TRANSCRIPT

Hi… thanks so much for watching.

Once you complete a manuscript and are ready to send it off to publishers, you may be tempted to send it to the publishers that we’ve all heard of like Scholastic, or HarperCollins, or Simon and Schuster.

The thing is… these big publishers only accept manuscripts from agents. So, if you don’t have an agent, you can’t submit a manuscript to these publishers.

However, even without an agent, you still have options!

What you want to do is find publishers that accept “unsolicited manuscripts,” and these are manuscripts that haven’t been requested by a publisher.

I have a list of publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts in my book, The Unstoppable Picture Book Author, which you can find on my website.

You can also do what I did when looking for publishers and that is to simply Google, “Publishers that accept unsolicited picture book manuscripts.” Doing this search will produce plenty of articles with the names of publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts, aka, publishers willing to take a chance on new writers.

However, there are a few more steps in the process.

Before sending your manuscript to a publisher that accepts unsolicited manuscripts, you first have to check each publisher’s “submission guidelines.”

Submissions guidelines are the rules and processes that publishers make you follow when submitting manuscripts to them. These can cover everything from whether you need to attach a manuscript or paste the manuscript into the body of an email to windows when the publisher accepts unsolicited manuscripts.

In addition to the submission guidelines, there are two other aspects of the querying process that you need to be aware of: first is formatting your manuscript and second, writing a query letter.

I don't want this video to get too long, so I'll get into those two in the next videos. In the meantime, thank you so much for watching. If you got any value out of this video, please like it, subscribe to my channel and share the video with other aspiring picture book authors. Thanks.