Adam Torres and Rich Linville discuss writing children’s books.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
How do you write a children’s book? In this episode, Adam Torres and Rich Linville, Sr. Writer and Editor at Rich Linville Children Books, explore Rich’s journey which led him to write hundreds of children’s books.
About Rich Linville
For over 40 years, Rich has enjoyed teaching all subjects in elementary, middle school, high school and college. He tutors all ages and writes children’s books: ebooks, audiobooks, hard cover, and paperback books. I have custom-written books for adults and children. Rich has received awards for Teacher of the Year, for Innovations in Education and Technology plus a Lifetime Achievements Award in Education. He also enjoys researching topics and writing books as well as writing books to your specifications.
Check out Rich Linville’s Children Books
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Rich Linville on the line and he’s a writer, editor, and author of children’s books.
Rich, first off, just want to say welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Rich so our, our editor here at Mission Matters, she Hillary, Hillary Crawford, shout out to Hillary. She was telling me about you and she’s like, and how many books have you written? Quite a few. How many? I’ve published over 300 children’s books since 2013, and I enjoy doing it, and they’re fiction, nonfiction, and they’re all grade levels from preschool to adulthood.
Holy smokes, Rich. How do you do it? 300, , that’s a significant amount of books. Like, like, how, not only how do you do it, but like, where’d all this start? What happened was in 2013, I enjoyed, teaching for 45 years, and all grade levels from preschool up to college, and when I retired, my wife said, you’re bored, honey.
I said, yes, dear, I’m bored. She said, call your grandchildren and ask them what kind of books they like. I said, why? She said, you’ve been telling stories for 45 years. You might as well write them. I said, I can’t write. She said, honey, call your grandchildren now. So I called them up. My granddaughter loved unicorns.
My grandson, he liked Greek myths and fables. And so, as a storyteller for 45 years, because that’s what you are when you’re a teacher, is you do storytelling, and the kids love the stories, and so what happened is I wrote some children’s books, and my granddaughter and grandson loved them, and I went to schools, and as I went to schools I would present to children my books and talk about them and ask the children what kind of books they liked, and they would tell me dinosaur books, or they liked different stories of any kind that they’d tell me, and I would take notes and keep track of them, and so then I started writing, and I couldn’t stop, and what happened was I had fun doing it.
I have a I have illustrators that give me the illustrations that I can put in the book and I, I organize those and put those around and I, I’m constantly editing and re editing and re editing. As a teacher, you realize that no book is perfect. They always have mistakes or typos or misinformation.
And I had an administrator come up and he said, your science A book doesn’t have the right information about, within it. And I said, well, that’s okay. I said, I, I use that as a lesson to the kids not to believe everything they read in books. And he goes, you don’t want to buy any new books? I said, no, we’ll keep these.
They’re doing fine. So I, I just enjoy writing. I’ve always got four or five books on my mind that I want to write about fiction, nonfiction. I just finished 15 women in science, women in science because in the past, women were treated like they couldn’t do science. And actually that’s wrong.
they’re not only as as good as men in science, but they’ve proven that they can do things that before they said we couldn’t do. And so I enjoyed writing that book. A lot of Aesop fables, I rewrite them or change them, and at the end of the Aesop fables, I’ll ask, what do you think is the meaning of this Aesop fable?
And then I’ll give three choices, but the fourth choice is, I think it means, because I want the child to realize that over the years, the meaning to Aesop fables, or to any stories, It changes and it doesn’t have the same meaning today as it did 100 years ago or 1000 years ago. And so what happens is that I get more compliments about, I like the way you have my child think about what can be the meaning of this story and they can have their own idea and they can have their own thought about what it means.
But when I taught, , I want to stay in the beginning a little bit longer here because there’s people that are listening to this a lot, a lot of business owners, a lot of executives, entrepreneurs, writers like let’s stay in the beginning just a little bit longer. So.
you’re at your first book. You mentioned you have illustrators, you have like all these things, like talk to me about building up the infrastructure and what that took, because you’re not the illustrator. I understand that you edit and that you write, but like, like, how did that process start in the beginning?
Because I’m hoping that some people may listen to this and whether it’s children books or other books or otherwise, like, I want them to be inspired to go off and write too, because that’s, I feel like as creators, It’s one of the best things we can do. So, how did you build that infrastructure of illustrators or whatever it took?
When I first started, I kept looking online for illustrators for children’s books. And I found someone that would not charge me too much. She charged a fair amount, which I could afford. And I took those illustrations and I was one of the first teachers in my school to use PowerPoint. And with PowerPoint, the beauty of PowerPoint is not only can you put Move illustrations around and enlarge and shrink and add to them, but you can put up a question.
So I would say to my students what happened on the Titanic or I’ll say Who is this story about and we always start off with questions because that was my way of teaching I wanted to teach students to look up the answers or to figure out the answers either using their book or later on it became the internet or discussing as a group Because I wanted them, they learn more from each other than they did from the teacher.
So I was not. Sage on the stage, I would be a facilitator and I’d say, look it up, then what happened was I started writing these books and as a teacher, I’ve been editing stories for a long time. And so I would walk away. I would write, get up, walk away, do something else and then come back and read it.
And I’d go, no, that’s not right. I’m going to change that. And with PowerPoint, it’s easy to change your text. It’s easy to move your text around on the picture. So if you look at my books, you’ll see I’m the kind of teacher that use a lot of visuals. I want students to see. So I’ll have lots of pictures and they can see an example of what the bay power ship looked like if you.
Through a cross section to see inside of it and then I’ll have information or labels that relate to that and I move that around and play with it. So when you’re writing, try to get as many people as you can to read what you write and to give you feedback, but also realize your close friends and your relatives.
They’re going to say it’s great. Yeah, feedback is what we’re going for. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I keep saying. I don’t want to, it’s great. I want to know what, how can I improve it or what do you suggest I do, or what do you think I should do? And so you want to try and get as much feedback as you can. The beauty I found for me as a self publisher is that I don’t have to pay someone to publish for me, and you have to be careful, and this is extremely important.
There are a lot of scams on the internet about companies that said they will publish your book, but the fine print is they’re going to charge you lots of little money, and you don’t, you’re not aware of that until it’s too late. Did you go self publishing from the beginning, or did you work with publisher first?
From the beginning. I was self publishing from the beginning, but because I had a friend who said, you know, you realize that you’re not in it for the money because what happens is that most parents buy children’s books written by when they were a child. And so Dr. Seuss is very popular because when you were a child you had it, so you give it to your children.
Yeah. So you do it because you enjoy doing it. I never really thought about that, actually, Rich, what you just said. So it’s like, it’s kind of like the consumer. So it’s like, well, who’s the one buying it? It’s going to be the parents. Duh. So you, what are you going to give, right? That makes so much sense. So that’s why those brands can also be so enduring.
Yeah. Yes. And then, so what happens is that you still have fun doing it. You’re mainly doing it for the fun of it and the insights. You learn a lot. I learn more as in my one year of teaching than I did my four years of college. Because when you teach something, you have to know it. And when the kids say, why do we study this?
You have to have different answers because there’s always that kid who says, ’cause I said so, doesn’t work. Right? That’s not a good, no, no, that doesn’t work. No, that doesn’t work. And I usually have the kids answer why we studied it. I’ll say to you, okay, why do you think we studied this? What good is this?
What, how, who cares about this stuff? And why should you care? And I say, you can hate this. You don’t have to like, I don’t like everything. You don’t have to like everything, but just learn as much as you can and do the best you can. And don’t worry about it. You might need a new job someday. And then you’ll go, whoops, I should have paid more attention.
So that’s what we’re doing with writing. You just have fun with it and you get different people to, to review it and to make comments and then you do editing and re editing and re editing constantly. Even when I publish the books, what’s nice about Amazon, publishing on Amazon, is that I can always re edit my mistakes and fix them up and go back and change them.
So I’m using PowerPoint, and then you save them as a a PDF, and then you publish them. , I’m a big fan of Amazon, and just, and their publishing, and otherwise, and we, I mean, we use that as publishers, too. It’s just for anything, indie world, or even small publishers, like, we’re not Penguin, we’re not, you know, on our end.
So we’ve published a little over 400 authors, but by no means do we have huge warehouses. So using For printing, I think is is a great step for people out there, especially authors that aren’t necessarily proven yet or don’t have a track record of sales or a huge list or something.
So they don’t, they don’t normally want, they don’t necessarily want to do a run of a thousand or ten thousand or whatever, which way, which can bring the cost down a little bit for. For, and it can make it more profitable if you’re in this for, you know, the profit, I’m just saying for, for those out there that have different concepts of books and rich, I’m, I’m curious about your end in terms of the marketing side and what you do to, just to reach more readers.
I know you mentioned you’re not in this, you, you know, after retirement and you’re doing this out of the love and the learning and all the other experience, but, but how do you, but every author wants to reach more readers, have more people read their work. You’re ultimately doing this to benefit the children, the parents, and others.
How do you expand your reach and your footprint? How do you get your, get your name out there? I’ve tried different methods. Sometimes I’ll use the Amazon advertising. And especially for the holiday ones, those, it works on the holiday books. That’s interesting. How’d that, how’d that work for you?
Is it, I think we’ve experimented a little, but we haven’t done anything really serious on that yet in terms of spend, but it it seems interesting. Yeah, I don’t lose money, which is fine. I mean, oh, that’s great. That’s amazing. I’ll either break even or make a few dollars. And again, it’s the exposure. You’re getting more and more people that are exposed to your books.
The nice reviews that I get when somebody says, I use Richland those books for my children because they learn so much more. Then they would at school. Wow. And now that’s to me, I had one parent say, and that’s what you’re in this for. That’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah. When the, the fun of it and the enjoyment of it.
But again, anybody who wants to make money on it, the key word there is, of course, advertising, but there’s no guarantee that again, you’re dealing with an audience that can it. What I like about Amazon is they give you a sample book to read. So if you don’t like it, you can read the sample and say, hey, I want to read this or I don’t want to read this.
And that’s the beauty of Amazon. I had one review that was so strong. I had one review that was a one out of five, and she said, fix this and fix that and fix this and fix that. And I went back and I fixed it. And it was nice to have that constructive criticism that here’s somebody who read my book and said, I needed to fix this part here.
One person said one page was blurry and they couldn’t read it. And I thought, Oh, okay, I got to fix that page. And so it’s nice to get that. Feedback from reviews that I, I don’t mind a review of one or two or, or, or some people say they give zero if they could, but I don’t mind that because that helps me give information and feedback for what I need to improve the book.
Yeah, the data. And that’s absolutely what’s your, what’s your feeling on social media? Like, do you do much on social media to get out there? What’s your, what’s your thoughts there? I use a lot and I have some followers and I have people that give me the thumbs up or give me the nice comments or give me the nice feedback or give me the comment of, I suggest you read this book, you should check this book out.
So those things are nice from somebody who’s actually read the book and recommended it to other people and word of mouth kind of thing that, except that it’s on Facebook or people are kind of saying, check this out or look at it. basically Facebook’s what I do. Talk to me about your, vision for the future for this rich Linville empire of children’s books.
You didn’t say that. I’m saying it because you got an empire, hundreds of books under the title. Tell me about the vision for the future. Well I just want to keep doing it. And in fact, I’ve always got, like I said, four or five books in my head right now that I want to write about and discuss. have a friend who’s published books for adults, and he’s got a hundred books in his house.
And I said, what are you going to do with those? And he said, well, I can’t sell them. Every place I go, they don’t want them or I’m stuck with them. And I thought, oh, my God, but he wants me to write them as a children’s version. So I’m taking his book. that talks about Kennedy and PT 109 and, and World War II, and he wants me to put them as a children’s version.
So I’ve been doing that some of his books and, he says that he likes that, he only writes for adults and I’m doing his book for children. well, I like the creativity, I like the the thought process, and I love that you’re doing it for the love of the craft, really.
Like, to get it out there, to get the reader feedback, to get better and just to continue improving, and to, to get the work out there. Because I, I feel it’s almost like, or I should ask you, do you feel like it’s Almost an extension of your teaching, like all those years in the classroom and everything else that you did and giving back that way, and now this is another way to give back.
Am I off? Absolutely, and thanks to my wife who encouraged me to do it, and I kept saying I’m not going to do it, and she didn’t. Let’s be real, you were bugging her. She’s like, oh, this guy’s got, come on, man, you used to Doing. You were at work all day. Now , you’re bored. Get, get do something. Driving me crazy.
Exactly. That’s, you got that one right? So shout out to shout out to Rich’s wife. Thank you. For many, getting them out there, we’d be 300 books less. So thank you. I owe everything to her. it’s the feedback and it’s, it’s a nice compliments. When I had, I wrote one about Johnny Appleseed, you know, a father wrote me an email and he says, I want to thank you because my son and I, after we read the book, he wants to plant an apple tree in our yard and we’re going to do it and he’s all excited about it and together we get to do something together and it’s, it’s going to be the future.
Also, I learned in my teaching the first day, I would say to the kids Why are there bullies and what do you think you can do about them? And talk about a discussion. I mean, all these comments from kids and all these thoughts and all these information. I had one class that said we’ve got a a bully in the class.
I had sent a student down to the office to, to get something for me, and when he left another student raised his hand and he said, so and so’s a bully. I said, what? I said, well, if he’s a bully, I can call the police. We can have, I can talk to the parents. I can I can report this. It doesn’t do any good because he’ll do it after school.
I says, what do you want? We want suggestions. I said, what do you guys think you can do? We don’t know. I said, well, first off, travel in a group. When you’re in a group, you make sure the bully doesn’t pick on anybody, and you stand between, as a group, you stand between the bully, and I don’t call them a victim, I call them the target, because a victim acts like he can’t do anything, whereas a target is what they’re looking for, just some target of some sort.
And so, I said, Any other ideas? And then we talked about it. A few days later, I sent him to the office. I said, okay, you guys, what’s the follow up? They said, it worked. And after school, he was picking on us and we all stepped between him. We said, we don’t do that here. And he stopped and I thought, good for you guys.
You handle it. So, in my book, I have what’s called role playing where you role play that Somebody has pushed you in the back a bully has pushed you from behind, what do you do? And it’s meant for the students and adults and counselors to talk about it and to think about it. And then here’s, and then I give some possible suggestions.
One suggestion could be keep going and find a safe adult. Because when you turn around and try to face them, unless you’re good in karate or sports And they might have a gun or they might have a weapon or some sort to hurt you. If they’re pushing you, you’ve got some speed. Now get away to a safe adult.
And consider that if you say nothing, the bully will continue to be a bully. If you say something, then maybe and you keep saying something until somebody handles it and takes care of it. Be responsible, but those are the scenarios that I set up in terms of what to do if there’s a bully and why is somebody a bully?
There’s many reasons. I, that I give why somebody could be a bully, but yeah, one of them is some people are just bullies. They’re plain bullies. The other thing I did is, as a teacher, is I always had students say I can’t do that, or I hate math, or that’s too hard, or I hate reading, or I hate the subject.
And I would say, you can hate it. There are things I hate, but. All math is is seeing a pattern and if you can see like wait until you become an adult and you gotta go to work every day. You might not like that one that much. Don’t worry kids aren’t listening to this one. Rich is an adult so we don’t curse but Really tell me you hate I want if you haven’t done this When you get rich, I want you to be, wait till you’re an adult.
And I want you to wait until you’re an adult and then wait until you’re adults to title. And then some of the points in there is going to work. Paying bills and list like the top four. And, and the point is, is that we want kids to know that when they’re kids, they got it pretty good. That’s the moral of the story.
I said to my teenagers, I’d say, hey, you guys, you know what’s worse than being a teenager? And they would go, nothing’s worse than being a teenager. I go, yes, there is. No, there’s not. I said, there is something worse than being a teenager. What’s that? Being the adult of a teenager, being the parent of a teenager is the worst thing.
And they know, and I said, you’ll find out when you’re an adult, you’ll see, you’ll know. Right. I want that children’s book, for the parents to read, okay, every time the kid’s acting up. All right. You know what we’re reading for the bedtime story today, waiting till you’re an adult. Oh, Rich. Hey, just want to say first off, thank you for coming on the show.
This has really been a lot of fun. I think it’s truly admirable what you’re doing and continuing to add, you know, add to add to the world and to give your gift of teaching to others and to future generations as the books live on. That being said a lot of people listening to this, if somebody wants to follow up, wants to pick up some of your collection wants to connect, how do people do that?
Well, first of all, my Amazon account is amazon. com forward slash author forward slash Richlandville, all one word. And my phone number is 209 918 2534. And my email is teachersaskatyahoop. com, and there’s a joke that goes with that. A little kid goes, is looking forward to kindergarten, all excited. Mom packs his lunch, gives him his backpack.
He goes to school, comes home, throws down his lunch, throws down his backpack, goes to his room screaming, crying. She says, Honey, what’s the matter? He goes, I’m not going to kindergarten anymore. That teacher is so stupid. All that teacher does is ask questions. Doesn’t my teacher know anything? So that’s all teachers do, is ask questions.
Mm, that’s great. That’s a good way to end it. And speaking of the audience everybody tuning in on this, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, I don’t know what you’re waiting for hit the subscribe button. Nobody else is going to do it for you ask the question Why am I not hitting the subscribe button?
Ask some questions rich right? Hit the hit the subscribe button and we have many more mission based people coming up for you on the line and and appreciate you listening and tuning in rich. Thank you again so much for coming on And thank you so much. I love this
