Hello everyone,
I hope this is the right place to post this - if not, perhaps a friendly mod would move it somewhere more appropriate?
As you might know, in common with a lot of other publishers, we strongly prefer to consider manuscripts that are sent to us by literary agencies, and we don't have an email inbox for unagented submissions. But I think it might be interesting to open a channel for a small number of picture book manuscripts, and to give authors instant feedback on their work.
At some point between now and Friday we'll tweet a link to an email address to which you can send your manuscript. That address will stay active until the 25th message comes in - any MS that comes in after that will, I'm afraid, be invisibly deleted without any of us seeing it.
We will then sit down and work our way through those 25 manuscripts, and then tweet our reaction - either a note to let you know we're taking it to our next editorial meeting, or a rejection, and as much feedback as we can get into 140 characters. Your work will be read by experienced picture book commissioning editors.
If you're interested, there are a few rules we need you to follow:
If you break any of those rules, I'm afraid we'll ignore your emails entirely...
I'm starting this off here, with a fairly low limit of 25, as a pilot scheme, but feel free to tell other people about it. If this works well we'll do it once a month or so and add more slots.
The Twitter account to follow is @RHCBlog and our blog - where we will do some related posts about writing and publishing picture books - is www.talkaboutrandom.co.uk.
I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this... so please do let me know what you think!
I hope this is the right place to post this - if not, perhaps a friendly mod would move it somewhere more appropriate?
As you might know, in common with a lot of other publishers, we strongly prefer to consider manuscripts that are sent to us by literary agencies, and we don't have an email inbox for unagented submissions. But I think it might be interesting to open a channel for a small number of picture book manuscripts, and to give authors instant feedback on their work.
At some point between now and Friday we'll tweet a link to an email address to which you can send your manuscript. That address will stay active until the 25th message comes in - any MS that comes in after that will, I'm afraid, be invisibly deleted without any of us seeing it.
We will then sit down and work our way through those 25 manuscripts, and then tweet our reaction - either a note to let you know we're taking it to our next editorial meeting, or a rejection, and as much feedback as we can get into 140 characters. Your work will be read by experienced picture book commissioning editors.
If you're interested, there are a few rules we need you to follow:
- You need to have a Twitter account, and to let us know your Twitter name so we can tweet you back. (Oh, and your real name, naturally!)
- Please don't send more than one manuscript.
- Please don't send us more than one email, as each one will count towards the 25 email limit and waste a slot for someone else. We're trying to automate this system, but it's easy to break if you don't follow the rules, and we don't have the time to manage the inbox manually.
If you break any of those rules, I'm afraid we'll ignore your emails entirely...
I'm starting this off here, with a fairly low limit of 25, as a pilot scheme, but feel free to tell other people about it. If this works well we'll do it once a month or so and add more slots.
The Twitter account to follow is @RHCBlog and our blog - where we will do some related posts about writing and publishing picture books - is www.talkaboutrandom.co.uk.
I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this... so please do let me know what you think!
