Children's Author
Action Plan
Achieve your lifelong dream of becoming a traditionally published
children’s book author faster than you ever imagined—no agent required.
Becoming a children's book author is your lifelong dream…and you'd feel like you won the lottery if you ever landed a book deal.
But the process is exhausting. Perfecting a manuscript is only the beginning. It’s followed by painful querying where it can take months for an agent to respond—if you’re lucky—with a no. Sometimes it feels like you don’t even exist. Years can go by without making any progress on your goal.
What if there was a better way? Where you could write a children’s book, get feedback directly from editors, and get paid while doing it—within months instead of years? With this proactive approach, you can become a traditionally published children’s book author faster than you could ever imagine.
Children's Author Action Plan
Here's what you'll learn:
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How work-for-hire projects can kickstart your author career on a much faster timeline
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10 kinds of work-for-hire projects and what they pay
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How to discover these never-listed-online gigs
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Step-by-step formula to pitch yourself as a work-for-hire author
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The author onboarding you need but will never get from a publisher
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How to leverage these opportunities and pitch your personal projects
I’m Aubre Andrus, an award-winning children’s book author of more than 50 books for kids published by Disney, Scholastic, American Girl, National Geographic Kids, and more.
Not too long ago I thought it was impossible to get a children’s book published, let alone make a career out of it. I began freelance writing on the side with hopes of eventually leaving my job. But after attending many writer’s conferences, I felt overwhelmed by the years-long timeline, microscopic chances, and drawn out payment schedule that comes with landing just one children’s book deal.
With a lot of courage (and not a lot of knowledge), I slowly figured out how to leverage my writing experience to hack my way into the traditional children’s book publishing industry without an agent and on a much faster timeline. I repeated the process over and over again, and I can now call myself the author of more than 50 books for kids. I left that job in 2011 and have been freelance ever since!
I’ve done book events and author tours, won awards, gotten fan mail from kids, dedicated books to my daughters, seen my name on the spines at bookstores, and ticked all my dream publishers off my list—all while sharpening my writing skills, making new connections, and getting paid! I continue to grow as an author and fine-tune my children’s book career to this day.
