Submission Guidelines

Starfish Bay Publishing operates under two imprints: Starfish Bay Children’s Books and Tiny Seed Publishing. Both imprints follow a traditional publishing model, covering all costs—including editing, illustration, design, printing, sales, marketing, and distribution—while authors receive royalties generated from book sales

All books published by Starfish Bay Children’s Books and Tiny Seed Publishing before December 2023 were released traditionally. However, due to the impact Covid-19 had on our business between 2020-2022, we introduced two additional publishing programmes alongside our Traditional Publishing Programme:

• Author Supported Traditional Publishing Programme
• Secondary Publishing Programme.

We are pleased to announce that as of January 2025, our Starfish Bay Children’s Books imprint has fully recovered and resumed focus on our Traditional Publishing Programme. This imprint now operates just as it did before the pandemic. However, our additional publishing programmes will continue under the Tiny Seed imprint—which is managed by the same publishing team and maintains the same high standards and processes as our Traditional Publishing Programme.

Since establishing ourselves in 2014, our goal has been to publish and promote emerging talent. We have had the privilege of working with many exciting authors through unsolicited submissions, and we are proud of the work they have produced. However, we regret to announce that we are no longer accepting unsolicited submissions for our Traditional Publishing Programme. Only solicited authors may now submit to this programme.

We deeply appreciate all authors who have participated in our additional publishing programmes, as well as those whose work will be included in these programmes under our Tiny Seed imprint. To show our gratitude for their contributions, these authors will now be considered solicited authors. Since 1st January 2025, our Starfish Bay Children’s Books imprint has only reviewed, selected, and published picture books that have been submitted by our solicited authors. To become a solicited author, you are required to submit to one of our additional programmes. For more details about this, please refer to our Tiny Seed website:

https://tinyseedpublishing.com/submission-guidelines/

We have reserved 50 spaces for solicited authors, along with additional places for Signed Authors, in our 2025 Traditional Publishing Programme.

We are very pleased to announce that the following solicited authors have joined our Traditional Publishing Programme since 1st January 2025:

• Tata’s Shoes, by Ester Reato
• Silver’s Pirate, by Katie Aaron
• Where Have These Jeans Been?, by Adele Hunter
• Too Loud Cicada, by Audrey Crowfoot
• Learning to Fly, by Andrew Dittmer
• Finding Kharm after the Storm, by Kelly-Anne Norman
• Emus Don’t Fly, by Sue Bormann
• There’s room for just one in my tree…and that’s me!, by Kylie Tull
• If I Were A… by Lorna Stallman
• Please, Not the Alphabet Book! by Anna Brotherson
• Ant’s Don’t Dance by Bethea Todhunter
• Grampires by Emma Fraser
• Dog by Joanne Vernon
• From Grandad, With Love by Karyn Miller
• Chubby Cheeks by Robert Marrone
• Can You Speak Ballet? by Rhonda Ooi
• Acorn‘s Away by Sarah Tonkin
• Prickly Pete by Jennifer Seal
• Muffin McFluff: Catnap Catastrophe by Millie Lewis