The Key Selling Points may be the most important piece for study.  Sterling is delivering on a digital platter the many ways this book and this author will appeal to buyers. They are giving bookstores reasons to say yes to buying this book for their shelves and talking points they can use to handsell the book to customers. 

As writers, we can study the Key Selling Points and extrapolate to our own WIP. Picture editors and the marketing team debating the merits of your manuscript at acquisition. Does it have the potential for a large audience (notice how Sterling gives numbers of soccer players to illustrate the potential? — again, good material for a cover or query letter)? Does it have opportunities for diversity in illustration or in storyline? Not every book must, but it is an important aspect of our book culture and most publishers are invested in creating more diversity in children’s books. Does it offer a new take on a universal theme (in this case, the importance of teamwork and persistence)? 

To land the deal, we want these hooks — and/or others that correspond to your topic and theme — to be sharp.  
** What are the Key Selling Points for your WIP? Try listing them. If you can’t, maybe the project needs a slightly better focus. **

Continuing the Hey, Coach! page tour, take a look at the marketing and publicity section:
■ National print and online publicity campaign
■ Blog tour
■ Goodreads giveaway
■ Local events in author’s hometown of Chapel Hill, NC
Which of these items above do you think the author will have a hand in? If you said, “All” you are correct. There will be support from Sterling, but the author (and illustrator) will be on the front line and behind the scenes making this campaign successful.

Just for comparison, here is the marketing and publicity campaign section for Tammi Sauer and Vanessa Brantley-Newton’s fall release with Sterling called Mary Had a Little Glam. Both creators have a deep platform and Sterling is going big on this one: 
■ Author appearance at ALA
■ National print and online publicity campaign
■ Included in Sterling’s Children’s White Box mailing (an American Booksellers Association program to mail promotional material to independent bookstores)
■Review copy mailing to organizations and websites supporting diversity in children’s books
■ National book tour
■ Trade advertising campaign
■ Digital focus on children’s book review and mommy blogs
■ Author to promote on her social media platforms and website
Again, lots of support from the publisher, but also lots of time investment by the creative duo as well. 

Call me a catalog geek, but there is so much to learn from these pages. Grab your mug, your mouse, and see what you find. I’d love to hear your observations.

Avoiding didactic writing or themes might be one of the hardest concepts when beginning to write for children. I get it; our adult mind — either consciously or unconsciously — wants to share what we’ve learned and what we know. We may feel that children of today need a nudge in the right moral direction. Or if we are of a certain age and grew up when more teaching-heavy stories were the norm, it could feel familiar and natural to write a story with a strong message.    

However, I want you to succeed as a writer of children’s books and these type of stories will likely not be acquired in today’s market because:
​​1.  a didactic story reflects the writer’s ideology and unique perspective instead of allowing the reader to bring their own perspective to the story
2.  a didactic story narrows the scope of the story to only the writer’s experience ​instead of opening the reader to new worlds
3. a didactic story often has only one layer — the moral or teaching — instead of offering many layers for self-understanding and growth.

“Leave lots of room for illustrations. I mean LOTS of room. This is the best way to cut down your number of words, and the hardest thing for most writers to do (unless you’re also an illustrator, in which case you’ve got an advantage here). First, study books with short texts and see how much of the story is contained within the pictures. Then write your first draft, forgetting about word count. As you revise, think about what each illustration might look like. It helps to create a 32-page “dummy” book and put your text on 26-28 pages (leave the other pages blank for title page, copyright, end pages, etc.). * HERE IS THE EXCITING PART! Then write a description of each illustration, or sketch one out (don’t worry, no one will see this but you). Now, what do you say in the text that’s also depicted in the pictures? Take it out of the text. It doesn’t need to be stated twice. Kids are looking at the illustrations while an adult is reading the words, so they’ll get that information.”

​And let me tell you, IT WORKS! Kaboom! Useless words are out! Try it and let me know how it works for you!