Writing for Children:
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Here's what I'm getting at...
I want you to ask yourself this question: Is writing for children:
a) what I most want, or
b) is it merely something I think I can do and possibly succeed at?
That's a huge question when you're talking about something as important as your life. Please do yourself a favor and, before continuing with this page, make sure you know what your answer is.
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My name is Steve Barancik and - have no doubts - I am the author of this site.When I set out on my writing career, I only had a broad idea of what I wanted to do. But I got lucky and stumbled into a field where I made a lot of money.
The movies.
I know plenty of writers who never got lucky. That's why I think the question I asked atop this page is such an important one to answer.
You see, the reason I'm writing this website is because, after 14 years in my own writing business, I asked myself a similar question:
Is writing for Hollywood really the writing I still want to do?
The bad news, and then the good news
The bad news is there's too much competition. For whatever the reason, tons of people want to be writers. They all want to express themselves.
And, of course, they're free to do so. The problem is, for some of them, "free" isn't what they want their writing to sell for.
These people - are you one of them? - want to write for a decent sized audience. And they want to write for a living. (Or at least for an additional income.) And a lot of them turn to writing for children. Why?
Some because they love the notion. Some because it seems doable.
This page is written specifically for the doable crowd. (But I recommend it pretty highly for the writing for children is my dream crowd too. It might open your horizons a little.)
Steve, you're getting to the good news, right?
Right. Here it is. When I set out on my writing career, writing on the web wasn't an option. Heck, there was no web.
So that's the good news. Now you can write and "publish" on the web.
And (I know what you're thinking) you can get an audience and make money at it...if you do it correctly.
You're probably skeptical. I was too.
I decided long ago I wanted to make a living as a writer. A decent living. And here I am, as my screenwriting career winds down, writing for children on the web. Or, more accurately, writing for the parents of children.
Whether you're writing for children or for left-handed rugby players, one key to writing on the web - and making money at it - is attracting traffic.
You need an audience.
Stephen King attracts traffic to his site by virtue of being Stephen King.
But how does Stephen Barancik do it? Certainly not by name recognition! Heck, I'm having a good day when I can spell my own name.
No, I learned to write in such a way that I attract search engine traffic to my site. That traffic is my audience! Once they're here, they're mine for as long as I can keep their attention. I can write whatever I want.
Isn't that what you want?
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Some people already have a website, are attracting traffic but having trouble holding onto it, possibly because of writing skills. These people should visit my Acknowledging the Elephant page.
When I started my writing career...
...the options were limited. If writing for children was your hope, you needed to impress children's book publishers. If writing movies was your dream, you had to find an agent, and s(he) had to find a studio interested in turning your script into celluloid.
It's a different era now. The internet has given us all access to our markets. You can shoot a movie today and post it to You Tube tonight.
But here's the catch. Just because you put up a website doesn't mean that an audience finds you.
Attracting readers
It's easy to get on the net. Technorati.com, as of this writing (June 30, 2006) is tracking 46.4 million "blogs" on the web.
That's a lot of writers. How many of them do you think find readers? Well, how many "blogs" do you read?
No, if you want an audience, you need a strategy, something more than plopping a website onto a "server" somewhere.
So how do you find your audience for what you want to write about? Whether it's about writing for children or something else?
Here's how:
Hundreds of millions of people get on the web every day, arrive at a search engine and search billions of different terms. Some of them are searching for information on something you know about or they're searching for entertainment you might provide. Whether it's:
- Words and art
- Caribbean beaches
- Styling hair
- Planning birthday parties
- Juggling
- Dentistry
- Antique dolls
Here's the thing...
It'd be great if we could all do precisely what we wanted and know that someone would pay us generously to do it. Whether writing for children, writing for film, whatever.
Me? I'd love to write movies about subjects that compel me and know that they'll get made.
That ain't happening. On the other hand, if I want to write Spiderman VII...
But the cool thing is, we live in the internet era, when we writers can search out our own audience. We don't have to convince publishers and movie studios that that audience is out there. We get to find them ourselves.
I'm compelled by children and books. I can't stand much of what passes for children's writing out there. So here I am, writing about children's books and writing about writing for children and writing about writing...
And here you are reading it.
What better proof could there be that it's working for me? Because I'm loving every minute of this! I love that people visit my website, that some of them care about what I say, and that I brought them here myself. I love that more of you come every day!
In fact, I love it so much that I started another website on another subject that compels me: self publishing.
Do you have a subject that might compel you more than writing for children? Do yourself a favor...
Look into writing about that!!!
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