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Sequestrum is accepting submissions for our first annual Editor's Reprint Award! For complete guidelines, visit our website.
 
Contest Guidelines:

Open to reprints of fiction and nonfiction in any original format (electronic or print).

One $200 prize plus publication.
One runner-up prize including publication and payment (just above our usual rates). Finalists listed on the site.

$15 entry fee.
Tentative close date of April 30th. (See site for details)

Include the name and email address of the original publisher in your cover letter.
Length and subject are open.
Submit via our online submission system.
Manuscripts reviewed on a rolling-basis.
Multiple submissions allowed.

No identifying information should be on your manuscript.

Not previously published? No worries! We're always accepting general submissions. Send them here.

About Sequestrum:
We average 1,000+ readers a month, keep our archives free and open to the public, are a paying market, and pair all our publications with stunning visual arts created by outside artists or our staff. Our contributors range from award-winning novelists and poets (with other works featured in publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, many other university periodicals, and Best American Anthologies) to emerging voices and first-time writers.


We're proud of our little plot on the literary landscape and the writers and artists we share it with. Come see why.

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We pride ourselves on publishing diverse children’s books that feature characters and cultures from around the world. In 2012, we expanded when we acquired Children’s Book Press, an award-winning multicultural publisher based out of the Bay Area. Our new CBP imprint is a great place to find high-quality bilingual English/Spanish picture books and many more books by talented authors and illustrators of color.

We’re very excited to report that we’ve reprinted several Children’s Book Press titles already under our CBP imprint, and we have more on the way! We know some of you have been waiting quite a while to see your favorite CBP books back in print, so we’re happy to share our most recent reprints:

Animal Poems of the Iguazú/Animalario del Iguazú, by  Francisco X. Alarcón, illustrated by  Maya Christina Gonzalez

Bears Make Rock Soup, by Lise Erdrich, illustrated by Lisa Fifield

Birthday in the Barrio/Cumpleaños en el barrio, by Mayra L. Dole, illustrated by Tonel

Drum, Chavi, Drum!/¡Toca, Chavi, Toca!, by Mayra L. Dole, illustrated by Tonel

Featherless/Desplumado,  by Juan Felipe Herrera, illustrated by  Ernesto Cuevas, Jr.

From North to South/Del Norte al Sur, by René Colato Laínez, illustrated by Joe Cepeda

Home to Medicine Mountain, by  Chiori Santiago, illustrated by Judith Lowry

Making Magic Windows, by Carmen Lomas Garza

A Man Called Raven, by Richard Van Camp, illustrated by George Littlechild

Moony Luna/Luna, Lunita Lunera, by Jorge Argueta, illustrated by  Elizabeth Gómez

Nana’s Big Surprise/Nana, ¡Qué Sorpresa!, by  Amada Irma Pérez, illustrated by  Maya Christina Gonzalez

Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y la Llorona, by  Gloria Anzaldúa, illustrated by Maya Christina Gonzalez

Quinito, Day and Night/Quinito, día y noche, by  Ina Cumpiano, illustrated by  José Ramírez

A Shelter in Our Car, by Monica Gunning, illustrated by Elaine Pedlar

Soledad Sigh-Sighs/Soledad Suspiros, by  Rigoberto González, illustrated by  Rosa Ibarra

What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses?, by Richard Van Camp, illustrated by George Littlechild

We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts on these new reprints!

For a full list of Children’s Book Press titles that are currently available from Lee & Low Books or to place an order, contact our ordering department toll-free at 1-888-320-3190 x. 28. We also have a PDF of our latest catalog here.

Filed under: Book News, ELL/ESL and Bilingual Books, New Releases Tagged: bilingual books, cbp, Children's Book Press, children's books, diverse lit, reprints

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In case you haven’t heard, we acquired SHEN’S BOOKS last winter, and we couldn’t be more excited! Shen’s Books published great children’s books emphasizing cultural diversity and tolerance, with a focus on introducing children to the cultures of Asia. 

This month, we released the first title under our new Shen’s Books imprint: Summoning the Phoenix: Poems and Prose About Chinese Musical Instruments, and it’s been an amazing journey so far! The title received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, and author Emily Jiang and illustrator April Chu have been very busy with book events!

There are seven more titles that we have reprinted and plan to release this spring. All will be available starting in mid-May:

Abadeha: The Philippine Cinderella, retold by Myrna J. de la Paz, illustrated by Youshan Tang

Angkat: The Cambodian Cinderella, by Jewell Reinhart Coburn, illustrated by Eddie Flotte

Anklet for a Princess: A Cinderella Story from India, by Lila Mehta, adapted by Meredith Brucker, illustrated by Youshan Tang

Cora Cooks Pancit, by Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore, illustrated by Kristi Valiant

Domítíla: A Cinderella Tale from the Mexican Tradition, adapted by Jewell Reinhart Coburn, illustrated by Connie McLennan

Jouanah: A Hmong Cinderella, by Jewell Reinhart Coburn with Tzexa Cherta Lee, illustrated by Anne Sibley O’Brien

Land of the Morning Calm: Korean Culture Then and Now, by John Stickler, illustrated by Soma Han

We’re looking forward to all of these titles and hope you are too!

For a list of Shen’s Books that are currently available from Lee & Low Books or to place an order, contact our ordering department toll-free at 1-888-320-3190 x. 28.

Filed under: New Release Tagged: children's books, cinderella, diversity, new releases, reprints, Shen's Books

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Bidibidi by Gavin Bishop, Scholastic New Zealand



Scholastic are taking the opportunity provided by the current WWI centenary events to publish a re-designed edition of another classic picture book. Originally published in 1996, this book won the New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year in 1997 - a prize richly deserved. On re-reading the book I was struck by the excellent integration of the story and the pictures. Bertha the bantam becomes a symbol of hope and survival for the unfortunate soldiers stuck in the trenches, and throughout the illustrations - mainly done in shades of brown and khaki and grey - Bertha’s rich red-gold feathers provide a cheering focal point. I particularly enjoyed the end papers with their reproductions of relevant photos, drawings and ephemera. Teachers will find these pictures useful for studies of WWI, along with the author and illustrator’s comments about their families during the war, also the Bibliography on the last page. This is another must-buy for public, primary school and intermediate school libraries; also for families who want to remember ancestors involved in The Great War.

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I offer to answer readers’ burning freelancing questions on the blog. If you have a question, please send it to me at [email protected]. If you have a LOT of questions, please consider signing up for my phone mentoring for writers. I’m offering a 10% discount until November 15; e-mail me to find out how to get your discount.

Gail asks: When selling a reprint, should you update any statistics or information that may have changed since the first time you wrote the story? I have an opportunity to resell a story, but the statistics are old and one of my experts has changed titles, from professor to emeritus professor. All the other information is the same, but should I sell this as a reprint?

I don’t consider myself an expert in this area, so I asked someone who is: Kelly James-Enger, author of

Goodbye Byline, Hello Big Bucks: The Writer’s Guide to Making Money Ghostwriting and Coauthoring Books and owner of the blog Dollars and Deadlines.

Kelly says that she sends the Word file she has on her hard drive, not a PDF or other version of the story that actually ran. That’s easier for her, and means she doesn’t have to maintain PDFs, etc. of stories that have run to market her reprints.

She sends the editor the article as is and lets her know she’d be happy to update it; “I’m not going to do the extra work unless she wants to purchase reprint rights to it,” she says. If the editor would like Kelly to update the article for reprinting, she double-checks statistics, job titles, and so on. “It doesn’t take long and ensures that the reprint is up-to-date,” Kelly says.

Kelly is also willing to “tweak” a reprint to better fit the audience. “For example, I wrote a piece on how to lose weight for a woman’s magazine and rewrote the lead to focus on brides wanting to get in shape for their wedding and resold it to a bridal market,” she says. “This is still a reprint, but it’s been customized and/or updated (or both) for the reprint market, which will make your client happy.”

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Despite the fact that there are a lot of books no longer in print that I think should be, there are also plenty of childhood favorites that are reaching anniversary stage. This is an excellent excuse for a reprint. And I must say, I have seen some rather nice new covers lately. Here's my current favorite. I love Mrs. Frisby's clutch!(Okay, so this edition is actually about three years old by now.

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I was just browsing through the latest "Little, Brown and Company" catalog and they have some very tasty reprints coming up, including Mr. Popper's Penguins and The Enormous Egg. I'll post reviews when the books are out.

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Awesome news via Jen Robinson: the Melendy books are being reprinted again! They've been through a couple of reprints in the last ten years, but I still shiver with the memory of that dreary era when they weren't available. Here's what I wrote when they were reprinted ten years ago:

It's always disconcerting to me, as a children's book reviewer, to be reminded of how often adult reviewers miss what children see so clearly. These aren't the books Elizabeth Enright won Newbery awards for--and if the blurbs on the back of these reprints are anything to judge by, they were well-received without making much of a splash. But I can think of few books--particularly those in the realistic fiction genre, and without "Junior Classic" status--that have had such a hold on the hearts and memories of young readers. The Melendy books are simply the family stories.

Maybe it's partly because there's just so much family in them. There are four young Melendys to start with: Mona, Rush, Randy and Oliver. (They'll acquire another brother in a later book.) There are pets galore, particularly after the second book, in which the family moves from New York City to a big house in the country. And though they're motherless, there's no lack of adult relationships in their lives: in
addition to their father, their loving housekeeper Cuffy, and the good-natured handyman Willy, the Melendys seem to have a knack for making adult friends wherever they go. No Melendy kid ever has to be lonely or bored for too long--there's always some project going on, some exciting plan to cook up, or a story to listen to. Stories told by adults about their childhoods crop up all the time in these books, a fascinating connection of the past with the present which is still effective, even though the "present" of these books is now more than fifty years old.

Though relationships are so important to the books, they wouldn't be nearly as good as family stories if the characters weren't also very individual. (The Nanny McFee books come to mind.) Randy has always been my favorite: she is creative, sensitive and impulsive, the one who falls overboard in a boat in Central Park and almost sets the house on fire. Rush and Oliver tie for second place; I can't decide if it would better to have a smart, funny older brother like Rush or a calm, solid younger brother like Oliver. Only Mona never much appealed to me--she's too much into "girly" stuff like clothes and perfume for my tastes. Naturally the kids do a lot together, but unlike many family books, they are also given quite a bit of time apart--in fact, the entire point of The Saturdays, at least at first, is for them to have adventures on their own. For them, it's a chance to explore their own interests and feel grown-up; for us, it's a chance to see inside each character and get to really know and like them--to see them as real people with real feelings, rather than just parts of an ideal group.

These long-awaited reprints make these wonderful books available for a new generation of readers. Will they be as entranced by the story of how Mrs. Oliphant was once kidnapped by gypsies, as amused by Oliver's nonchalant trip to the circus all alone, as intrigued by the discovery of the secret room in the attic? Will they crawl into these books and live there the way I did? For their own sakes, I sure hope so. * (8 & up)

And what the hell, here's what I wrote when they were reprinted again five years ago:


I remember how astounded I was, years ago, to discover that the Melendy books had fallen out of print. True, they weren't big award winners, but among readers, they're generally much better remembered and better loved than Enright's Newbery winner Thimble Summer. And to me, these stories about a large family and their adventures are the books that define the classic, non-fantasy, family story.

There are lots of reasons to remember these books with affection. They're written with great warmth and humor. They're filled with interesting stories and episodes. Best of all, they have wonderful characters: each of the four Melendy children (they acquire an adopted fifth in the third book) is a unique and likeable person. I always empathized most with the dreamy and impulsive Randy, who's always getting into ridiculous situations--falling out of a boat in the Central Park lake or accidentally leaving the family's mail to freeze under a sheet of ice. Then there's Rush, an essentially kind-hearted older brother with an occasionally wicked sense of humor, Oliver, the stolid and forthright youngest and Mona, who as the eldest is the most interested in "growing-up," yet still enjoys being one of the family. Despite the differences in their ages--Mona is thirteen in the first book, Oliver is six--the four often play and have adventures together, just as you'd expect from an ensemble family story. (The help of kind and imaginative adults is also often involved.) Yet all four are also filled with different creative desires and talents, which make them stand out as memorable individuals.

But I think what makes the Melendys seem like the quintessential literary family is that the books strike a perfect balance between realism and idyll. Fun and exciting things are always happening to the Melendys, but against a background of everyday security and a rather more controlled upbringing than is common today: their loving housekeeper Cuffy may bake cookies a lot, but she also makes them eat their beets and scrubs their hair till their skulls ache. Likewise, the Melendys are all fond of one another and enjoy being together--but that doesn't mean they never squabble or tease each other.

In an introduction originally published in an omnibus edition of the Melendy books, Enright writes: "Wishing has played a large part in these stories too, as you can see. The Melendys have and do all the things I would have liked to have and do as a child." It's the way the Enright puts that element of wish fulfillment into such a believable framework that makes these books so enchanting. In many ways, the Melendys are an archetype of the best possible kind of family having the best possible kind of childhood. Because the characters are so well drawn and human, we can believe in the stories: they represent something that seems both wonderful and real.

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Why won't Johnny read?
Or rather, why won't Johnny read non-fiction? Maybe if there were more series titles out there, Johnny'd be more interested. So say two former employees of Houghton Mifflin.

They had noticed there's a strong nonfiction market for men -- adventure books such as Sebastian Junger's "A Perfect Storm" or Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air." But, said Hill, "it was clear that publishers were ignoring adventure, history, and nonfiction for 10-to-15-year-old boys." Hogan said, "If you look at what men read, there was no springboard for boys. If they want to read the kind of books they will read as adults, there is nothing to lead them into that area."

The idea is that series books do better than individual titles. So they're bringing back an old series by the name of Random House Landmark Books. My concern with that wasn't too far off from that of former ALSC President Caroline Ward who said, "One of the criticisms of that series in the 1950s and '60s is that it was somewhat fictionalized to sweeten the material. There is such interest in fact-checking and documentation today. We try to avoid narrative nonfiction if it has dialogue that is conjectural."

Plus, are they not tweaking any terms at all? Cause call me crazy, but isn't one of the problems with old non-fiction its... uh... colorful view of people who aren't white?

So I looked through some of the titles we have here at Donnell. We have about 100 of them, as it turns out, with titles like, Rogers' Rangers and the French and Indian War , Captain Cook Explores the South Seas, and Balboa, Swordsman and Conquistador. My boss, for one, was very excited to hear that this is being reprinted. But will they play in Peoria?

Thanks to Mediabistro for the link.

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