First Books: Some Stats...

In my 14 years working on CWIM, I've found there is never a shortage of debut children's book authors. This year I heard from writers, illustrators and writer/illustrators. First-timers worked on picture books, MGs and YAs. They wrote historical, contemporary, fantasy and poetry. And they were published by both small presses and big New York-based operations.

I've pretty much got my next First Books lineup picked out (haven't emailed anyone yet though), and as I paged through my stack of emails, I kept a list of the publishers producing all these wonderful debut titles. Here they are (in no particular order--I'm not good at alphabetizing):

• Sterling
• Delacorte
• Sylvan Dell
• Flux
• Candlewick
• Margaret K. McElderry
• Greenwillow
• Harcourt
• Little, Brown
• Abrams
• Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• RGU Group
• Henry Holt
• Random House
• Simon & Schuster
• Dutton
• Blooming Tree
• Richard Jackson/Atheneum
• Albert Whitman
• Red Deer
• Bloomsbury USA
• HarperCollins
• Dial
• Carolrhoda
• Houghton Mifflin

Half of the publishers on the list are publishing two of more of the first-time authors who contacted me. And Delacorte and Sylvan Dell get Most Friendly to New Authors Gold Stars.