Storyteller5 said:
I've been doing my research, using a lot of the familiar sources (WD Market for ChildrensWriters&Illustrators, write4kids,etc) so I know a lot of the obvious submission rules.
For those of you who have been published, what do you wish someone would've told you when you started submitting? I'm looking for the small details that get overlooked.
Don't see 'getting published' as some kind of Holy Grail. It's an amazing and wonderful achievement, but getting that phonecall is not the end. In fact it's the beginning of another, much longer process: your career. If you bear in mind that signing the contract is actually only one link in the chain then it will stop seeming an impossible dream (and one that you probably despair of quite often), and become something which you can work towards with patience and professionalism and a steadying sense of having done all you can.
Oh, and I always found sending out my mss in white padded envelopes to be a good move. Most mss arrive in brown envelopes, which will make yours stand out a little more, and because it's padded it shows that you care about your ms. But don't sellotape the flap down or stable it - make it easy to get into, so if the editor is taking five minutes break to let his/her eyes wander across the desk, yours is the one they'll be tempted to rip open, NOT the one that looks as if they'll need to fetch a pair of scissors and possibly the jaws of life to get into...
