Thursday 13 November 2008

Contacting Employers?

Has anyone contacted any possible future employers? I'm starting today, but don't really know how to start of my emails.
I was just wondering what other people had put?

8 comments:

Jess Watson said...

I emailed several people on Tuesday night. I looked for publishers who published work with spot illustration (the horrible history series, the astrosaurs series and the seriously silly stories). So far none of the publishers have replied. However I also contacted the guy who wrote horrible history, the illustrator for Seriously Silly and the illustrator for astrosaurs who all got back to me with tips and such. One even said if I needed any help at breaking in, to get in touch with him.

here is what I sent to Publishers...

Dear 'publisher',

I’m a huge admirer of 'whatever' books. I’m an aspiring illustrator myself and I wondered if you could answer a few questions about how publishers go about chosing and commisioning spot illustrators.

How and why did you chose 'illustrator' to do the illustrations for 'bookname' books? When you are commisioning a book, do you given specific pages to illustrate and spaces to fit the pictures into or do they work the words around the pictures afterwards? And do you quote a number of illustrations to be in the book as a whole (without knowing what they’ll be) or do you give each individual illustration that you want to be included (say specific parts of the text you want images for)?

Any help/answers you can give would be a huge favour and thank you in advance for your time.

Sincerely

Jess Watson

The ones to the illustrators where similar, just aimed at them instead. I'm doubtful the publishers will get back to me but I'm glad someone did atleast >.>" I might try again using my proper email rather than my stupidname one. They might be more likely to open the message.

Hope that helps!
Jess

Jellysock said...

Thanks :D I emailed two today, and am going to do a bit more research and then email the rest tomorrow I think when I've given it a bit more thought.
I'm emailing with my proper name email, rather than my other ones :)

It's nice that someone replied :D

Thanks for the tips though, was good, and made my email look a bit small in comparison!

Jess Watson said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jess Watson said...

probably a good idea...I might do that with my next round from my proper email! Next round will be about submitting since the illustrators explained abit about how it works and such. I'm gonna wait a few days first so it doesnt look like I'm spamming them >.> I purposelly did the first round with my old email so that if I did anything wrong then they wouldn't hold it against future emails XP

Jellysock said...

good idea...damn this means if I do anything bad i'll have to change my name :D

Chiu said...

yes! do use a proper email address!!

Jess Watson said...

Hey, some of them got back to my duckndry one >.>" just...not the important ones XP I'll re-email them at the weekend with my jess.watson one!

Rosemary Chalmers said...

Hey,
I've been contacting illustrators for my dissertation recently and I've been using this website to help structure my emails:
http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/email-tips.htm
It seems to be business orientated - but I suppose we should be more business minded now anyway!

It does seem that illustrators do take the time to reply, even if it's to say they will answer your questions more thoroughly when they are less busy... so we may as well ask them about publishers!

Rose