That's Not Fair! - an eBook aimed at children aged 5-8, by CaptainD and Kastchey

Started by CaptainD, Sat 16/12/2017 14:20:41

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CaptainD

I originally wrote this for my own daughter but then enlisted the awesome artistic talent of Kastchey to illustrate it, and this is the result!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07888W3XF


Cover:



4 pages from the eBook (printed version coming in January 2018)

(For general preview purposes only - obviously the image quality of the real thing is a whole lot better):

[imgzoom]https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nF111UiEUSA/WjI2I9YAWqI/AAAAAAAAr-k/-rwFWMyl_2cNM1UvUssOyn6rfGSdBzMMgCLcBGAs/s640/Not%2BFair%2Bpages.png[/imgzoom]
 

Mandle

Looks awesome!

As a teacher of kids and a reader of many kid's books to kids I might attempt a bit of advice:

When writing books to be read to/by quite little kids you probably want to repeat as many basic sentences as possible to imprint them in memory and also increase the impact of their meaning in the story.

I would suggest changing "But in reality, it was fair" to the more basic "But really, it was fair" used later and using that same sentence every time (as I suspect the book probably does repeat it a lot before the final punchline).

If the book was aimed at 5+ year olds then providing different sentence structures to say the same thing is valuable, but not so much for 2-4 year olds this story seems to be aimed at (IMO)...

I want a copy for my school also!

EDIT: "LANGEN" in yellow against the beige background is really hard to see. I thought you had only credited his first name for the first few times I looked at the cover.

CaptainD

Hi Mandle, thanks for your feedback!

I do indeed make use of repetition but also a mix it up a bit here and there, not sure how representative those pages are of the whole thing.  I'm rather inexperienced when it comes to writing for a specific age range, but I guess my idea was to make something that my daughter would both enjoy being read to her, and reading herself - which she's certainly capable of.  Having said that my younger daughter also enjoys hearing this one, but then again she loves pretty much any stories to be read to her (and of course now she expects me to write a story based on her! :-D)

If anything I'd say the structure of the writing is most similar to something like Not Now, Bernard, which I've seen advertised as suitable for 5-7 year olds.  Hopefully in time I'll get some more feedback on this.

As for the cover colours, that's Antoni's design and I have to say I rather agree with you on the yellow being difficult to spot, but you know what artists are like, very temperamental ;).   Still that's the joy of Amazon's self-publishing system, if we decide to change it the process is very quick and will take hold on the Amazon sites within usually 24-28 hours.
 

Mandle

Quote from: CaptainD on Sat 16/12/2017 20:53:17
If anything I'd say the structure of the writing is most similar to something like Not Now, Bernard, which I've seen advertised as suitable for 5-7 year olds.

Ah, I was assuming a younger 2-4 age range. 5-7 it's better to provide further examples of how to say the same phrase, you're correct, both so the listener doesn't get bored and complain "This is a kiddie book!" and for sneaky learning purposes.

Still I would advise to use "But really it wasn't" first in the story and then change it up to "But in reality it wasn't" later on.

HollyBeth


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