On Nov. 10, Beth Sutinis sat at her desk in Brooklyn with a big task looming. As the executive editor for the children’s division of Time Inc. Books, she and her colleagues had worked through the fall to update their book “Presidents of the United States.” They added a spread about Barack Obama, another about the 2016 election and a third about Hillary Clinton, who polls had indicated would be elected the 45th president.

In the days after the election, Ms. Sutinis scrambled to produce a profile of the person who was elected instead. “It was one of the harder things I have had to do in a long career of writing and editing nonfiction for kids,” she said.

Presidential biographies are a staple of children’s book publishing, and of classrooms across the country. Nonfiction for children is a surging category, particularly in light of a Common Core mandate that schools put greater emphasis on it in their curriculum. Publishers like Penguin Young Readers, Scholastic and Time for Kids chronicle stories like the rise of Mr. Obama from Illinois state senator to president, or the political legacy of the Bush family, interspersing those accounts with facts about presidential history. The books hit bookshelves every four years, usually long before historians and writers of nonfiction for adults weigh in.

But the story of Donald J. Trump posed a unique set of challenges.

After an election cycle whose divisive effect on voters is still being felt, publishing books for classroom use has been unusually perilous. For Ms. Sutinis, the difficulty went beyond the time crunch to finding concise quotations from Mr. Trump’s campaign appearances that didn’t include contentious remarks.