As a true bibliophile, you never judge a book by the cover. You pick it up and scan the detailed information on the book's jacket flap, right? The good news is that now we can do that for the entire children's book industry at a new(ish) site called JacketFlap.com:
... What separates this resource from others is that in addition to contact information, the site continuously compiles valuable statistics about the publishers. As a result, JacketFlap.com contains up-to-date information on practically every children's book publisher in the business. At last count, there are more than 10,000 publishers in the JacketFlap.com database. Over 5,000 of these actively published books in 2005. There are publishers large and small in our database, and you can see where a publisher ranks on their publisher detail page. In addition to children's publisher statistics, the site contains contact information and submission guidelines for many of the publishers in the system. Best of all, the contact information is kept current by the book publishers and the site's users, whom we compensate with Amazon gift certificates for keeping the site up-to-date.So if you want to know what's selling like hotcakes from Dutton or find out when Karen Day's wonderful new novel Tall Tales is coming out, head right on over to JacketFlap.com. Another fantastic service provided by Tracy Grand, the site's editor and CEO, is her brilliant megablog. If you, like me, check out bunches of kid lit blogs on a regular basis, Grand's megablog gathers all the new posts from a personalized list of favorites and displays them in one easy-to-read place. Hooray! (In fact, if you're already a JacketFlapper and want to add the Fire Escape to your list of favorites, use the link in the sidebar.)
(For writers, the site) has been designed from the ground-up to make the process of submitting manuscripts better. On the Publisher Detail Page, writers are able to see at-a-glance the subject categories, the number of annual titles, and the number of new authors that the publisher has published over the past 5 years ... If you want more information about a book, you are only a single click away from being able to review everything about a book on Amazon.com. The publisher search on the home page helps you find publishers that match your target profile and provides the background research, contact information and guidelines you need to look professional when you send in your book ... Be sure to register with the site (it's FREE) ...