Kidz Books with a Message

IP.Kidz is our newest imprint, dedicated to publishing the finest print and digital work for children. We aim to feature the very best children’s authors and illustrators, plus digital artists producing New Media for children.

There are lots of children’s publishers out there, but few who offer an integrated approach to print and digital work. We’ll have standalone print books, but also digital versions of some of those books, and even some titles that come alive just in the digital environment via multimedia. Kids these days are quite savvy about screen content, so why not deliver the content to where the kids increasingly live?

While IP Kidz has only been publishing since November 2007, we have already signed up some name authors and illustrators for future books, including Libby Hathorn, Hazel Edwards, Goldie Alexander, Edel Wignell, and Matt Ottley.

Unlike our other imprints that focus on Australian authors and Australian content, IP.Kidz will be open to collaborations between Australian and overseas creators. Our first title, Real Guns, an illustrated book authored by our Director, David Reiter, was illustrated by a well-known Irish artist, Patrick J Murphy. We’re excited by the prospect of bringing together artists from across the globe.

We will of course want the work to be relevant to Australian children in the first instance, but we will be marketing titles internationally as appropriate. Our content is already being distributed internationally through partners such as Lightning Source, BookSurge, ContentReserve, CD Baby and CreateSpace, so we pay much more than lip service to electronic rights. Making the most of our content makes sense to us and to our artists.

We’re open year-round to proposals from authors, illustrators, digital artists and animators — or collaborative teams involving some or all of the above. Please query us by email with your creative bio, a synopsis of the work and a representative sample. For picture books, you should send the complete work in storyboard layout (where the text is divided by page or spread). The work can be in a Word, InDesign, QuarkXpress or Acrobat pdf attachment, with any images optimised for screen viewing.

Picture book authors don’t have to send illustrations. If we like your work, we’ll find an illustrator for it. However, if you’re one of those rare creative geniuses who can illustrate as well as write, or if you’ve teamed up with a visual artist pro, feel free to try us with the whole package.

You can query us for free, but if we think your work shows promise, we’ll need to get a reader’s report on it, and there’s a fee for this. For average-length picture books (32 pages / 16 spreads) it’s $129, GST-inclusive. For novels and non-fiction books, the fee is $259. We pass on the reader’s report to you whether or not we offer to publish you.

We do waive the fee for commercially published authors or author/illustrators or author/illustrators who come to us via a recognised agent who provides us with a detailed creative and marketing report on the project.

If we like your work, we’ll offer you a royalty contract. Then the fun begins!

Ready to send us that query? Click here.