LGBTQ+ Open Submissions 2023 - Nosy Crow Skip to content
Posted by Lisa, May 30, 2023

LGBTQ+ Open Submissions 2023

We are looking for more LGBTQ+ authors!

It’s important to us that we publish a diverse range of voices that reflect the amazing variety of the world we live in. We want to promote empathy in the stories we put on children’s bookshelves and an understanding that there is no ‘right’ way for anyone to live their life. We hope that these stories will also inspire the next generation of people who love to scribble and sketch!

So, if you are part of the LGBTQ+ community and write picture books (and maybe illustrate them too!), send us your stories in June for Pride month.

Submissions open on Thursday the 1st of June. Authors can submit picture book stories, together with your own artwork (not someone else’s) if you are an author-illustrator.

Before submitting your stories to us, we would like to ask that you familiarise yourself with current fiction picture books for children aged around 3–5, especially if you’re new to writing for this age group.

Stories can be in prose or rhyme, and the themes and types of characters (magical, mythical, human, animal, and everything in-between!) are totally up to you. Stories informed by your LGBTQ+ identity and experience are especially welcomed.

Please send no more than three picture book texts to [email protected], along with a short biography in the body of the email. The window for submissions is for a limited time only, from the 1st of June 2022 to the 30th of June 2023. I’m afraid any submissions received after this time will not be considered.

With the help of my colleagues in the picture book team, I will review all submissions, and we will aim to respond to you by the 30th of September 2023 to let you know whether or not you have been shortlisted.

It’s free to submit stories, and we welcome submissions from around the world, but they must be in the English language and unpublished anywhere in any country. Authors and author-illustrators must be aged 18 or older.

Texts should be no more than 1,000 words each and submitted as a Microsoft Word document (or similar document that can be opened in Microsoft Word) or Adobe PDF document. They should be sent as an email attachment (no paper submissions).

If you are an author-illustrator, texts can be accompanied by your artwork. PDFs should be no more than 5MB in total. If you’re an author-illustrator, please also include a link to your website and/or social media pages, where we can view more of your artwork.

If you’re not an author-illustrator, you don’t need to include any illustrations. Feel free to include illustration notes if needed but keep these to a minimum.

Don’t worry if you forget to attach something to your email. Please resend the entire submission with an alert at the top to let us know to delete your earlier submission.

If you have any questions, email [email protected]. I’m looking forward to hearing from you, either via your agent, or directly from you if you don’t have one.

Good luck!

Alice Bartosinski

 

 

See more: Open Submissions