In this episode, we sit down with Stephanie Roselli, Senior Editor at Gryphon House Books, to talk about what kind of books she’s looking for, what’s involved in writing for Gryphon House, and how the book selection and editorial processes work. Stephanie will answer some frequently asked questions by prospective authors.
Emily Garman: Welcome to Early Childhood Chapters, a podcast from GryphonHouse Books. We're visiting today with our very own Stephanie Roselli, Executive Editor here at Gryphon House books. She's here to talk about what's involved in becoming an author for Gryphon House. Let's dive in and learn what we're looking for, how we choose what books get published, and how you can make your submission stand out. Stephanie, welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining us today.
Let's get right into it and start talking about what kind of books is Gryphon House looking for? What kind of books do we publish? What kind of books don't we publish?
Stephanie Roselli: That's a great question. I get that a lot. We are always looking for books that are founded in research and best practices and developmentally appropriate practice for early childhood caregivers, people who work with young children in any way, early interventionists, therapists, directors. That information is really helpful to those practitioners.
So we're always looking for books in that space. Topics can range from social emotional development, fine motor, gross motor, math, science, language, developing literacy skills. Anything that an early childhood teacher would be teaching in a classroom is something that we want to see. So we're always looking for anything that's going to help early childhood professionals do their job better, and give them the latest information.
The one thing we don't publish is children's books. We publish books for grown ups who work with children.
Emily Garman: Good to know. When you talk about research-based and evidence-based, can you talk just a little bit more about what that means?
Stephanie Roselli: Yeah. So, there's constantly research happening, through universities, around how children learn how children's brain development happens.
The best practices for working with children, new methods, new approaches. So often those research studies are published in peer reviewk. ed journals, but often educators don't read those. So we try to bridge that gap between what's happening in research and what we're learning. And getting that information to the practitioners who can use it and apply it.
Emily Garman: So, say, I have an idea for a book, and I want to send it to you to see if you'll publish it. Maybe I have some of it written, maybe I have the whole thing written. Maybe I just have an idea. What's the process? What should I do to see if this is something that Gryphon House would publish?
Stephanie Roselli: That would be a great thing to do. If you have an idea of a book that we might be interested in, what we look for first is a book proposal rather than the whole book written out. What I'll need to know is who you are, what your qualifications are for writing it. So, usually that's just your resume. An introduction that tells me what this book is about, who the book is written for, what's the audience? What can the readers expect to get from this book? And how might it be used in their daily practice? Then I'll need a working table of contents, so I get a sense of what you're going to be approaching in that book, and a sample. So, it can be a full chapter or part of a chapter that gives me an idea of how you're going to approach it and how you're going to write this book for this audience.
Emily Garman: And how long is something like that you typically get, and would you want it in, say, a Word document format?
Stephanie Roselli: A word document is great. Sometimes people will embed photos and we actually prefer that they not do that. That kind of information comes later. If you want to share that you do have photos that you'd like to include, you can share that in your book proposal. And we if we decide to move forward with the book, then we would certainly take a look at those and see if they would work for printing.
Emily Garman: Great. So what what kind of people are Gryphon House authors? Do I need to be a professor? Do I need to have a PhD? What kind of qualifications do I need in order to write a book for you?
Stephanie Roselli: We work with a range of people. Not necessarily PhDs or people who have doctorates in education. We work with people who have master's degrees. What we're looking for is someone who really understands how research connects with classroom practice and is able to articulate how to do what research is telling us in the classroom with real children on a daily basis.
Emily Garman: So when I'm putting together this book proposal to send to you at Gryphon House, what are some common mistakes, or do's and don'ts, if you will, that you see, when, when you receive these things, what are some tips that you would give folks to say, oh, definitely, this is something you should do and this is something you shouldn't do.
Stephanie Roselli: There really aren't too many do's and don’ts. It shouldn't be a children's book. We're not going to take a look at a book that is not written for the early childhood space. So, young children, from birth through early elementary is our main focus. If it's a book for middle school or high school, that's really not our area.We could certainly refer you to other publishers if that's the case. I do get those from time to time. But primarily we're focused on early childhood and best practice.
Emily Garman: So once I've got my book proposal already, I've written it out. I'm going to also include my resume. I need to send that in. So the address that we have to send that to, it's a mailing address. And you're going to send it to:
Acquisitions
Gryphon House Inc.
P.O. box 10
Lewisville, North Carolina 27023
Do they need to send multiple copies or is just one copy enough?
Stephanie Roselli: One copy is great. I would include a cover letter or an interest letter that also explains who you are, what your focus is going to be, what we can expect from this spot. Something else that might help is if you are active on social media or if you do presentations, we would love to know that if you are out there presenting your ideas and sharing them with other people already, that's wonderful.
And we highly encourage that. So if you aren't doing it, that's not going to keep us from reviewing your proposal, but we will encourage you to start branching out and doing speaking engagements. And posting on social media.
Emily Garman: So a link to the person's website, their LinkedIn profile, any kind of other videos of them presenting if they have that kind of thing.
Stephanie Roselli: Yeah, that would be great.
Emily Garman: Okay, so once we've got the book proposal, you get these probably every day, several a week, probably once you have all of these, what's the process inside Gryphon House with the Gryphon house team? How do you decide what books to publish?
Stephanie Roselli: We have an acquisitions team who takes a look at each proposal. I review it first. I also do some market research around what else is out there in the market. And I take a look at how this book proposal might be different and bring something different to the conversation. I present all of that information to our acquisitions team, which is made up of marketing, editorial, design, sales. We all want to take a look at it from different perspectives, and everybody has their own point of view.
We have a conversation about it, and I'll review everything if we have questions. I'll send those back to the person who submitted the proposal so that we can talk through those. If we love it, I'll go ahead and share that we're interested in moving forward and, if we decide that it's really not going to work for us, I'll also communicate that information.
Emily Garman: And this is not a quick process turnaround. Right? I mean, we've talked a little bit about that. We can't really go into specifics about the length of time it takes to produce a book because it really varies so widely from book to book. But if a person submits something today, I mean, we're really looking at at least 18 months out before the book would actually hit the shelves, right?
Stephanie Roselli: Yeah, that's a rough estimate. It a lot depends on once we approve a book for publishing and we have that author under contract with us, it really depends on when we're going to get that manuscript, and we'll build our schedule off of that. For some people, they need time. They're busy, and they've got a lot going on in their professional lives, and they really are going to need a little more time to write that manuscript.
We can work with that. Sometimes people have a manuscript pretty close to being done, and they'll go ahead and be ready to get that to us pretty quickly within a couple of months. So either way, once we get a manuscript, it usually takes about a year to get the book out into the market. Obviously, that's not set in stone. But we do, work to get these books out as quickly as we possibly can.
Emily Garman: Okay, if someone's listening, they're interested in submitting a book proposal and they have specific questions. Is there a contact email that you can share that they could maybe send an email and get specific questions answered?
Stephanie Roselli: If you send an email to info@ghbooks.com, you'll be able to ask questions and we get a lot of emails through that portal, but that will eventually make its way to me.
Emily Garman: So if you've got book ideas, start sending them in, get that proposal together and let us know, because we're always interested in new ideas and topics related to early childhood education.
I love what you said about our books. Really, the goal is to bring theory to practice. So people who don't have the time or inclination to read the academic journals, they're reading our books because we're bringing that information to them. So it's the latest evidence based, research based practices in early childhood education.
All of this information that Stephanie has shared with us today is in the show notes. There's a link to our “become an author” page on the Gryphon House website. And we'll also have that email address that she mentioned linked below, so you can get in touch with any questions. Thank you so much for your time today, Stephanie. It's been really nice talking to you.
Stephanie Roselli: Thank you Emily, it's been great.