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A few months ago we were going through our very ancient art archives that date back to the old days when the company fully owned all the illustrations.  The archives have been a treasure trove: among other things, we unearthed the complete artwork for a long out-of-print Flicka, Ricka, Dicka book, which we’re reissuing this spring.

And then one day, I was talking with Laura, our archive manager, who was just unwrapping a stack of illustrations that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades. They were pen-and-ink on paper, with tissue paper on top showing where color overlays would be printed. We didn’t know the book, but something about the style looked familiar. Something about that girl in the bonnet…

“Oh my goodness!” I said. “It’s Helen Moore Sewell! She did the original art for the Little House books!” (Which were published by Harper in New York, but if you know me at all, I have something of an interest in those books.)

The artwork we were looking at was for a title called Peter and Gretchen of Old Nuremberg by Viola M. Jones, which we published in 1935.

Little House on the Prairie was also first published in 1935. You can see here that she used a similar style with the color overlays.

It’s really something to see this original art up close, and to see Sewell’s technique. The art on the right is the tissue paper showing the overlays. It must have been photographed and made into color plates.

And the cross-hatching is exquisite!

Helen Sewell’s illustrations in

So last week I talked about how being an editor has helped me as an author. But the benefits of having a double life can work the other way around, too. I learned plenty of things about book editing from my own experience as an author and from the brilliant people who worked on I’m Not the New Me, The Princess and the Peanut Allergy, and The Wilder Life. Here are a few:

Be both the coach and the cheerleader.  In other words, be tough, but always be positive, too.  The first few times I read emails from my first editor that said things like, “I’m so excited to work on your book!” I figured she was just awfully perky.  But the enthusiasm and positive energy was infectious, and it helped my confidence even when she sent me a twenty-page editorial letter full of nitpicks and cruel cuts.

Be a bother, and botherable, too.  First-time authors can be meek creatures, afraid to ask reasonable questions about the editorial process for fear of “bugging” the editor. It wasn’t until I fielded a million tiny questions from my own editor that I felt comfortable bugging her back, and now I try to keep the lines of communication as open as possible for my authors.

Break down the work into manageable bits. I tricked myself into writing a whole book by writing 500 words a night. From this experience I learned that just because an author has a 300 page manuscript, it doesn’t mean that they’re ready to deal with all 300 pages at once. And it helped me realize that, as an editor, I didn’t have to work that way either.  My job is to see the big picture and help the author understand it—but sometimes that has to happen one chapter at a time.

Next week: Things I thought I would NEVER do once I became an author.

Some of you might know that I lead a double life—children’s book editor by day; nonfiction author by night (and weekends, and early mornings when I’m extra motivated). This means I work on both sides of the editor’s desk. I used to tell people that I did a lot of waiting on one side of the desk, and that I was always swamped with work on the other side.  But then, uh, I forgot which side was which. They both involve overwhelming workloads as well as plenty of patience.  Suffice it to say, though, that my work and my writing have benefited in plenty of ways. Here’s three things that wearing my editor hat has taught me about being an author:

The ideas can be as important as the writing. You might think this is an obvious point, but you don’t know Wendy the Writerly Writer, the version of myself who lives in my head and loves to show off her brilliant prose in long, artful, descriptive passages to show the world what a genius she is. But Wendy the Editor has spent years having to trim unnecessary in-love-with-one’s-own-words kinds of sentences from manuscripts and has learned to be quite impressed by more plainspoken writers who know how to make a point.

Handle reviews with grace. Reading a disappointing review of a book you’ve worked on is never fun—and it’s an experience I’d had as an editor several times before I ever published my own book. And since as an editor I often see reviews before the author does, I have to find ways to mitigate the bad news (“It’s still good exposure”), or put it in perspective (“Everyone knows that The Shelbyville Gazette is hard on first-time authors”), which have been good to remember when it’s my own book getting slammed.

Don’t be too much of a perfectionist. A lot of my job involves emailing authors to ask things like “How’s that sequel outline coming along?” and “Any progress on the manuscript?” The writer in me is inclined to regard these questions with much dread, and even more procrastination. It wasn’t until I became an editor myself that I understood that on the other end of those horrible emails is a person who can help—one who is a fan of my work and can see through the awful first drafts (newsflash: they’re not that awful, not to a person who regularly reads slush manuscripts written in all-caps Comic Sans fonts) to understand what you’re doing. So buck up and turn in that story already—the editor knows it’s a work in progress!

Next week: what being an author has taught me about being an editor.

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They pop up on the internet every year, on bulletin boards or else group blogs like Huffington Post.  Sometimes they go viral, thanks to Twitter and Facebook and even good old-fashioned email forwards.  They’re collections of book covers, for children’s books that are “creepy” or “bizarre” or “hilarious,” and if you do anything related to children’s books for a living, you’ve probably had links like this one and this one sent to you dozens of times, from acquaintances who think you’ll find them extra funny.

Ah, yes. There they are yet again: the book about poop, and the self-published book about drugs, and the therapeutic book about abuse, and the book where it kind of sort of almost looks like the animals on the cover are doing something indecent with each other, especially if you turn it sideways, and the book about Uncle Somebody, because let’s not forget that cliche about uncles being vaguely inappropriate towards children, haw-haw, and also that book called I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much. Oh, the hilarity.

Sigh.

Yes, sometimes our older issues books turn up on these lists. Though it’s worth noting that continued sales have also kept them in print all these years. And sometimes the books on these lists approach difficult subjects in ways that might seem a little dated now. (Though, again—often these books are still in demand, which means someone finds them effective.)

But you know what’s “creepy”? When people see children’s books as only one kind of book. And when people are so uncomfortable with the notion that a kid might need a book on a serious topic that their first reaction is to single it out as “bizarre.” If there’s one thing that the recent challenge to My Mom’s Having a Baby! has made clear, it’s that a book that’s appropriate for one child might not be appropriate for another child.

There’s nothing creepy about a world of children’s books that tries to serve as many needs as possible. And there’s nothing funny about snap judgments.

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