Thanks to the Canadian Children’s Book Centre for including Water Wow in their Best Books for Kids and Teens 2016.
The CCBC has been promoting and supporting Canadian children’s books for over 40 years.
There are so many wonderful books on this year’s list. I wish I could read them all!
Antonia Banyard 
Congratulations Antonia! I have written a children’s book and was wondering if you would be so kind as to take time to speak to me about publishing.
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Thank you for the kind words, Donna. I do manuscript consultations as a freelance editor. If you’d like to send more information about your book, please send me your email address via the contact page.
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Dear Antonia: Thanks for getting back to me. I got excited when I read that you live in Nelson B.C. Our son and daughter in law Kate live there as well. Kate is an author too and just got accepted for publication. Presently I am looking for a Canadian publisher for children’s books. I am wondering if you were satisfied with Annick Press when you published your book with them. It is hard to know where to even begin. Appreciate any information you may have to offer.
Sincerely Donna.
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A big congratulations to your daughter-in-law, Donna. Best of luck with her book! Now for a full disclosure: I work for Annick Press. Long story short, they asked me and my co-author to write the infographics because infographics are very fiddly and need a lot of revising to work with the design, so it seemed easier to have an in-house writer. But speaking strictly as an author (as much as that’s possible), yes, Annick is a good publisher and they did a fine job with Water Wow and Eat Up.
However, there are no one-size-fits-all publishers, so that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the right publisher for you. Every editor has their own sensibility, their own preferences, their own sense of humour, so they will be more inclined towards some manuscripts and less towards others. You need to find the editor who falls in love with your manuscript, deeply enough in love that they can convince the marketing department and the sales department (etc) to fall in love with it too. And of course, we can’t fall in love with everyone.
Once you’ve learned your craft, you will need to look at what Canadian children’s book publishers are publishing these days (go to your library, look for books that have been published ideally within the last 3 years — tastes change and the market is fickle).
The Canadian Children’s Book Centre offers a list of publishers (http://bookcentre.ca/resources/get-published/) and here’s a blogger who has also compiled a list (http://parentclub.ca/2014/10/list-canadian-childrens-book-publishers/). Some of these publishers have pretty specific info on their submissions page. Orca is a good example (https://www.orcabook.com/AuthorGuidelines.aspx). Read their guidelines well, so if they say they don’t accept historical fiction, for example, please don’t send them historical fiction!
Apart from that, there are plenty of organizations for aspiring and experienced writers, such as CANSCAIP (https://www.canscaip.org/), CWILL (http://www.cwillbc.org/), SCBWI (https://www.scbwi.org/) as well as the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. You might find some useful information on their sites.
Finally, keep going. Writing is not for the faint of heart and not all of us succeed on the first try. Good luck!
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