Illustrator Submissions | Policy: Thank you for your interest in sharing your talents with KRBY Creations. We are always accepting portfolio samples to review for illustr... MoreThank you for your interest in sharing your talents with KRBY Creations. We are always accepting portfolio samples to review for illustrators of our children's picture books.
If I may, first let me explain how we select our Illustrators. I hope it will assist you in sending us material that allows us to best consider your work.
When we make a title acquisition and then must seek an illustrator to work on the project, our first attempt is to try to match the right style of artist with the design we feel best matches the manuscript. To do that, we gather our creative and editorial team together and physically leaf through the tear sheets and samples that we keep on-hand from artist/illustrator submissions. We place a copy of the mss in front of each of us, talk about about the look and feel we are after, and then start pouring through examples of work. From this process we narrow down to a handful of artists we wish to study further.
Your first goal is to get into this finalist round. And there are five things you need in order to do that. Fortunately, two of them you can control completely:
First, you have to be talented and be able to creatively express the author's words in visual form. Luckily for you, we can't even fingerpaint without running into problems, so your talents are already in great desire from our staff. This first item you have already been able to address by your chosen profession or love, which has brought you to this website.
Second, you need to be included in the round-table review. That is where it is important to follow our requests outlined below to make sure what you send to us is both kept on file and identified properly. This is the nuts-n-bolts of submitting to KRBY Creations as an Illustrator. And you control that completely.
Third, you need a little luck in having samples that we believe are your natural core styles and that this imagery or effects match what we envision for the project at hand. This is a matter of having the right sample in front of us for the right project.
Fouth, you need to be available to work with us and we need to be able to contact you. The former is timing, the latter is making sure we have up-to-date contact information.
Fifth, we both need to be able to agree on financial terms. We are a small press with limited funds for large advances. We also understand you need to eat and can't work for nothing. We believe that our Illustrators should be able to share in all of the upside potential of a best-seller, including add-ons and merchandising sales. We do not use Work For Hire contracts. Our Illustrators share equally with our Authors on all book royalties, and are given the opportunity to do the artwork for any derivatives (merchandise, etc) that also includes royalty payments. In essence we believe that our Illustrators should share in all the success that is generated from their work, whether that is a trade book, e-book, DVD, Hollywood movie rights, foreign sales, or merchandise sales.
Okay, enough background. Here is what we would like to see (and not see) from you:
1) Please send us several (more than two, less than a dozen) tear sheets or photocopied samples of your work. SEND ONLY NON-RETURNABLE SAMPLES!!! We recommend that you send color photocopies so we may see palettes you have worked with in the past.
2) If you have multiple-styles and media that you work in, please feel free to send samples that represent this diversity. But please also focus on what you feel is your most natural style and form. It has been our experience that even though many of you are talented and trained in many media, when final selections are made for our Illustrators, it seems that the most natural and unforced style of the submission always seems to win out over a very good and fundamentally sound but un-natural style of an artist. Not a scientific study, but it seems to have worked out that way for us in our limited experience.
3) Please insure that EVERY piece that you send has your name and contact information on it. Two years from now, going in and out of the file cabinet, your cover letter or folder may no longer be attached to a tear sheet we are reviewing. If we select your work as the perfect fit for our next title, we will be terribly disappointed if we can not get in touch with you because we don't know who you are!
4) Please understand our method of doing the first mass review for each manuscript, and that we are leafing through reams of paper. For this reason, please do not send oversized materials that are tabloid size or larger, or have fancy three-dimensional folding oragami pieces that would take a member of Mensa to figure out how to refold. Keep it simple for the first round of reviews for us. Ideally we like to see 8.5"x11" samples that we can easily keep in a file cabinet.
5) The electronic age has allowed for a greater supply of data and images to people. Most of you have online portfolios and we often received CDs and DVDs with great volumes of work. However, because of our screening process in committee by spreading out samples, we never load a CD, go to a website, and certainly never search back through old emails looking for illustrative styles and samples. There is NO need to send us email attachments because we'll never look at them. Referencing an online portfolio or sending a CD may assist us in the second round of selections, but without the physical hard copies to screen first, the online pointer or CD will not be considered. Make sure if you send these you also send hard copies for the round table discussion!
6) Please do not send us your portfolio. Even with return postage, we do not like to handle your materials because we do not regularly sit down to review submissions. Your portfolio may sit here for weeks until we go through our sorting process. Plus with the risk of possible loss or damage, it does not seem like a necessity for us to receive your portfolio, at least in early reviews.
7) Please feel free to send a SASE or better yet a SAS-postcard if you wish us to acknowledge that we have received your samples.
8) Send us a vita or resume with some relevant background information on yourself, as well as any works or commercial projects you have had success with in the past. Also include your expectations on compensation/advances in your cover letter, so we may best know how to target a package that works for both of us. We also may find from time to time "spot" jobs we need assistance with, and might wish to contact you for those.
Now, where to send everything, right? Please mail your submission materials to us at:
KRBY Creations, LLC
attn: Art Director
PO Box 327
Bay Head, NJ 08742
Thank you very much! We look forward to seeing your work!
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