|  |  | Apply for an Internship Grant, check out our latest Ask WNDB column, and get ready for the Walter Awards! |  | WNDB is excited to announce that the 2023 WNDB Internship Grant application is OPEN! Are you of a diverse background and looking to work in either children's OR adult publishing? In our ninth program year, we continue to offer $3,000 grants, of which we have 12 to award for children's-focused internships and 12 to award for adult internships! Have any questions about the program? Meet the team behind the We Need Diverse Books Internship Grant Program and learn about this wonderful publishing opportunity at our first-ever WNDB Internship Grant Open House on Thursday, March 16. Register here! A big thank you to our program partners who are hiring diverse interns! Apply to your summer internships with these publishers and agencies: Astra House Books Barefoot Books Beacon Press Bloomsbury Publishing USA Candlewick Press Charlesbridge Publishing Chronicle Books Fabled Films Press Hachette Book Group Lee & Low Books Lerner Publishing Group Macmillan Publishers North Star Editions Penguin Random House Simon & Schuster Teacher Created Materials Andrea Brown Literary Agency, Inc. BookEnds, Literary Agency InkWell Management Ladderbird Literary Agency Click here to learn more about how you can apply for our grant—remote internships applicable. | |  | CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS OF THE 2022 BLACK CREATIVES REVISIONS WORKSHOP. WNDB and Penguin Random House are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2022 Black Creatives Revisions Workshop, Kibkabe Araya and Mirta Desir! Each winner will receive a $2,000 grant and their workshopped manuscripts will be considered for publication. More here.
JOIN US AT THE WALTER AWARDS. The Walter Awards Ceremony and Symposium will be held Friday, March 17, 2023, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC. The event will begin at 10:30 am ET, is open to the public, and will be live-streamed here. If you would like to join us in person, RSVP here.
| |  | |  | As we gear up for the 2023 Walter Awards Ceremony and Symposium, we wanted to celebrate an integral aspect of the program: the books we donate! Each year, WNDB donates 4,000 copies of the Walter Award-winning books to schools and libraries in need nationwide. This year, we are excited to donate copies of the 2023 Walter Award winners Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers, illustrated by Jeff Edwards, and Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Angela Joy, illustrated by Janelle Washington. To stay up to date on giveaway details, educators should be sure to sign up for our education-focused newsletter, Off the Shelf. (And if you’re a North Dakota educator, email us!) | |  |  | With our Ask WNDB column, we get industry insiders to answer your burning questions. This month we discuss the ins and outs of book publicity with Sabrina Pyun, assistant editor at Scribner. To read Sabrina’s entire Q&A, head to the WNDB blog! What do you wish authors on submission knew about the process, from your perspective? I’m sure most authors know this, but I’d love to emphasize that editors are fielding tons of submissions near-constantly, so if your submission process is taking a while, I’d request empathy and understanding! Also, this industry relies heavily on personal taste and the imprint’s track record, so if your book isn’t for one editor, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t succeed. I’d also note that editors need to generate excitement among their coworkers, and especially the publisher, to get clearance to pursue a project, so it can be an uphill battle. For authors submitting without an agent, I’d strongly recommend researching best practices for submitting/pitching. I often see emails from authors on their own copy-pasting chapters into the body of an email, which is unwieldy and difficult to read. Make sure everything is in order! What's your best tip for authors working toward publication? Make sure you are reading! Especially make sure you are reading the books in the sphere of what you are writing that have been published in the past two to three years. It helps to know what is current and why it is working. Don’t overthink your writing, but reading and understanding the market will help inform your writing naturally. This will also help your agent pitch your book to editors and will help editors work with the publisher to make an appropriate offer to buy the book faster. What is your best piece of advice for those looking to work in editorial? Do as many informational interviews as you can! Many people in editorial, especially assistants, are very happy to chat with you and inform you about the department and about the industry. There is so much you cannot learn without already being in the industry. If you can, do an internship, but you don’t have to have done an internship to get in (I had no editorial or publishing internships prior to joining Simon & Schuster). You want to build your network and keep in touch with people who can help you and bring up your name when HR is looking for new employees to fill entry-level roles. After I graduated college and began hustling to get into the publishing industry, I told myself I would never forget how hard job hunting was psychologically and emotionally. That goes beyond just this industry, but for anyone trying to get into publishing as an author or editor or anything really, know this: you can be doing a good job and doing everything right and it will still feel brutal. Rejection is inherently upsetting no matter how much you can rationally understand that it’s not a reflection of your self-worth. However, if you persist, you will find your moment, and it will be amazing what you discover and get to work on once you come out on the other side. |  | What does your day-to-day look like? My day-to-day varies a lot depending on what projects I’m working on and what stage we are at in the publication process. Right now, Simon & Schuster is still on a voluntary hybrid office plan, so I go to the office twice a week usually. I come in on the days we have our weekly editorial meeting and one other day (maybe for an author event or book mailing). I officially start my day around 9 am and check email. I might be sending revisions from authors to the production team, marking appointments on my boss’s schedule, drafting tipsheets (informational packets summarizing the important details of a book), updating the online copy and publicity quotes for a book, drafting descriptive copy for a book jacket, checking on if we have finished books in the warehouse (in which case, I will reach out to the authors and agents to see how many finished books they want and where they’d like them sent), and so on. I might also be preparing a reader’s report for an editor on a submission they asked me to look at, or I may be requesting reads from coworkers to evaluate a project I’m interested in pursuing. Everything is sort of all happening all at once all the time, but schedule-wise, we typically prepare for the titles publishing next year about a year and a half ahead of that season. So, as of March 2023, we would be preparing for the Summer 2024 season. We have three seasons: Fall, Spring, and Summer. It can be chaotic, but we have the publishing and managing editorial departments to thank for wrangling us, time-wise! They will let us know the key meetings coming up (where we present our list to our sales force), or when what is due to production to get the book made (when we send in the jacket copy, when each pass of the manuscript is due for revisions, and so on). We’re a symbiotic entity! When do you read submissions? (Some may think your day job is reading!) As best I can, I try to read (or listen to) submissions during the work day in between other tasks, whether that’s for other editors or for myself. (Pro tip: the Word app on your iPhone has a read aloud feature which I absolutely take advantage of). I will try and get a sense of what is the most exciting or urgent and prioritize those manuscripts. Unfortunately, this industry relies on the fact that we read enthusiastically during our personal time. That being said, this is technically a strong method for evaluating submissions: is this something you would not only read in your off-hours, but would you also spend money to do so? That is what we’re asking consumers to do: pay for the pleasure of reading THIS book. Sabrina Pyun is an assistant editor at Scribner. She works with Nan Graham and Kara Watson. She is the editor of Dear Chrysanthemums (May 2023) and handles The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin and C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) on the Scribner backlist. She is looking to acquire literary and upmarket fiction (particularly fiction with speculative elements), memoir, narrative and big-idea nonfiction (especially those including psychological research), and baking cookbooks. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University where she majored in Writing Seminars. To read the full Q&A and hear more of Sabrina’s advice, visit the WNDB blog here. Got a question about publishing? Email us at info@diversebooks.org, and it could be answered in a future Ask WNDB column. Thanks for reading!
|  |  | |  | |  | |  | Bring award-winning author and the 2023-2024 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Med Medina to your community! Whether at your school, public or school library, or other community organization, the Children's Book Council and the Library of Congress are accepting event proposals through March 14, 2023. Details: http://ow.ly/cA4O50N9GvA
Check out the 2023 LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop dedicated to innovation, access, and diversity in publishing. Five weeks of lectures, workshops, meaningful connections, and one-on-one meetings with over 50 leaders in publishing! Need-based scholarships available. Apply by March 31. Details: http://www.larbpublishingworkshop.org/
Help support Ooligan Press, a student-run book press within the Publishing Master’s program at Portland State University, publish their very first comic book.
Teen writing workshop alert! Calling all dungeoneers and dragon tamers, ages 13 to 18. Whether you are a veteran Dungeon Master or a first-time player, you are cordially invited to join Cosmic Writers' Dungeons & Dragons Creative Writing Workshop. To embark on this quest, check out more details here.
Looking for a writing retreat? Writers Rest is an all-inclusive retreat for Black women and femmes taking place this year in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Dates for the retreat are May 22-26th, and cost of attendance is $1,500/person. If you'd like to participate, please fill out a resident application, or email your questions to info@writersrest.co.
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