When Tim Wynne-Jones launched his first children's picture book, Madelaine and Ermadillo, in 1976, he was one of a mere 35 Canadian children's authors to be published that year.

"Today the number would be 10 times that -- there's a way that children's books are going off into the world and telling people about Canada," Wynne-Jones says.

A two-time winner of the Governor-General's Award, Wynne-Jones has had his children's stories published in the United States, Australia, Asia and Europe.

Last month, he spoke about his stories to a gathering of young students at the Turin Book Fair, in Italy, where 20 per cent of all translated books are now Canadian. The translation of Canadian adult and children's literature in Germany has increased by 760 per cent in the last decade, with more than 100 Canadian children's authors and 300 titles currently translated into German.

Wynne-Jones said he began to notice big changes in the mid-1980s, when he was the children's literary reviewer for The Globe and Mail.

"Children's writers across the country were putting regions of Canada on the world literary map," he says. "Each season would bring a writer from Alberta or British Columbia or Newfoundland. A village here, a town there -- a lot of little nowheres suddenly became somewheres, and it's still going on today."

Wynne-Jones, who lives in Perth, Ont., an hour north of Kingston, will speak about regional writing during his opening address at The Fun of Reading: International Forum of Canadian Literature, beginning today.

Hundreds of international delegates will attend the event, which runs until Sunday at the Ottawa Congress Centre. It will include a trade exhibition, school library summit and seminars on hot-button issues in children's reading and writing, such as the promotion of Canadian children's literature at home and abroad.

Canada's vastness, combined with its relatively small population, forces Canadian authors and publishers to rely heavily on audiences around the world.

"It's a sales thing," says Lisa Nave, rights director at Groundwood Books, the children's division of independent publisher Douglas & McIntyre. "We just don't have enough sales in Canada to support our publishing program, so we depend on foreign markets to make it viable."

Nave says getting Canadian literature translated is a challenge in the fiercely competitive publishing industry.

She says Britain has been one of the most challenging markets for Groundwood to break into, since the Canadian publisher focuses more on quality than marketing potential, while its British counterparts always have their eyes out for the big sellers.

Accordingly, "the world took a little longer to be aware of our books," Nave says, but connections with the international literary community through fairs and committees are starting to bring international accolades to Canadian work.

"We're now regularly nominated onto lists and winning international awards," she says.

As a children's author who has two part-time jobs and "writes on a computer held together with chewing gum and tin foil," Sarah Withrow is well aware of the benefits of having two of her books published abroad.

"With another country, you get another advance, and more money if you earn out the advance," Withrow says. "You've already done the work, so the more countries you can sell to, the more bang you get for your book. It's not financially rewarding to do it otherwise."

Withrow's love affair with fiction began when she was a young girl who quickly ran out of good Canadian literature to read. Now she's filling the void by writing stories about real-life youths against conspicuously Canadian backdrops.

"When I come home from working at Loblaws every day and think, 'What am I doing this for?' I look at the foreign copies of the books on my shelf and think the children of the world need me," she says.

Her 1998 book Bat Summer -- about a 12-year-old girl who thinks she's a bat, and the boy who loves her -- was nominated for a Governor-General's Award and has been published in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and England.

Even with this varied audience, the book had enough universal appeal to require only subtle changes. The streets in the story retained their Toronto names, and only minor changes were made to the book's cover and content.

"I'm a writer, and I assume the publishers know their audiences and are interested in selling the book," Withrow says. "All I know is that I get fan mail from Luxembourg and Germany, so somebody's reading it."

But writers and publishers agree that translation potential ultimately comes down to the quality of the story and the writing.

"There are some Canadian authors who go out of their way to sound American so they'll get published," Wynne-Jones says. "But Canadian authors are increasingly realizing that you can set your story in Saskatoon or Goose Bay -- if it's well written it can still get published anywhere."