Press release

HARPERCOLLINS LAUNCHES OPEN INBOX INITIATIVE FOR BIPOC MIDDLE-GRADE CREATORS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Toronto; August 17)

HarperCollinsCanada is thrilled to announce that in support of our ReadBetter campaign, we are launching an Open Inbox initiative inviting BIPOC creators to submit their unagented, unpublished middle-grade manuscripts. This initiative will give underrepresented creators residing in Canada direct contact with, and feedback from, a HarperCollins Canada Children’s Editor. Iris Tupholme, Senior Vice President and Executive Publisher, said of the initiative, “At HarperCollins Canada, we believe that Canadians deserve to see themselves represented in the books they read and to be represented by authors from their own communities. This is especially true in the case of books for young people. We are proud to be opening our submissions to unagented middle-grade authors from the BIPOC community and look forward to engaging with them on their work and finding exciting new projects to publish.”

The current open submission call will be for original, unpublished middle-grade projects only, for ages 8 to 12, across all genres and formats. A typical middle-grade novel is 30,000 to 75,000 words in length. Said Children’s Editor Suzanne Sutherland, “Books for a middle-grade readership have long been a strength of our publishing program, including those by luminary authors such as Kenneth Oppel and Kit Pearson as well as upcoming publications from acclaimed creators Thomas King and Natasha Donovan, Lawrence Hill, Basil Sylvester and Kevin Sylvester, and Danielle Daniel. With this new initiative, we will be looking both to discover new voices for our list and to remove barriers to access for emerging writers.”

The Open Inbox runs from August 17, 2020, to September 30, 2020. Submissions will be read by an editorial committee comprised of kidlit-loving members of HarperCollins Canada’s editorial, sales, marketing, and publicity departments, and authors will receive responses with feedback and/or a potential offer to publish by December 15, 2020. Any unagented BIPOC creator who resides in Canada is eligible to submit one manuscript for consideration, including titles that are part of a series. HarperCollins Canada acknowledges BIPOC as referring to individuals who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Colour. Submission packets should include:

• a letter including contact information, a summary of the project, and a short biography
• a complete manuscript in Word document format

Submissions or questions can be sent to [email protected].

For more information on the Open Inbox submission process and the ReadBetter campaign, visit www.readbetter.ca.

About HarperCollins Publishers:

Known worldwide for the quality of its list, HarperCollinsCanada is the proud home of many bestselling authors, including Kenneth Oppel, Dennis Lee, Brian Francis, Louisa Onomé, Esi Edugyan, Emma Donoghue, Heather O’Neill, Lawrence Hill, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Mark Sakamoto, Ayelet Tsabari, Emily St. John Mandel, Tracey Lindberg, Tara Westover, Hilary Mantel, Rachel Cusk, Anthony Horowitz, Uzma Jalaluddin, Kim Fu, Carrianne Leung, Ellen Keith, Jael Richardson, Helen Humphreys, and Thomas King, among many more found at harpercollins.ca.

HarperCollins Publishers is the second-largest consumer book publisher in the world, with operations in 17 countries. With 200 years of history and more than 120 branded imprints around the world, HarperCollins publishes approximately 10,000 new books every year in 16 languages, and has a print and digital catalog of more than 200,000 titles. Writing across dozens of genres, HarperCollins authors include winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, and the Booker Prize. HarperCollins, headquartered in New York, is a subsidiary of News Corp (Nasdaq: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) and can be visited online at corporate.HC.com.

Date Posted

August 17, 2020

Author

Lauren Morocco

Subject

HARPERCOLLINS LAUNCHES OPEN INBOX INITIATIVE FOR BIPOC MIDDLE-GRADE CREATORS