The Three Connections: What It Actually Takes to Write a Book That Matters

The KidLit Creator’s Chronicle – Issue #57

Last week, I went over three forces reshaping the world of children’s books: screens, children’s mental health, and AI flooding the market with noise. This week, I want to talk about what it actually takes to write a book worth putting into the world in this difficult time.

Fair warning: I’m going to be a lot more opinionated than usual in this edition.

Many believe a picture book needs two things: a good idea and some illustrations.

I understand why. Picture books look simple. Short text, bright pictures, done. And honestly, that assumption is part of what has made the sausage factory possible. If a book is just an idea plus pictures, well… a machine can do it in two prompts. A “publisher” can churn out ten a day. A person with no writing experience, no illustration knowledge, and no real reason to write can slap something together and upload it to Amazon before lunch.

BUT that belief is also the reason so many well-intentioned books—books written by real people with real stories—never connect with kids.

A good idea and some illustrations are not enough.

Recently, a mentor of mine asked me what upsets me most in the children’s book industry. I started with AI (quite vehemently!), but it goes back further than that. Even before AI (and still today), there were authors putting out the quickest, cheapest, lowest-quality books they could manage, and illustration companies paying their illustrators extremely low wages to churn out as many books as possible, as fast as possible. I call this the “sausage factory”. AI is the sausage factory on steroids. Both upset me thoroughly, because children deserve so much better. Picture books are not products to be mass-produced at the lowest possible cost to make a quick buck. They never were.

A book that truly connects requires three things that no machine can replicate. And none of the sausage factories bother with any of them.

Connection 1: To your reader

Know who you are writing for. Not some general idea, but a real specific person in your mind.

What does this child need or enjoy? Why should they read YOUR book?

I see so many books that are written for the author, not the child. The author loves the idea, or they’ve told the story at dinner parties and everyone laughed. But it doesn’t resonate with kids. It wasn’t written with a specific reader in mind. Even if that reader is the child you were—but that’s still a real child.

And, I can tell you, AI has no reader in mind. It has a prompt. The sausage factory has a quota to fill. Neither has ever stopped to ask: what does this specific child actually need?

That question has to be the starting point, and everything else follows from it.

Connection 2: To your craft

Picture books have invisible rules that most people don’t know exist.

Page turns. The relationship between text and image. What the words must do and what the illustrations must do, because they both have an indispensable role. Word counts. Pacing that holds a child’s attention.

I say this often: the illustrator is the co-creator. A traditional publisher pays the illustrator 50% of royalties. Fifty percent. That tells you everything about how seriously the industry takes the visual half of a picture book. And yet I still see people in this space present the illustrations as an afterthought you sort out once the “real” work (the writing) is done. (To be fair, at least some of them do take the writing seriously.)

That is not how picture books work.

I come from an illustration background. I’ve illustrated books, I run an illustration company, and I’ve produced hundreds of books. I know every little detail: bleed, trim, gutter, how characters need to move coherently through a story, why an AI image generator cannot truly tell a story, because it doesn’t know the story. It creates separate images.

AI has no understanding of what the book is trying to do.

Getting the craft wrong is why so many books with good intentions fall flat. Not because the author didn’t care, but because they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

I saw a comment this week on Facebook I had to respond to. Someone posted that AI illustrations were fine with her, and she didn’t know why everyone was making a big deal about wanting to know if their illustrator was using AI.

Firstly, it’s shocking to me that she didn’t understand why one would want to know if a real illustrator one was paying pretended to draw by hand and just used AI (apart from being dishonest, AI illustrations can’t even be copyrighted in many countries). She also said AI was basically just the same as using Photoshop, which illustrators have been using for years.

Now, as an illustrator who used Photoshop for years (and now Procreate), I can tell you that sitting and drawing an illustration for many hours in Photoshop (after practicing for years) is not comparable in any way to typing a prompt into AI and having an illustration one minute later. I’ve written enough articles on my thoughts on using AI for books that you’re welcome to go check them out: Children Deserve Better Than AI-Generated Stories: How to Avoid AI scams, Create an Authentic Book, and More and The Hidden Cost of Letting AI Do Your Writing: What the Research Says About Creativity, Craft, and Cognitive Decline.

But in short, a human illustrator puts human thought and human heart into illustrations. AI just puts pixels on a screen to match a prompt. What struck me was her confidence, when she clearly doesn’t have a good understanding of what she’s saying.

She responded that she’s bought bad books with AI illustrations, but that she could just make up her own story every time she read from it, and then it wasn’t a waste of a book. Now, while I understand what she’s saying, I’m mystified. A book so bad you have to make up your own story is clearly not what we want to put out in the world.

Another post I recently saw on Instagram absolutely nailed it for me. The author said she didn’t understand why people use AI to write your book because if you don’t like writing (or you’re not good at it), don’t be an author.

Great picture books take learning and practice and work. It’s a true art, and learning it and creating something outstanding is an accomplishment to be proud of for the rest of your life.

This comes from knowing the craft.

Connection 3: To yourself

This one no machine can fake, ever.

The material has to come from inside you. From a real experience, a real reason. Something that happened or you see in the world and you want to share it with children for a real reason in your heart. My coaching members are some beautiful examples: Terrie Lynn Birney, a woman with cerebral palsy who is sharing (fictional) stories she’s lived, so kids with CP know there are books out there for them, and other kids can learn that they’re just (awesome) people too. Nicole Todd Bailey, a mother who adopted children of different races and has seen their challenges, and wrote a book to help others in the same position and to raise awareness. And the list goes on. (Writing a laugh-out-loud book can be just as valuable, I have to mention.)

Terrie Lynn Birney with The Fishing Buddies and Nicole Todd Bailey with Multicoloured Monono.

That is why people write picture books. Not to make money. (If you want to make money, don’t create picture books. It is not the best way to make money.)

Write picture books because you have something to say that you need to share with children.

In Return to Real by Ryan Levesque (coming out in June, and well worth a read!), he says, “What is deeply personal becomes deeply universal.” Reading this made me think a lot. It’s beautiful and true.

The more specific your story is (one child, one moment), the more your reader will be able to connect it to their own life. AI is intrinsically incapable of this. It has no life, no experiences, no grief, no joy, no memory of being a lonely kid who found a book that made them feel less alone.

A while ago, I got an email (from someone I respect) promoting AI-generated illustrations, and it made me absolutely cringe. Not because it competes with my business, but because it’s not good enough and it’s not honouring what we’re actually doing here, which is creating something for the future generation.

You put out a book because you have something real to say.

A few of my coaching members with their beautiful books. Mary Smith (pen name, Mary Aggas) with Rocky and the Bully, Diane Klein with Bomi Beekeeper’s Honey Bee Nursery, and Nancy McNeil with Becki and the Trailer Kids.

When all three come together

When all three connections are present:

• when you know your reader
• when you understand your craft
• and when the book comes from something real inside you

… the result is a book that connects.

That’s the solution to the three forces I wrote about last week. In a world where children are increasingly disconnected from their parents, their own imaginations, nature, quiet time and tangible experiences…

… AND the beneficial experience that a good book provides, then a book that truly connects is more important than ever.

It is exactly what the world needs more of right now.

So let’s create it.

Over to You!

Which of the three connections do you feel you do well right now, and which one do you know you need to work on? I’d love to hear from you.

Next week

Next week, I want to tell you something more personal. I want to share why all roads in my life led me to this work and this belief that good children’s books matter more than ever. I’m a bit nervous about sharing my story, but I’ve realised it’s important.