What Publishers Look for in Authors with Lauren Groves

This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 91. You can listen in here!

If you’ve ever felt like traditional publishing was a door that would stay closed until you hit some magic follower threshold, we have good news for you. This week we sat down with Lauren Groves — acquisitions editor at B&H Publishing Group and author of the Toddler Theology board book series — and what she had to say might just make you exhale for the first time in years.

Publishers Are Shifting — And Writers Should Know It

For a while, social media felt like a golden ticket. A large following seemed to signal a ready-made audience of buyers, and publishers took notice. But the data hasn’t borne that out. “People who click follow on Instagram are not necessarily ready to buy a book,” Lauren explains, “or interested in buying a book from someone who they follow for quippy online things, funny videos, or even online writing.”

What publishers care about now is something harder to fake and far more meaningful: real expertise and real relationships. At B&H specifically, Lauren tells us, local church involvement carries serious weight. They’re the publishing arm of LifeWay Christian Resources, so boots-on-the-ground community connection is genuinely part of what they’re looking for. But even beyond B&H, she points out, publishers across the board want authors who are embedded in the world — people whose neighbors, church friends, and local booksellers trust them enough to hand-sell a book.

“When we invest in people first,” Lauren puts it simply, “marketing becomes a natural overflow out of that.”

What Actually Makes an Editor Stop and Read

When a proposal lands in Lauren’s queue without a recognizable name attached, she doesn’t go hunting for an Instagram profile. She goes straight to the manuscript.

For children’s books, the full text is usually included in the proposal, and she’s looking for writing that makes her want to see it — writing so clear and well-crafted that she can already picture the illustrations. “I just love it whenever someone gets that simple writing that isn’t too convoluted,” she says, “and makes me want to put pictures to it.”

She also looks at how the author articulates the felt need — what gap in the culture or in readers’ lives does this book actually fill? That section of a proposal often reveals the author’s voice, and voice is everything.

Speaking of voice: Lauren offers a candid caution about AI-written proposals. Even when the manuscript itself isn’t AI-generated, a proposal that sounds like it was will raise red flags. “We’re just starting to more and more understand what that writing sounds like,” she notes, “and we just want to hear the writer’s voice in every single part.”

Lessons From Writing for Toddlers (That Apply to Every Writer)

There’s a famous Mem Fox quote Lauren loves: writing a children’s book is like writing War and Peace in haiku. She laughs a little telling it — but she says it’s really true.

Board books run somewhere between 200 and 700 words. Every single one of those words has to do significant work. That constraint, she believes, is actually a gift — and not just for children’s authors. She challenges every writer, regardless of genre, to try distilling their manuscript’s core message down to picture-book length. Not to publish it that way, but as an exercise. “If you could get everything that you’re trying to communicate down to 200 or 700 words,” she says, “I think that it just helps us attack with better precision and focus on what is really the point of this.”

It’s a tool for clarity. And clarity, she reminds us, lives in simplicity.

When the Theology Gets Hard (And What to Do About It)

Writing Toddler Theology — a board book series based on catechism questions — meant taking some of the weightiest concepts in Christian faith and rendering them in a sentence a two-year-old could hold. That is no small task.

Her approach? Pull in as many trusted eyes as possible, early. She sent manuscripts to team members pursuing PhDs in theology, to her pastor, to people who might not be able to write simply themselves but could identify the holes in her simplicity. “All writing is a collaborative process,” she explains, “because you are writing for someone else to read it.”

The concept she was most worried about? The Trinity. And her solution turned out to be the wisest move of all: she didn’t try to explain it. She stated what Scripture says: God is three persons and one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And left it there. Sometimes the right move is trusting the truth to do its own work.

How Lauren Sells Her Own Books (Without Social Media)

Lauren is refreshingly honest about her own platform: she doesn’t have a huge following, and social media isn’t where she’s placed her hopes for Toddler Theology. Instead, she pictures exactly where she wants her books to land — tucked into a baby gift, brought to a first birthday party, pressed into a friend’s hands alongside a post-baby meal.

“Really thinking about my real life relationships first has been the biggest impact on this book,” she tells us. She connected with a local bookstore in her hometown, built relationships with booksellers in Nashville, and gave copies directly to people in her church community. Often, she’d hand one or two books from the six-book series to a friend — and watch that friend buy the other five.

It sounds quiet. It doesn’t sound viral. And it works.

The One Thing She Wishes She’d Known

If she could go back to 2022, when she first started writing these books, Lauren says she would have thought more concretely about the specific toddlers who’d be holding them in 2024. Publishing is slow — illustration, production, printing, shipping — and the babies born when she was writing were toddlers by launch day. Keeping a specific child in mind, she believes, sharpens everything.

We feel this deeply. When we write to a real person — someone we actually know, whose life we can picture — the writing gets focused and alive in a way that writing to “all Christian women” simply cannot match.

An Invitation to Become a Student of Children’s Books

As we wrapped up, Lauren encouraged every writer — not just those writing for kids — to spend time in the children’s section of their library or local bookstore. Read the books. Touch the pages. Ask yourself what the author is really trying to say, and whether they pulled it off.

“How can I illustrate with my words,” she asks, “even if they’re only words?”

That question is worth sitting with for a while.

This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.