Brianna Caplan Sayres
Interview with picture book author Brianna Caplan Sayres
critique. (I promise, I had been doing this long enough to know that you should
never expect to get a manuscript acquired from a critique. But this time it
happened. Yay!)
group critique with a Random House editor to be held at the Jennifer De Chiarra
literary agency. (Thanks so much to Jennifer De Chiarra and to Stacy Mozer for
these awesome critique opportunities!) So I sent off two manuscripts.
got an email with the title of one of the manuscripts. Was the editor writing
me for some reason?
from the editor who was giving me the critique. It was from a wonderful agent I
had submitted to via an online form a month or two earlier. The agent (now my wonderful agent) liked my manuscript
and wondered if I had anything else.
else?!?!?!” Yes!!!
a very good mood. What a great day!
amazingly detailed written critiques she had prepared for each of us. She was
so thoughtful. As I began to skim through mine, I was very pleased. She was
very complimentary about my first manuscript and believed it would find an
editor. Hooray!
about my manuscript. Again, she was very complimentary, but the final line
really got me. She “would like to consider acquiring it for their list”
Oh my!!!
with my agent. Hooray! She liked many of the manuscripts I had sent her. Soon
after we heard from my editor, and WHERE DO DIGGERS SLEEP AT NIGHT? was
acquired. It was quite the whirlwind (though as I waited to hear back time
seemed to pass very slowly :o) .)
heard from both my agent and my editor was incredible!
three or four rounds of revisions on DIGGERS. The first round was right after
it was acquired. I completed the revisions that my editor had suggested on my
manuscript in her initial critique. I removed some verses entirely and replaced
them with others. Others I polished to make them flow better.
revisions is when I changed the tractor verse from “Do their dads sing Old
MacDonald for a barnyard bedtime song?” to “Do their dads sing Old TruckDonald
for a barnyard bedtime song?” That idea just came to me as I was making
the verse flow better and it has been another hit with my young readers. During
the truck slumber parties I often do for little ones, we all have a grand time
singing Old Truckdonald. :o)
changing one of my verses to make it about monster trucks. Some parents and
grandparents have mentioned how much their kids appreciate the inclusion of
monster trucks, so this was another awesome suggestion!
me with one more super-important question. I had not answered the question I
posed in my title. Where DO diggers sleep at night? Yikes! How could I NOT answer
that question? But, how COULD I answer that question? After some thought, I
added two more verses that imagined where all the trucks could be sleeping…
though I kept it in question form just like the rest of the manuscript.
In each round of revision, she challenged me to make the manuscript better and
better!
us a bit about it, without giving away the plot?
“a tale of a very competitive dinosaur named Tina and some disappearing
contestants at the Miss Dinosaur Pagaent.”
came from a joke. One day for some reason, I joked to my husband about a
dinosaur beauty pageant. He laughed and told me, “That could be a picture
book.” The idea stuck in my head and I kept working on it through many,
many rounds of revisions. (In fact, I even wrote a blog post about this one
titled “How Many Times Can I Revise 500 Words?”)
TIARA-SAURUS REX will be published by Bloomsbury
in 2014. Can you tell us about
the acquisitions process?
My wonderful editor at Bloomsbury wrote back to my agent and said that she was
in the process of prepping the manuscript for an acquisition meeting with her
group. From the time we got that email, I was so excited and so nervous. What
were the chances of my manuscript going through acquisitions? I knew that many
manuscripts got that far and still got rejected. So I hoped and waited. (And
the NY Metro area had a major storm during that time that shut everything down.)
phone call from my awesome agent. We were going to get an offer! And then came
the email with the offer! It was real!
picture books in the works. A couple about dinosaurs, a couple about jazz, and
one fun one about a dragon.
most surprising thing about it? What’s the most rewarding?
thing about officially being an author is how badly I keep wanting to get the
next book published. Somehow in my dreams of being an author, I always imagined
how wonderful it would be to get a book published. (Which it is! Yay!) But in
my dreams, I almost imagined that as the end. But in real life, it is fantastic
to get a book published…. and I can’t wait to work on getting the next one
out there (and hopefully the next one and the next one and the next one!).
and bookstore visits. I was a classroom teacher for many years and I love to teach
writing. It is so much fun to get to be the visiting author who teaches kids
about writing.
us about your publishing journey, Brianna. Best of luck with the rest of the trip!
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Brianna Caplan Sayres, picture bookBrianna Caplan Sayres’ Interview with 3 Highlights authors!
Picture book author, Brianna Caplan Sayres, (WHERE DO DIGGERS SLEEP AT NIGHT? and TIARA-SAURUS REX) interviewed three authors of Highlights pieces–one from each of their magazines, Highlights for Children, Highlights High Five, and Highlights Hello.
I was lucky enough to be interviewed about my recent poem, “Robins’ Treat,” in the June issue of Hello.
Here’s the article from Brianna’s web site. http://briannasbookstop.blogspot.com/2013/06/good-news-day-tuesday-interview-with.html
Thanks, Brianna!