George Brown: Hi, I’m George Brown with the Highlights Foundation. I’m here talking to Harold Underdown, the lead faculty of our Crash Course (Everything You Need to Know About Children’s Publishing).

I thought it would be helpful, Harold, if you could talk to us a little bit about what students can expect, who should attend, and some of those pieces.

So, who should attend the Crash Course?

Harold Underdown: Thanks, George. So that’s a key question, and it’s something we’ve talked about over the years. And we’ve come up with this term that we use.

We call our students “serious beginners.”

It’s an interesting term. What does that mean? Who’s a serious beginner?

You might think about it in terms of milestones, i.e. that someone’s gotten to a certain point or not.

But we think it’s really more about attitude—that people at different points in their writing or illustrating or publishing career can be serious beginners.

So for example, someone who has literally just started writing in the past year, they’ve been working away on a few manuscripts; they’re really excited about it. And they’re Googling and they find out that the Highlights Foundation is offering workshops, and bing—they want to go off to the Highlights Foundation. That’s a serious beginner.

On the other hand, someone who has been writing for a while, maybe they’ve joined a writer’s organization, maybe they’ve started sending out manuscripts; they belong to a critique group. But they don’t know the whole process. They feel like they need to know more about how publishing works. That’s a serous beginner, too.

And we’ve also had folks come to the Crash Course who published in Highlights Magazine, or published with a book publisher, but even though they’ve been through that, they still feel like, “I don’t know how this all works, and I need to learn more about it.”

So all those folks come to the Crash Course, and all those folks are what I call and who we would call “serious beginners.” And that’s really who we intend the Crash Course for.

George Brown: So Harold, I’m also curious—you told us a little bit about what type of student. But what can students expect from the Crash Course? You talked about “serious beginners.”

Harold Underdown: Right. Well, yes, there’s a lot to expect from the Crash Course. We subtitle it “Everything You Need to Know About Children’s Book Publishing,” and we really feel like that’s the case.

Because we try to give you everything about the process—starting from when you’re beginning to write, to when you’re working on your manuscript and making decisions on whether it’s ready to go out, to sending it out, who you send it out to, how you send it out, and what happens when a publisher is interested in it. We talk a little bit about contracts, we go through the publishing process and all that’s involved in that—illustrating, design work, the different kinds of editing, what happens when your book goes out on the market.

And of course we also talk about the different kinds of children’s books, and who their audience is, and the different children’s book markets. Because there isn’t just one market.

And all of that gets presented to our students in an organized manner by people who have first-hand experience in what they’re talking about.

And what I think is really great about that, is that–you can pick this stuff up. You know, you could go to writer’s conferences, if read some books. But you’d have to do a lot of work on your own.

If you come to the workshop, it’s all laid out for you. It’s presented in a friendly way. You get to ask as many questions as you want. And you’ve got all that knowledge packaged up for you and presented effectively.

So that’s what you can expect, and I think that’s what we provide.