Submitting to a publisher

Posted on 18 August 2012 by Brooke C

If you’ve finished writing your manuscript, you’ve had someone critique it and you’re sure you can do no more to improve it, you might now be ready to approach publishers. This can be a daunting prospect! It’s extremely difficult to secure a contract with a publisher, so you must do your research before trying to submit your work. If you get it wrong the first time, you’re unlikely to get a second chance with a publisher.

The first step is to identify the publishers that accept submissions in your genre (many publishers only accept specific genres). Also check that they are currently accepting submissions – some only accept them at certain times of the week or month, and some don’t accept them at all.

Publishers also have different procedures and guidelines for submissions. It’s vital that you check the submission guidelines of the publisher you’re researching, because if you don’t follow them correctly, your manuscript often won’t be considered.

They may request a synopsis and a few chapters of the work, or they may be happy to receive the whole manuscript, especially if it’s a picture book or a short chapter book. You may be asked to provide a document identifying the book’s market and competition, among other things. Publishers will usually also specify whether you should submit a hard-copy or electronic file.

Eliminate as many grammatical and spelling errors as possible from the text, and do not submit a first draft to a publisher. The manuscript must be in the best possible shape before submission.

See the Australian Publishers Association for a comprehensive list of Australian publishers, and SPUNC for a list of small and independent publishers.

CBCA Book of the Year 2012 winners announced

Posted on 17 August 2012 by Brooke C

Big news today for the Australian children’s book community – the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year 2012 winners have been announced!

Here are the winners:

Older Readers Book of the Year: Scot Gardiner for The Dead I Know
Younger Readers Book of the Year: Kate Constable for Crow Country
Early Childhood Book of the Year: Nick Bland and Freya Blackwood for The Runaway Hug
Picture Book of the Year: Bob Graham for A Bus Called Heaven
Eve Pownall Book of the Year: Alison Lester and Coral Tulloch for One Small Island: The Story of Macquarie Island

See the CBCA website for full details of the winners and honour books. Congratulations to everyone!

Penguin’s ‘Monthly Catch’ puts children’s submissions on hold

Posted on 12 July 2012 by Brooke C

As outlined in an earlier post, at the beginning of the year Penguin included children’s and YA submissions in their Monthly Catch, so that for the first week of every month authors of these books could submit their manuscripts.

Unfortunately, they have had to suspend the inclusion of children’s and YA manuscripts because of the number of submissions they received. Bad news for authors, but keep checking their website for updates, as they suggest they’ll reopen submissions soon.

John Marsden Prize for Young Australian Writers

Posted on 27 June 2012 by Brooke C

If you’re a writer who’s under 25, you might be interested in entering the John Marsden Prize for Young Australian Writers. Entries have just opened for this prize, which is being facilitated by Express Media and funded by Marsden himself.

The competition offers the following prizes:

Short Story prize (18–24) $3000
Poetry prize (18–24) $1500
Short Story prize (under 18) $500
Poetry prize (under 18) $500

You also have the chance to have your work published online and in the December issue of Voiceworks.

See Express Media for more information, and for entry forms.

Are you having trouble with your novel’s beginning?

Posted on 1 June 2012 by Brooke C

Writing the beginning of your novel is one of the most challenging, and most important, aspects of writing a novel. Get it wrong and you’ll lose the reader’s interest pretty quickly. Maybe they’ll come back to the book later in the hope it will get better, or maybe they’ll put the book down, never to pick it up again.

For those of you who are having trouble, I just read a great blog post from the Ampersand Project (Hardie Grant Egmont’s project that accepts new submissions from unpublished writers for a period each year – see more on the project here).

The post outlines some fantastic tips from Writer’s Digest on what to avoid when you’re writing your beginning, including opening with a dream or with an alarm clock buzzing, being unintentionally funny, and opening with dialogue.

Take a look at the post, and revisit the opening scene of your novel. Does it need tweaking?

Good luck!

Hachette accepting manuscripts

Posted on 21 April 2012 by Brooke C

Another publisher has announced that they are accepting manuscript submissions. Hachette Australia is accepting submissions from children’s writers (as well as writers of adult fiction and non-fiction). Note that they will only accept submissions in Word format; see their website for details.

Good luck!

Penguin and A & U accepting manuscripts

Posted on 9 February 2012 by Brooke C

Many children’s book authors out there will know how difficult it is to find a children’s publisher willing to accept manuscript submissions. However, the good news is that two of our major publishers have announced that they are now accepting them.

Penguin recently began accepting submissions for their adult fiction and non-fiction lists through the newly created Monthly Catch, and now their Books for Children and Young Adults (BCYA) division is also accepting unsolicited manuscript submissions. Their submission guidelines are strict, so make sure you read through the requirements thoroughly; see their website for full details.

Allen and Unwin has a well-established ‘Friday Pitch’ program, in which authors can email submissions to the publisher on Fridays, and they’ve now added children’s and YA submissions to the program. See their website for information about the Friday Pitch and their books for children and teenagers.

Good luck!

Technology not the book’s enemy?

Posted on 6 January 2012 by Brooke C

This article in the Melbourne Age is interesting reading, and very relevant to those of us who write and publish books for children and teenagers.

Written by Gail Rebuck of Random House UK, it discusses the idea that the book may be a solution to Western teenagers’ reduced capacity for empathy. Maybe we should concentrate on the content of books, and not worry so much about whether it’s a print book or an ebook …

Formatting a picture book

Posted on 28 November 2011 by Brooke C

If you’re working on a picture book and are unsure about how to present it to prospective publishers, agents or editors, this post looks to provide a little guidance.

A picture book is 32 pages long, and around half of those pages will be illustrations, so try not to go over around 500 or 600 words for the most part. Don’t spell things out too much in the text; let the illustrations tell the story to some extent. Remember that the content of the illustrations should tell a child a lot more about the story than what can be gleaned from reading the text.

The book begins with endpapers, the title page and the dedication and imprint page (although these last two sometimes appear at the back of the book). Look at how other picture books are set out, and if you’re having trouble picturing how to place the text and spread it out evenly throughout the book, it can sometimes help to create a mock book.

When you are ready to submit your manuscript to a publisher or editor, send it as a Word document, using 12-point font, double-spaced. You can indicate with a text break where you think the page breaks should go, if you’d like.

If you are submitting to a publisher, do not include any illustrations; the publisher will choose an illustrator/artist. If you are self-publishing, the illustrator you choose should be happy to get some guidance from you as to what kind of look and feel you have in mind, but they will probably expect some freedom of expression when it comes to actually completing the artwork.

A publisher will require you to submit a synopsis of the book along with the manuscript. The aim of the synopsis is to give the publisher a snapshot of what the book is about, and why they should publish it. Make it as catchy and interesting as you can, but keep it brief, at around four to six sentences for a picture book.

There’s a common misconception that it’s easy to write a picture book; in fact, the opposite is true. The limited number of words and the fact that the text and illustrations need to work together to tell the story make it difficult enough, but the picture book’s audience, the child, is the toughest of critics. Any flat spot or flaw in the story and the child will lose interest. The answer? Redraft, redraft, and redraft again. And seek feedback from trusted sources, such as writing groups, as you go.

New YA looks intriguing

Posted on 24 November 2011 by Brooke C

This morning I stumbled across a new trailer for a YA novel called Fracture, by Megan Miranda. It’s being published in February 2012 by Bloomsbury Australia. It looks fantastic, so different from all the other YAs that are around at the moment. Can’t wait to read this one …