So to start-- I am currently taking a children's literature course, and it is absolutely fantastic (still another reason for me to be inspired). My professor is Gary Schmidt who has written many books, and is actually quite "famous" in the children's literature world (I put famous in quotes because he is a person who is incredibly humble and who has a pure joy for good literature-- he would never consider himself famous, and the matter is of little importance to him).
A couple of weeks ago, he told us a little bit about the publishing process for books, and I was slightly astonished. Did you know that after an author's written work is accepted at a publishing company, they have absolutely no say in who illustrates their book or what the illustrations look like? As he said, "you have to just accept and be thankful someone is publishing it." In fact, the author and illustrator are not even allowed to communicate with each other. It's illegal. Most of the people who have illustrated his books, he has never even met. Some authors, he told us, have wept when they got their book back because it was so different from what they had envisioned. Now obviously, throughout the process, the author is able to talk with his editor, and if there is a major issue between the illustration and text, then sometimes things can be fixed (although, it's almost always the author who has to readjust his/her text, and not the illustrator). This boggled my mind! All these years I have been looking at a picture book of two completely different interpretations of a story and had no idea. My childhood has been flipped upside down.
