WRITING IRRESISTIBLE KIDLIT Book Study • Last activity 20/Oct

Mary Kole’s WRITING IRRESISTIBLE KIDLIT: The Ultimate Guide to Crafting Fiction for Young Adult and Middle Grade Readers covers everything from the basics: Knowing your MG and YA audiences — readers’ mindset, genres, word count, content, and themes— to creating a query list and writing your query letter.

As a writer herself, Mary began interning at Andrea Brown Literary Agency to “see what it was like on the other side of the desk” and discovered her passion, quickly rising through the ranks in the industry to become Senior Literary Manager and head the Children’s Department at Movable Type Management. After reviewing thousands of manuscripts in the slush pile and mining the occasional gym, Mary has written this book to give writers the nuts-and-bolts insight into what agents and editors are looking for.

It turns out many writers are making the same mistakes.

Unlike other craft books, WRITING IRRISISTIBLE KIDLIT highlights where writers go wrong. This book’s easy-to-read, no-nonsense approach employs excerpts from popular novels as teaching tools. But perhaps, even more importantly, it contains examples from her slush pile; submissions by dedicated, hardworking, aspiring authors, that simply don’t work, and she tells you why. Sidebar tips and comments from editors, agents, and published authors are scattered throughout the book to round out Mary’s experiences “from the other side of the desk”.

Children's