*Please note that submissions are now closed*
Are you a member of the LGBTQ+ community?
We want your picture book stories!
At Nosy Crow, we have a diverse range of authors and illustrators who create amazing picture books. But we want our list of picture book creators to reflect more closely the diversity of the world around us.
With this in mind, we will be holding open submissions during Pride Month (June 2022) for LGBTQ+ picture book writers and writer-illustrators.
Texts must be suitable for children aged around 3–5 and can be in prose or rhyme (though, from the perspective of international selling, prose is probably preferable). Stories can feature human, animal or fantasy characters, or a mixture. They can be about anything you can imagine, although we are especially interested in submissions that are informed by the writer’s or the writer-illustrator’s LGBTQ+ identity and experience, such as (but not in any way limited to) alternative family structures and celebration of individuality.
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.
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 15th of July 2022. I’m afraid any submissions received after this time will not be considered. If you miss the deadline this time, please do submit the next time we run the open submissions window.
With the help of my colleagues in the picture book team, I will review all submissions, and we will respond to you by the 31st of August 2022 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free to submit stories, and we welcome submissions from around the world, but they must be in the English language and unpublished anywhere in any country. Writers and writer-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 a writer-illustrator, texts can be accompanied by your artwork. PDFs should be no more than 5MB in total. If you’re a writer-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 a writer-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!
Senior Commissioning Editor, Picture Books
