Local Writer Publishes Children’s Book

By Brianna Brickweg
Contributing Writer

He’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse before lunchtime.

“The Fourth Stall” by Chris Rylander is a novel about Mac, a sixth grader who runs an organized crime ring out of the fourth stall in the East Wing bathroom at his school. Kids come to him for help with anything a middle schooler might need in exchange for fees or favors.

“I thought it would be cool to put a kid-friendly spin on organized crime because I see that [in] children’s literature a lot of people do things like that,” Rylander said. “They’ll take a classic story like ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ or something and then they will retell it for modern kid’s literature.”

This is Rylander’s first published novel, and it was published on Feb. 8. Rylander graduated from NDSU in 2005 with a degree in history education. He currently works for Noridian, a company that owns Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota.

Rylander started submitting his query letter to agents in 2006. When he first submitted to his agent, Steven Malk at Writer’s House, he submitted an adult novel. Malk only represented children’s authors and called Rylander to suggest writing for children.

“Writing for kids and teens is way more open. You pretty much can do whatever you want – if you want to write about magical unicorns who go to space, you can probably get away with that if you do it well enough,” Rylander said, “I feel like it’s more fun. Adult literature, I feel like, takes itself really seriously and is, often times, really pretentious. I don’t have any plans to write for adults anytime soon because I really do like writing kid’s books.”

Malk took three to four months to sell Rylander’s novel to a publisher and the normal process for publishing a book takes about two years. Rylander’s book was originally sold to Simon & Schuster in late 2007, but his editor at the publishing company was laid off. The new editor at Simon & Schuster didn’t have the same vision for the book, so Rylander and Malk pulled out of that contract and resold the book to HarperCollins in the summer of 2009.

“I really like [Writer’s House] because they’re a large agency [and] they have a lot of great authors, but they kind of operate like a boutique agency,” Rylander said, “They give you a lot of personal help. I don’t feel like I’m represented by a giant corporation or anything like that. I pretty much only work with my agent and his assistant.”

Rylander said the main thing for writers who are looking to be published to do is to not let the rejections get them down. “The Fourth Stall” is Rylander’s third finished novel and he has gotten many rejections before his novel was picked up.

“You can’t force people to like your book. Either they’ll like it or they won’t. And if they don’t, you’re just going to have to move on,” Rylander said, “There’s not much you can do, outside of next time trying to write a better book.”

“The Fourth Stall” can be found at Barnes and Noble as well as barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, harpercollins.com and indiebound.org. To learn more about Rylander, visit his website at http://www.chrisrylander.com.

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