Submission Tips

The Way It Was and the Way It Is Now

Wendy McClure3 Comments

(Our thoughts about our new submissions policy and the fact that we will no longer respond to every unsolicited manuscript):

Twenty-five years ago, Albert Whitman received hundreds of manuscripts a year and we read every single one. People typed their stories on typewriters, or “word processors,” or else they composed them on beige home computers and then printed them up at “best quality” on their dot-matrix printers. We often received flyspecked photocopies, carboncopies, and pages of parchment typing paper where the typewriter left deep marks that you could feel with your fingers. The cover letters were usually brief, and they included SASEs. Sometimes the shorter manuscripts were folded into thirds, and from the deep creases you could tell that they’d been sent elsewhere and returned. Then you were compelled to keep the pages neat, so that you could fold them up again and send them back with our form rejection letters.

In our office twenty-five years ago, there was no email and people still had typewriters at their desks. There was time to open all the postal mail as soon as it was received.  When a writer didn’t include a SASE, we sent it back to him or her in a hand-addressed envelope with a reminder to please include one next time.

Ten years ago, Albert Whitman received thousands of manuscripts a year. We’d read every single one. They came on ink-jet and laser printers, and occasionally a few Xeroxed typewriter manuscripts. The cover letters were longer. Some people included email addresses as a sort of hopeful gesture. Some of the letters made claims like, “I am the next JK Rawlings,” (sic) and their writers didn’t even know to include SASEs, but we no longer had time to return their stories.  Now so many people owned PCs and thought they had written the next Harry Potter on them that we were sometimes overwhelmed and would fall behind on returning manuscripts.

In our office ten years ago, we had computers, too, and were determined to use them, so we logged in each submission in FileMaker Pro, so that when someone called or wrote us to find out what had happened to their story, there was a pretty good chance we could give them an answer. Sometimes people would phone us with questions—I sent my story on Monday did you get a chance to read it yet? or, How do I get published? or, I got a rejection letter, what am I doing wrong? We wanted to keep track of the manuscripts just so there’d be one question we could answer, and answer simply.

Five years ago, thousands of manuscripts continued to pour in. We would read every single one. But we no longer had time to log in the manuscripts. We were publishing more books now, though our staff hadn’t grown, and it was all we could do to keep up.  The postage increases were more frequent now, and often we had to stick one- or two-cent stamps on all the SASEs. We saw more email addresses on the first pages of manuscripts, more cover letters that said, Just recycle the manuscript if you’re not interested or I’ll assume that if I hear nothing after X number of months that the answer is no. We had to admit that made things easier.

Today, it’s more of the same: the manuscripts come in and we read every single one. We moved to a nicer office last November and moved boxes of manuscripts with us.  We read them in between the emails from agents and longtime authors, between the many more planning meetings that we have now, between all the other things that come with working at a company under new ownership and filled with new energy.

We are publishing still more books now, and our staff is still small (even a bit smaller).  And last month, with heavy hearts, we realized we can no longer respond to every submission without keeping writers waiting long past our posted response time. So we have decided to go the route many other houses have taken, and respond only when there is interest.  The SASEs, the form letters, the extra stamps—somehow it all adds up to a great deal of time we can’t afford, and we know writers can’t afford the extra wait time, either

All the same we hate losing the sense of connection that comes with that little transactions—sometimes we’d scrawl on the bottom of a form letter, Not right for us this time, but hope you’ll send again, or Do you have a good Thanksgiving story? But we’ve also been reaching out to promising writers through email for a while now, and we realize that the lines of communication are just different these days. We haven’t ruled out having an online submissions system, either, but we still like getting carefully printed pages in the mail.

People still call with questions sometimes—questions about their manuscripts, about getting published, about rejection. We don’t have all the answers, but there’s one thing we always tell them: We read all the stories. We read every single one.

Thanks for understanding.

The Way It Was and the Way It Is Now

Writers: please read! (And we’re still reading, too.)

Wendy McClure

Yesterday on the Albert Whitman website we announced a change to our submissions policy: as of November 1st, 2010, we will be responding only to submissions of interest, and will no longer send out response letters via SASE.

What does this mean?

  • We are still reading unsolicited and unagented submissions. However, the effort to return and respond to every one (with limited staff) has lengthened our response time considerably. In order to keep our submissions policy open and our wait times reasonable, we will now only respond to writers whose work we are interested in publishing and developing.
  • You no longer need to include a SASE. However, please include a mail address, phone, and email address with your submission so that we can contact you.
  • We will read every submission within four months of receipt. If you haven’t heard from us after four months, we’re passing on your submission. We’re fine with simultaneous submissions (we tend to assume you’re sending your work elsewhere at the same time).
  • If you sent something with an SASE recently, or between now and November 1st, we’ll still return it.
  • We know we’ll still be getting some SASEs for awhile, so we may still be returning things through the end of 2010.

If there are other questions, leave them in the comments, and we’ll try to respond here on the blog next week. Or take a look at our FAQ on the website.

Please spread the word, and we’ll update our info in CWIM and the other market guides very soon.  Thanks for your patience and understanding/

Writers: please read! (And we’re still reading, too.)

A Slush…Party…?

Melissa Ackerman, 1 Comment

by Rachel, Editorial intern

Last month, on my first day of work as an editorial intern here at Albert Whitman, I walked into the office anxiously wracking my brain: What was that word all the editors used during my interview? Slurp? Slug? Mush? Oh, that’s it:

SLUSH

Slush is, as I have come to learn, what people in the publishing biz call the mountains of unsolicited manuscripts that the editors read and, maybe, decide to publish. We receive over 5,000 manuscripts every year and each one contributes to the collective slush. But maybe, this is one of those phenomena that only a picture can really describe:

While the editors are always chiseling away at the slush pile, taking on chunks when they can find time, sometimes it is necessary to wage a full scale attack on the pile: you have a slush party. A slush party, to strain the metaphor to its breaking point, is the surge in the war against mountains of slush. Equipped with boxes of slush, letter openers, and cookies, we did some serious damage, two whole boxes of manuscripts: sorted into submissions that weren’t right for us and others that intrigued us. Victory tasted sweet, sort of like oatmeal raisin cookies.

Every time I confront the slush pile, I am amazed and humbled by the number of manuscripts. Apparently, people of all ages, from all over the place, and of all different walks of life, want to connect with and educate children through their stories. For me, a college student trying to figure out where I want to fit in the worlds of literature and education, it is really inspiring.

So keep the submissions coming. Don’t worry; we can take anything you throw at us. We’ve got a secret weapon: the slush party.

A Slush…Party…?

So write, it’s wrong

Wendy McClure1 Comment

Okay, while we sympathize with the striking writers in Hollywood, this article made us roll our eyes a little: Strking Writers Turn to Child’s Play.

It’s about television and film writers who’ve suddenly found an “unusual” (!) new calling writing children’s books. Several already have deals with a new imprint of IDW Books, which publishes a number of TV and movie tie-ins, so clearly somebody’s people talked to somebody else’s people, and then they did lunch, baby! Good for them, we say. But if any of those writers ever find themselves seeking out children’s book publishers beyond the thirty-mile zone, we have a few pointers for them, based on many, many years of experience reading the efforts of folks who think that writing children’s books is just like any other kind of writing, except shorter, and for shorter people. Thus:

1.) No snappy dialogue, please. Picture books aren’t “talky,” and they’re becoming increasingly less wordy. Also, kids really don’t say the darnedest things.

2.) We want stories, not pitches. Don’t try to dazzle us with talk about sequels, series, character licensing, animation rights! If you want to rule an empire, go play with action figures. (Which we will not be marketing as a tie-in.)

3.) Children’s books don’t have a laugh track, nor do they come with a remote control for switching channels. So for the love of Cosmo Kramer, don’t try to be HILARIOUS and ATTENTION-GETTING all the time, okay?

4.) Booger jokes are not subversive. Not even when they’re funny.

5.) Carefully read and consider the tone of the following quotes:
a.) “I’m a father of five and often lament the lack of really creative, funny children’s books.” b.) “I’m finding that in good children’s books, the text isn’t just describing the picture but the two are working together to advance the storytelling.” c.) “And, sometimes, there’s also a chance to make a political point.”
Did you get all that? Good. Now you know what not to say in a cover letter.

    Anyway, we’ve seen this kind of attitude before, and we sure wish we had a residual check for every time we’ve had to endure it. But it’s nice to know that other folks in the children’s lit world feel the same way we do. And we’ll be glad when the strike’s over. If they could bring back Arrested Development while they’re at it, that would be even better.

    So write, it’s wrong

    Here is a helpful visual aid

    Wendy McClure1 Comment

    Maybe you already know not to underestimate the size of the slush pile, ever. (If you don’t, visit that link and read posthaste!) And you may have already guessed that no, we try not to let it all pile up in a kitchen somewhere. So how big is it from week to week?

    Above is a photo of our editor-in-chief’s desk chair when she was out on vacation. This is how it looked with about a week’s worth of mailed submissions stacked up, though there are times when we get this much in about three days.

    It’s big enough to elicit a heavy sigh when someone calls to say, “Hi! I just sent you a picture book story! Did you get it?” (Yes, we did. If you need 100% certainty, it’s better to spring for USPS delivery confirmation than make one of our poor editors hunt through the stack.) It’s also big enough that it’s next to impossible to respond personally to most submissions.

    But at the same time, it’s manageable enough that indeed we do get through it. So bring it on!

    Here is a helpful visual aid

    The slush season

    Wendy McClure

    We’ve found this time of year we get more manuscript submissions in our slush pile than usual. We think this might be because 1.) plenty of people—especially teachers and school librarians—are on holiday break in late December and have extra time to stamp all those SASEs and 2.) “Write and publish a children’s book” sounds like a fabulous New Year’s resolution, doesn’t it?

    We don’t mind the extra mail—and yes, we do read ALL the submissions, every last one. And with all these new aspiring authors, there are bound to be questions. One we hear a lot is: When’s the best time of year to submit a manuscript? It depends on the publisher: some places receive unsolicited submissions for only a few months out of the year (and some don’t at all). But we’re always open to submissions—for us, the slush season is year-round. We read all the time, and when we’ve found enough book projects to fill our next list, we look for books for the list after that!

    Continue reading “The slush season” →

    The slush season