information fosters awareness of every organized event among writers.

In one of the meetings, a facilitator talked about the importance of involving diversity in children stories. This, according to her, entails talking about a wide range of things affecting the characters and their environment. It is a fact that children always want to associate themselves with characters in stories. This should, however, not hinder the process of making their characters realistic. Children should see the people involved in stories as people who can breath and do all that is done by human beings.

The books also need to be adventurous since children like adventure. In contemporary writing, for example, many authors talk about aliens, vampires, which hunters and predators among many other modern characters. Writers should, however, not use too much adventure at the expense of events that ring true.

It is, therefore, very important for authors to meet like they do in this city. As seen here, such meetings help them grow as writers. They get to know the necessary ingredients in writing children stories, hence, becoming acceptable in the market.




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