Self-publishing...will it hurt me?

Have you tried pitching it to these publishers?

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/DAWsubmission.html

http://www.ghbooks.com/manuscript_guidelines.cfm

http://www.fireflybooks.com/publishers.html

Good luck and check their guidelines and such.

Sara

To get agent/publisher attention for a self-published book, you need several thousand sales within the first six months to a year of release.

You may not hurt yourself by self-publishing, but you probably won't help yourself either. And the book you self-publish is off the table, in terms of getting a contract from a commercial publisher, unless you sell big--which means that if it's part of a series, the series is also out of the running. Publishers aren't going to pick up Book 2 without Book 1.

The buying frenzy in children's fantasy has died down a bit from a couple of years ago, but it'is still a vibrant market. If you're having trouble getting attention from legitimate agents and publishers, it's possible that your pitch isn't good enough, or that the people you're approaching aren't right for the work. It's also possible that your book isn't ready for publication.

- Victoria

Also do some research on the individual agents. One of the things I noticed was that many of them say they take everything under the sun, but what they actually sell is just in a few areas. For example, you could find an agent that takes children's books but when you do the research, you discover that the agent has never sold any children's fantasy books.

Some other things worth investigating further:

Publisher's Weekly often has issues on children's fiction and reviews them each week. It may be worth looking at the reviews for book titles and backtracking through places like like Publisher's Marketplace to see if you can find out who the agent was.

Society of Children's Book Writers. Not sure what their membership requirements are now--self-publishing has forced a lot of these professional organizations to restrict membership to published authors. In the past, though, SCBWI did have workshops on writing children's fiction, so it may be worth checking into.

Once you self-pubbed (even through Lulu), you can't sell first rights anymore. That might hurt your chances of getting a contract with a traditional publisher, if you're already having troubles already. Instead of going down that path, why not forget about agents for a while and target some independent, small presses that deals with children fantasy?

Somewhere up the thread someone posted details of Penguin Children's. I recently had a rejection fron Sharyn November in which she said that she has books scheduled out to 2008 and is not looking at anything new at the moment

If you're going to self publish (which I wouldn't recommend) PLEASE draw up a marketing plan.

My plan is to try to generate some decent sales...

Click to expand...

How? Have you considered what you will need to do to generate those sales? And have you quantified 'decent'? If you don't think these things through now, you'll fall at the first hurdle.

Can I ask what sort of feedback you've gotten from the agents (and editors?) you've submitted to? It's very cool that the 5th grade class loved the book, but -- and I don't mean to sound harsh -- I wouldn't take that as an objective measure of whether the book is publishable, any more than I'd trust my mother to make that judgement on my own books.