Submissions Guidelines and What I'm Looking For

What is your submission policy?

After long thought and much perplexity over this very subject, I'd like to see the following in a submission:

Picture books: Query letter + full text
Novels: Query letter + two chapters + synopsis (in that order)
Other: Query letter + five-page sample of writing (five poems, five pages of nonfiction, etc.)

I will respond with a form letter to any query not appropriate for me; and if I ask to see the full text of something and it doesn't work for me, I will respond with a form letter unless I want a revision. (I often hand-write comments on these form letters.)

Any formatting guidelines?

Letters can be single-spaced, but manuscripts should be double-spaced. Please include a self-addressed stamped envelope for my reply (of a size, and with postage, sufficient to contain your manuscript if you'd like it returned; otherwise the manuscript will be recycled).

Someone once told me that she'd heard all submissions should be set in Courier Text, as Courier is a fixed-width font and that allowed editors to see how long the final book would be. This is not true and will likely result in a considerable waste of paper, as well as your manuscript looking huge. Any nice readable font with a serif is fine.

Where should submissions be sent?

Cheryl Klein

Arthur A. Levine Books

557 Broadway

New York, NY 10012

Please put the word "SQUID" on the outside of the envelope so I know that you found me through this site. (Why "SQUID"? It makes me smile, and it's really going to bemuse the mailroom.) Please do not send submissions via the e-mail address for this site.

What is your response time?

You should receive a reply to your query within six to eight weeks.

Why do I have to send a query letter as well as the full text of my picture-book manuscript/synopsis of my novel?

Because the query letter lets me get a sense of how you talk and think about your book, while the manuscript lets me see the book for myself.

What are you looking for?

I answer this question at length in "Finding a Publisher and Falling in Love," so I encourage you to read that if you haven't already. In the meantime:

Arthur A. Levine Books publishes a wide range of hardcover books for children and young adults, including picture books, middle-grade and YA novels, and select nonfiction. We do not do a lot of easy readers, because those tend to be more successful as paperbacks; nor do we publish many novelty books or books for the very young, because those usually belong in Scholastic's Cartwheel imprint. But we have published in all of those formats with authors or illustrators who wanted to explore new territory, so we aren't averse to them -- they're just not the usual Arthur A. Levine Book.

In "Finding a Publisher" I say I'm looking for three things:

Emotional truth
Good writing
Originality

To that list I'm going to add "Really great characters," because I will follow a character I love just about anywhere -- into deep space, across the Gobi desert, inside the boys' locker room -- just for the pleasure of hanging out with him or her. Millicent Min, Cedar B. Hartley, Calwyn, Re Jana, Thomas (from The Book of Everything), Harry, Ron, and Hermione, Stanford Wong . . . Their creators are my heroes.

Genre-wise, I like fantasies, I like mysteries, I like romance, I like thrillers -- but they have to be literary fantasies/mysteries/romance/thrillers, and really driven by their characters rather than the familiar conventions of the genre. I love genre books with a twist: the fantasy that begins as a romance, the mystery told entirely through letters. Jaclyn Moriarty's The Year of Secret Assignments is a great example of genre-twisting, character-driven chick lit.

I also like historical fiction, especially about times, places, and people not often covered in historical fiction: the Dark Ages, for example, or non-Western settings (China, Brazil, the Congo), or medieval female protagonists who aren't averse to doing embroidery and getting married (because when was the last time you saw a historical-fiction heroine who wasn't preternaturally spunky?). But I'm happy with a traditional Civil War/Renaissance England/whatever novel with a peppy heroine too.

I'd love to see more school stories and sports books. I'm the child of two former teachers, so my life from the age of four to twenty-one pretty much revolved around school, and I played soccer, t-ball, volleyball, and basketball growing up (all badly, I cheerfully admit), but oddly I don't see a lot of submissions on these common childhood/teenage experiences.

I'm interested in books that involve religion and religious questions (and including both Eastern and Western religions), although I'm not interested in books that exist solely to espouse a particular religious viewpoint. In other words, the religious aspect ought to be driven by the character's journey, not the other way around.

I'd like to work on more nonfiction, of a narrative or descriptive stripe rather than a reference or prescriptive type. I'm not at all a science person, but I love the science articles in "The New Yorker" because they teach me how rich and strange our world is, and that's what I think all good nonfiction should do, whether it's science or economics or history or biography.

And anyone who can identify the exact source of "After long thought and much perplexity" above without Googling it should definitely send me their work.