I had a good feeling about Usborne Publishing (the balloon is their logo) when I read their guidelines for authors. To begin with they actually look at unsolicited manuscripts - an increasingly rare thing in children's publishing.
But then yesterday morning there was that familiar sound of my dog barking hysterically at the postman followed by the pathetic flopping sound of a rejected submission hitting the doormat. This time I was surprised to find I didn't feel sad - because this time I thought - 'oh I can blog about this.' Ha!
Usborne will consider unsolicited fiction manuscripts (not picture books) and their requirements are pretty standard. For ‘Older fiction’ they ask for a synopsis and three chapters 'of suitable manuscripts.'
How to write/get published books always point out that this should be the first three chapters (personally I've never felt the urge to send any others) because apparantly some people send random ones - say chapter 3, 15 and 23 because 'they are the best'. Of course every chapter should be your best work - but especially those first three.
The synopsis is a bit of a mystery - no-one seems to quite agree what form it should take. Some people want a full chapter-by-chapter break down, some want just a page of A4 outlining the story some want something more akin to what you would read on the back of the book (known as the blurb). I have a version of each available saved on to my desktop. They are surprisingly hard to do, and a lot of writers are nervous about giving away the ending - but it is a necessity so the publisher or agent can see your able to tell a complete story successfully.
So why was I confident about Usborne and what went wrong? Well I can answer the first part at least.
They wanted "Full length novels for confident readers. Strong concept-based or character-led series, as well as strikingly original individual books."
Excellent - I thought, Dr Midas is just that a character-led series.
They wanted: "Fast-paced, exciting plots with real page-turning quality; strong characters; dynamic storytelling." I think that's also the case with Dr Midas and I've had some good feed back about my writing and storytelling ability from professionals.
The age group was spot on - 8-12 the required length was a bit less than mine - 25,000 – 50,000 words approx while Dr Midas and the Pirates is 64,000 words - but there is a move towards longer books.
The next bit was even better. Content: extremely wide-ranging and varied, this is age group will cover almost any subject matter, although we are particularly interested in the following: history, other cultures, mystery, time-travel, spooky, friendship, adventure, humour.
I've heard there's less interest in time-travel books at the moment so I was really pleased to see Usborne were looking for them. They also love history, other cultures and adventure - which pretty much sums up what my Dr Midas books are about. They also have a good sprinkling of humour in them too.
So I wrote a covering letter, explaining that I thought Dr Midas might be what they were looking for and included my two writing competition successes last year, packaged up a synopsis and chapters, some press cuttings and sent it off.
Then of course there's a long wait so I carried on as always working on other things. Usborne make the following warning on their website: 'Please note that due to the large number of manuscripts we receive, we are unable to track the progress of individual submissions and a response can take up to six months.'
Their reply actually took just less than three months but as you can gather it was a no.
Disappointingly - but certainly not unusually - it was also a standard rejection letter with a gap for the author's name and book title. As letters go it is pretty standard and it does offer some websites and addresses useful for writers.
A tad annoyingly whoever filed mine in didn't bother to check the spelling of my surname - and one of the recommended addesses is for The Writers' Advice Centre for children's books run by the lovely Louise Jordan. It was one of Louise's short stories competitions that I won last year and one of the press cuttings I'd included was a fantastic double page spread she'd written about my writing for Writers' Forum.
You have to laugh! You certainly shouldn't take these things personally, publishers are inundated with submissions and they really can't afford to spend lots of time explaining why they don't want your book. Instead just start looking for the next place to approach.
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