2005 Children's Writers & Illustrator's Market (Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market)

Rating:
Summary: Essential market guide for writers and illustrators
Review: This review is excerpted from a longer review on my web site, The Purple Crayon.

This is essentially an inexpensive annual "yellow pages" of children's publishing for authors and illustrators in the United States, an alternative to much more expensive and harder-to-use tomes such as Literary Market Place. This year's edition is, as usual, an extremely useful book for a children's book writer or illustrator.

Contents: Most of CWIM is taken up by the Markets section, which includes listings of publishers of books, magazines, greeting cards/puzzles/games, and plays, with a special sub-category for young writers and illustrators. The Book Publishers part is over 100 pages long, with about 200 entries, a little longer than last year. Listings as usual range from a few lines to a half page, and include such information as as the publisher's address, names and titles of editors and art directors, a brief description of their publishing program, sample titles, how to approach them, standard contract terms, and tips (direct quotes from the publisher's staff.) The Magazines part of this section is also pretty substantial, at about 40 pages long.

Before the Markets section come a variety of articles, of which the first four--"Just Starting?", "How to Use This Book," "Before Your First Sale," and "Running Your Business"-cover the same ground every year. Twelve additional articles are new to this edition. I particularly liked "Critique Group Disfunction and What to Do About It," and "The Pitch," which provides helpful guidance in crafting query letters and the like. But there are also articles for illustrators, and on marketing, and even on niche markets (the puzzle market and writing licensed product). Following these articles come lengthy interviews with Newbery winner Jerry Spinelli and the quirky illustrator J. otto Seibold, and a very interesting "First Books" feature, which focuses on first books published by independent publishers.

After the Markets section come a variety of materials in the Resources: listings of agents and art reps; 3 more "insider" pieces; organizations, conferences, and workshops; book, magazine, and web resources; a glossary; and a useful index to the publisher listings, which enables you to find publishers by age level or subject.

The length of the book is listed as being 442 pages, making it 10% longer than last year. The publishers claim over 700 updated listings, which by my reckoning means just about every listing has been updated, and over 100 new ones (the back cover states there are a total of 740 listings of book and magazine publishers, agents, and art reps).

Comments: CWIM continues to be the leading market guide for children's writers and illustrators with the 2005 edition. I like the feature articles, but the meat of CWIM comes in the listings, which get significantly updated every year. Yes, you could gather much of the information you'll find in it on your own, through diligent searches online, phone calls, and guideline and catalog requests to publishers. But the time spent doing that is time lost from your real work.

So how good is the Markets section? I've checked through the listings of book publishers, conferences, and agents, which are the areas I am best qualified to judge, and I found very little that did not seem to me to be both accurate and up-to-date. This year's edition, incidentally, came out in August, two months or more earlier than its usual release date in October or November. Listings are up-to-date, so far as I can tell, through April of 2004.

Children's book writers and illustrators need this, and should strongly consider buying a new edition every year--or at least when your scribbled-in updates are getting out of hand.