This is a comprehensive, hands-on guide to writing and illustrating picture books for young children. It presents up-to-date critical scholarship in literacy, visual and textual studies with creative and practical approaches to the task of making a book for young children.

The author draws on her original research into children's views on picture books and her historical and theoretical understanding of visual literacy to provide detailed information about how to create a picture book. Starting with a blank page, she goes through the steps of filling it with a location, peopling it with distinctive and interesting characters and developing plot and sub-plot. What will turn this creation into a book is described in knowledgeable detail: the qualities of various materials, the preferred format and size, the fonts young children like, the endpapers, the placing of the illustrations. Finally, she takes the would-be picture book maker or illustrator through the steps required to present their work most appealingly to a publisher.

The Picture Book Maker is essential reading for lecturers and students on BA and MA Illustration, Creative Writing and Design courses, and will be indispensable to educators and students in primary education who seek insights into the complexities of reading material for the early years audience, be it dual language texts, reading schemes, or the picture books that can widen horizons and imbue in children an enduring love of reading.