Podcast – Revision First Steps

In Revision First Steps, Laura Backes and Emma Walton Hamilton team up to give you tips on approaching the first big revision of your first draft.

Emma Walton Hamilton is a best-selling children’s book author, editor and writing coach.  With her mother, actress/author Julie Andrews, Emma has co-authored over thirty children’s books, eight of which have been on the NY Times Bestseller list, including The Very Fairy Princess series. She is Director of the Children’s Lit Fellows program at Stony Brook University and co-host of the Julie’s Library Podcast.

Laura Backes is the publisher of Children’s Book Insider, The Children’s Writing Monthly, and co-owner of WritingBlueprints.com (along with husband Jon Bard). Laura has edited and critiqued thousands of picture book manuscripts. Her credits include Best Books for Kids Who (Think They) Hate to Read (Random House); articles for Writer’s Digest, The Writer and Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market; and technical editor of Writing Children’s Books for Dummies.

Listen as they dig deep into revision first steps by taking you on a tour of the first act of a fiction picture book and a nonfiction picture book to show what your manuscript needs at the beginning of the story to get started on a firm foundation.

Listen here:

So you’ve written your “#@&!*% first draft” – now what? Before you start polishing your words, you need to make sure your book is built on a solid foundation. Laura Backes and Emma Walton Hamilton take you through the first steps and basic strategies of structural revision for both fiction and narrative non-fiction to move your picture book manuscript to the next level. Watch Laura and Emma’s full presentation of “The Next Draft: Revision First Steps” to get strategies for revising the middle and end of your book as well as the beginning on the Picture Book Summit Teachable site HERE.