So today we decided to try a bit of an experiment.

As you might know, in common with a lot of other publishers, we strongly prefer to consider manuscripts that are sent to us by literary agencies, and we don’t have an email inbox for unagented submissions. But I thought it might be interesting to open a channel for a small number of picture book manuscripts, and to give authors instant feedback on their work.

We tweeted an email address to which people could send their manuscript. That address stayed active until the 25th message came in – any MS that came in after that was, I’m afraid, invisibly deleted without any of us seeing it.

We then sat down and worked our way through those manuscripts, and tweeted our reaction – either a note to say we’re taking it to our next editorial meeting, or a rejection and as much feedback as we could get into 140 characters.

It was really interesting. The quality was pretty good, and there was at least one MS we’re going to consider further… So I think we might like to do this again some time. If you’d like to get involved, follow our Editorial Twitter account, @RHCBlog.

If you’re interested, there are a few rules we need you to follow:

1: You need to have a Twitter account, and to let us know your Twitter name so we can tweet you back. (Oh, and your real name, naturally!)
2: Please don’t send more than one manuscript.
3: Please don’t send us more than one email, as each one will count towards the 25 email limit and waste a slot for someone else. We’re trying to automate this system, but it’s easy to break if you don’t follow the rules, and we don’t have the time to manage the inbox manually.
4: This is for picture books only – maximum word count is probably 1,500 at the outside?

(If you break any of those rules, I’m afraid we’ll ignore your emails entirely. Sorry to be harsh!)

We really had fun today! To those of you who bravely sent us stories, thanks lots, and hope to see you again.

Right… Two more to look at, and then, I think, the Bank Holiday weekend! Have a good one, everybody!

Wow! What a great opportunity! Are you planning on doing this again soon? Sounds fun, I’ll definitely have to try and join in next time

Posted on October 10th, 2011 at 1:32 am by Michelle McLean 

heartbroken I missed this but what a tremendous oppurtunity. Twitter is brilliant for things like this and I love that publishers embrace the spontaneous side of new media with experiments, competition and giveaways.
Keep it up!!!

Posted on August 30th, 2011 at 11:13 am by Katie Clapham 

Wow! I would love to give this a try next time round.

Posted on August 30th, 2011 at 7:37 am by Sarah Yewman 

TY! Some great feedback and a fun format (almost like a contest). I didn’t even mind getting up at 2:30 in the morning.

Looking forward to trying this again.

Cheers!

Posted on August 26th, 2011 at 3:53 pm by Ken Howe