It’s Jacket Flap, the best and most extensive database of statistics and information on children’s book publishers. This searchable website helps writers check out the publishers that are publishing new authors and that publish titles in the writer’s category of work. It also tells stuff like number of titles per year, number of new authors published, and number of titles published by category, which is more important in larger publishing houses. A little more research on a writer’s part yields that all-important information about agented or unagented manuscripts, slush pile rules, and more. Together with some good info from our friend Google, a children’s writer has some great tools at their disposal.
This site is really primo — it’s updated regularly and the information is kept current by the book publishers. Site’s users are encouraged to participate and are bribed with Amazon gift certificates for keeping the site up-to-date. It also has children’s book news, which is really nifty — industry updates and everything. A lot of the information requires you to be a logged-in member — but that’s free and relatively painless.
I’m really kind of excited about this! I can’t find information about the number of printings runs per new novel or any of that deeper information, but it’s something individual publishing house websites will have. Jacket Flap is still a great tool to have on hand.
Excellent find!!