Wooden Cat Submission Guidelines

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts

Wooden Cat Books is now soliciting manuscripts. Because we are a niche publisher our guidelines are fairly specific, however the bottom line is always that we are looking for quality children's stories. All the guidelines below should be considered approximations.

Wooden Cat Books are roughly divided into three groups:

Group	Age	Approximate Reading Level
1	4-6 years	2^nd grade
2	4-6 years	4^th grade
3	7-8 years	4^th - 6^th grade

The following general guidelines apply to all groups:

Protagonists should be young; closer to the target age of the reader rather than the grade level.
More girls than boys tend to read early, so we are looking to build a strong catalogue of stories with female protagonists.
(December 2005 note: We also need male protagonists while starting up.)
Animal and inanimate protagonists are fine too.

Guidelines for Group 1:

Target age 4-6 years; reading level 2^nd grade
May lend itself to pictures, but the text should carry the narrative
Vocabulary words up to 2^nd grade lists
Sentence length target 10 words; 15 maximum
Word count 1000 - 2000
Straightforward, single plots

Guidelines for Group 2:

Target age 4-6 years; reading level 4^th grade
Fewer pictures
Vocabulary words up to 4^th grade lists
Sentence length up to 20 words
Word count 1000 - 3000
Limit subplots and extraneous issues protagonists must deal with

Guidelines for Group 3:

Target age 7-8 years; reading level 4^th - 6^th grades
Few pictures, if any
Vocabulary words up to 6^th grade lists
Sentence length 15 - 25 words
Word count 2000+
Single subplots ok, but with limited extraneous issues for protagonists

A useful book containing graded word lists, a thesaurus, and many suggestions is the Children's Writer's Word Book by Alijandra Mogilner (ISBN 0-89879-971-1.) Consider formally checking your completed manuscript's reading level before submitting it. One free online instrument to calculate the Flesch-Kincaid reading level can be found here.

Once you are happy with your story, please send the full manuscript double spaced in your choice of a legible 12-point font with 1" margins (standard formatting) to:

Lucy Hornstein

Shadow Publications/Wooden Cat Books

1288 Valley Forge Road

PO Box 1151

Valley Forge, PA 19482

If you want your manuscript returned, include a large enough envelope with sufficient postage in stamps. Otherwise please enclose a SASE. We will respond as promptly as possible to all submissions.

Thank you for your interest in Wooden Cat Books.