TRANSCRIPT

Hi… thank you so much for watching.

I’ve been talking about querying publishers in the last few videos. So now let’s say you have an awesome manuscript, an entertaining query letter and a list of publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts. Even with all this… you are still not ready to query… and here’s the reason why…

Publishers continually change their guidelines. One that’s open to submissions today, may not be open tomorrow. To ensure you’re respecting each publisher’s submission guidelines, you have to go through the very tedious process of visiting every single publisher’s site to confirm the following…

• First, confirm that they're still accepting unsolicited manuscripts.

• Then, confirm that they’re open to unsolicited manuscripts at this particular time.

• You'll want to see if they want manuscripts pasted into the body of the email or as an attachment.

• You'll also want to see if, instead of those, they have a form on their website.

• You also need to see if they only accept manuscripts by mail. And a side note here… I ignore publishers that only accept manuscripts via regular mail. Maybe I’m missing out on big opportunities, but my time is too precious to spend it printing out manuscripts, getting 8-1/2 x 11 envelopes, buying stamps, filling out a self-addressed stamped envelope for the reply, and then going to the post office to mail out a manuscript – only to get a form rejection six months later. Plus, I mean, this isn’t like 1990. Why would a publisher only accept manuscripts by mail? Still, all that said, if this particular publisher seems like the perfect match for your manuscript, then you may feel like it's worth your time and effort to submit to them.

• You also need to check if the publisher does not accept multiple submissions. Now, multiple submissions are when you submit manuscripts to more than one publisher at a time. And for me, like the mail-only publishers, I ignore these publishers. The publishing process is just so slow that I really think it’s unfair to expect writers to submit to only one publisher at a time. So like imagine sending your manuscript out to this publisher, waiting six months and then they reject it with some sort of generic form letter. You’ve wasted half a year on your goal towards getting published.

• And finally the last thing you want to do is confirm that they are not a vanity publisher. A vanity publisher, also known as a vanity press or subsidy publisher, is a publishing company that charges authors a fee to publish their books. And that is just not how publishing works. Legit publishers take on the financial risk of publishing a book and pay you a percentage of the profits, aka royalties. You should never pay a publisher anything to put your book out into print.

Like I said, this process is so tedious and so time-consuming. But I don’t know any other way to confirm all the information you need to know before submitting without doing all of this. If you have a short cut, I would love to know what it is. Please let me know in the comments.

As always, 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.