The Page is the Limit

In my researching, I found the standard length of a children's book is 32 pages. I looked through several children's books that we own and counted pages and found this roughly to be true. A good number had the standard 32 pages, but some did not. There were some books that went well over, into the 50s or 60s even, which made me wonder. 

Sunset in India

Is there a category of book between children's book and a Young Adult novel? I always classified the early "I can read" type books as children's books because my parents would read them to use when we were little, and they were some of my favorites. (Think Sam and the Firefly, Fish Out of Water, Billy and Blaze) Now I am curious if those would be classified under a different category. I have not tried googling it yet though. 

This brings me to another dilemma. For every book you write, you are supposed to have an intended audience in mind, and write toward that age group. The age of your main character is supposed to be the same (or roughly the same) as your intended audience. 

Now my main character is about 3-4yrs old, and my intended audience is roughly the same 3-7 or so. (Of course I hope it to appeal to adults and older children as well.) However, I think that I may have a few over the recommended word count. One article I read said no more than 50 on a page, and I am well under that. 

Well, I decided I'd better just look this up. This article has a nice concise list of both book categories and recommended number of words per category:   https://www.writing.ie/guest-blogs/childrens-books-age-categories-and-word-counts/

My word count currently stands at 261, so I think I'm in a pretty good spot in regards to this standard for children's books. 

With the page count, however, I am struggling. My original rough draft was 50 pages long. That is 18 more that the standard count, and also not in the normal multiple of 8 pages. In my second rough draft storyboard, I cut some words and some full page illustrations, and combined some pages.  (As of right now, I do not have a way to add photos of them, so I apologize.) This got me down to 40 pages.

I don't think that I can cut/combine anymore without losing some of the fun and impact of the story. 

This is a really great video that explains the layout of a children's book and how the pages are set up. It is well laid out and was very helpful when I put together my second rough draft: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6w0ZhMiXj8

Hopefully by next Sunday I will be able to upload some photos again and show you what my storyboard/rough draft looks like.