After working at Dovetail, Working Partners’ YA imprint, as editor for three years now, I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been promoted to the talent manager for WP. This is a literary scout position where I work to pair authors with our contracts for our IP books. I do this through networking with agents, authors, writers’ organizations, and any other funnel that can lead me to authors with vibrant voices who love the challenge and perks of working as a collaborative storytelling team to make a book the best it can be.
Subscribe to this blog to stay up to date with my submission calls! I’ll be posting what I’m looking for and what kinds of books we’re baking in our creative kitchen. Please note that a primary focus of my new role is searching for authors from historically marginalized communities to tell powerful, imaginative stories for everyone.
Here’s a bit about Working Partners:
As a global leader in the creation of children’s fiction and an award-winning creator of children’s TV and apps, story is at the heart of everything we do.
Warriors, Beast Quest and Rainbow Magic are but three of the 200 book series and 2,000 titles we have created and licensed to publishers. Lifetime global sales exceed 200 million copies.
Clangers, Scream Street and Poppy Cat are just part of an award-winning roster of hit animated and live action TV shows developed and produced in house, and enjoyed the world over.
Warriors, Beast Quest, and Clangers represent part of a digital slate that has been downloaded over 16 million times as apps and is viewed on YouTube over 40 million times a month.
Everything we create has global appeal: our books are licensed in over 40 languages, our apps and our award-winning TV shows are licensed in over 140 countries.
These are all just part of our deep and constantly expanding well of intellectual property. We cover every genre, from big fantasy and horror to friendship stories and rom-coms. With some 70 new titles being created and published each year, there are always new stories with which to engage. Please visit our 2022-2023 catalogue and the full list of our books to learn more.
How We Work
We create stories both from our own ideas and to meet a specific request from publishers. We have global reach and have created series for leading publishers in China, France, Germany, Japan, and of course the UK and the USA.
We routinely spend a year developing our projects, creating meticulously crafted plots to which we attach the strongest possible writers. The result is stories beloved by readers around the world. We like to say that our development team tells the story, but the authors are the ones who get to show the story. Authors are welcome to bring their own heritage, culture, and identity to the story, as well.
Once we have a project ready for the writer, our talent manager works to match the story with the best possible voices to bring it to life. We host small rounds of auditions for each project. Once we hire an author, we ask them to write the sample pages for the proposal. We will then submit the proposal to publishers in the US and UK, via our agents at Greenhouse Literary Agency. If the book is contracted by a publishing house, the author will then write the rest of the story. After the initial English language deal is made, foreign rights will be sold by Rights People—our dedicated and innovative children’s rights-selling team.
I’ve worked at several publishing houses and literary agencies over my career, and I’m so lucky to be able to say that Working Partners has that publishing gem: a truly skilled, trustworthy, and genuinely good-hearted team. It’s a dream job for me. They truly do value work-life balance, ethical pay, and the experience of our authors. It’s why I’m willing to work in this position with them.
We do offer (modest) advances for the authors who write our books, set against the future income from the project, along with royalties from all primary territory and secondary territory deals. Working Partners and Dovetail primarily work on picture books through YA, graphic novels, and crossover concepts, with occasional adult and nonfiction projects.
Agents and authors, please do get in touch if you’re interested in working with us. And editors, if you’d like to chat about what books we have going on submission soon, please do reach out as well. We do custom projects for publishing houses as well as books created from our own team’s creativity.
To get in touch, agents please reach out to talk over email or set up a call. Authors (and agents, if you have an interested client), please send the following materials to KateB@workingpartnersltd.co.uk :
1) An author bio, including what genres, age ranges, particular tropes, and story elements they particularly love and areas in which they have expertise (baking, engineering, Australia, animal training, etc). 2) The first 10 pages of a project most closely matches the stories they’d most like to write with us. 3) If they write multiple distinct voices and age ranges, please feel free to include multiple sets of 10 pages. Please attach these materials to an email as a Word document. If I believe the author could be a fit, I’ll be in touch with more information and be able to answer questions.
More soon about what I’m looking for right now! Watch this space.
Kate Brauning 
Congratulations, Kate!
Thank you so much, Vic ❤