Making a Book

Left: A page fromA Swim through the Sea, my second alphabet book. Right: The opening page fromSalamander Rain, showing the new nature journal format.

Deciding on a Format

"The format you choose for your book helps determine who will read it. I wrote A Walk in the Rainforest for my mother's pre-school class, so it seemed like a good idea to make it an alphabet. My editor at Dawn Publications thought up the idea of having a paragraph on each page that would describe the featured plant or animal in greater detail. That way big kids could read the book too, and still learn something. We liked that format so much that we used it for the next two books, A Swim through the Sea and A Fly in the Sky.

"When I began work on Salamander Rain, however, I decided it was time to take the book in a new direction. I was inspired by my love of journal-writing and motivated by the desire to make books that focus more on whole ecosystems rather than on scattered individual species. Then the reader would really get a sense of what it was like to be inthe pond with the frogs. That is how Salamander Rain became a journal written by a boy who loves to explore lakes and ponds. This format helps kids see that they could go outside too, and make their own journals."

~Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini, author/illustrator