Just heard from my agent: a publisher she recently sent my latest children's picture book to, has just turned it down. Crap! That's four rejections. They are all very pleasant though..."We love the book, but it just doesn't fit our publishing needs." So right now I'm faced with the following questions. Do I move forward and tell my agent to continue shopping it around, or do I file the story away and return to it a few years down the road?

In my heart I want to keep trying, but my head and publisher are telling me otherwise. The picture book market is dying a very slow and painful death. You wouldn't think so considering the enormous amount of picture books that are for sale at bookstores, but the truth is, unless you're Robert Munsch or Rosemary Wells, you can forget selling a picture book anytime soon. Publishers simply don't want to invest the time and money into new authors. Picture book publishing is very costly. The type of paper they print the books on costs more, the printing of the illustrations costs more, and the list goes on and on.

There are also so many things publishers don't want to see. They don't want to see animals that talk or walk, and they really don't want to see anything that rhymes. For me personally, those are two things that I've always loved about picture books. Where would Bill Pete be without animals that could talk? And what's a Dr. Seuss book without rhyming?

In a recent conversation with my assistant publisher, I was told that I should focus on writing novels, not picture books. Though she told me they would certainly look at picture books, she advised me to stop writing them. When word of this reached my editor he was very angry. He told me to write only what I wanted to write and to not base my decisions on the trends of the market. Good advice and I took it. Apparently though, my associate publisher was right.

So now I have a picture book that is floating lifelessly in the water. It’s very frustrating and a touch sad to have to abandon a story that you've written and one that you've grown quite fond of. I'm sure my agent will be contacting me soon to see what I want to do, and I honestly don't know what to tell her. Sink or swim?