A Drop in the Ocean by Jacqui Bailey

Jacqui Bailey, author of ‘A Drop in the Ocean’, published by Bloomsbury Education share her thoughts on why non-fiction is so important for children- and such a joy to write!

Most of my working life has been spent editing and writing children’s non-fiction books and it’s been both lots of fun and a challenge.

The joy of non-fiction is that the world is stuffed full of so many fascinating things it’s like a never-ending feast that you can come back to time and time again, and each time you do you’ll find something new that you didn’t know about before.

In fact, the world has so many things in it we’ve had to make it easier for ourselves by dividing them up into groups, with names like Animals, Plants, History, Science, and so on. But that’s just the start, because each group can also be divided up into thousands of individual topics, and each topic is packed with its own bundle of amazing information waiting to be discovered.

Readers, particularly young readers, have a huge appetite for finding out about things, but books that tell you about the world (information books) work best when they don’t smother you with facts and figures, but also allow space for the reader’s imagination.

So the fun part of making a non-fiction book is choosing a topic and finding out everything you can about it, then picking all that information apart to look for the best bits – the bits that tell you exactly what something is, how it works or how it lives, or when, if it is something from long ago (think dinosaurs, or pyramids).

The challenge lies in then weaving those best bits together to tell a story, in pictures as well as words, that will explain the topic as clearly as possible in an inviting and engaging way, allowing the reader to soak up the information and make it their own.

At different times I’ve written or edited books on all sorts of terrific subjects, but I’ve got to say that I find science topics the most fascinating of all. Probably because I am not a scientist and so each one is a complete journey of discovery.

‘A Drop in the Ocean’ is a good example. The illustrator, Matt Lilly, and I really enjoyed making this book and the rest of the books in the ‘Science Works’ series. It uses a comic-strip style of illustration which allows the pictures to work closely with the text as well as adding a level of information of their own – not to mention a dash of humour. It can be a fantastic way of presenting information in a clear, easily understandable form that keeps the reader interested and engaged in the subject.

Added to which, water is a fabulous topic. It is simultaneously one of the most ordinary yet also extraordinary things in our world. Most of the time we take it for granted, but without it no living thing could survive on earth. It can continuously change its appearance from a liquid to a solid to a gas and back to liquid again, as it travels endlessly around the world. Even more amazingly, all the water we have on Earth today is the same water that was first formed billions of years ago, and it’s the only water we’ve got. Altogether it makes a great story.

We hope you agree.

Many thanks to Jacqui and the team at Bloomsbury Education for taking part in NNFN2023. We have a bundle of the four titles in this series to giveaway!