I have a children's story I wrote in high school that my creative writing teacher loved and said I should get published. My BIL recently read it and feels the same way. How can I submit it when publishing houses don't seem to care for unsolicited work? Is it expensive to publish myself?
To self publish a children's book is expensive. It does depend on a lot of things. Your illustrator. How much color you use. If you look for a good priced printer. Get Idiot's Guide to Self Publishing. There is a lot of info in there.
If you sold it to a publisher you lose a lot of your freedom. They choose the illustrator. They can change your title. They decide the shelf life. They pretty much do everything. It is a load off of your shoulders but if you want your book the way YOU want it you should self publish. Of course there are probably special circumstances. I am a beginner myself and am trying to collect info.
DH has self-published a book. A little part of me feels sad he didn't get the recognition he would have gotten with a 'real' publisher, but DH has very strong views on intellectual property laws etc, and wanted to make sure his book would remain copylefted and able to be accessed for free online. AFAIK that's virtually impossible to achieve with a 'normal' publisher.
The service he used was called 'Lulu'--US-based, I think. There's no upfront cost, you just send them the PDF or whatever, which is *exactly* how it'll end up looking (your margins, your typos--they don't edit it at all). They say 'Okay, it'll cost us $12 per copy to print it' and you add your 'royalties' on top of that. So if you sold the book for $20, they'd send you a cheque for $8. Make sense? DH has gotten his first quarterly payment, which was very exciting--he's only sold about seven copies, but given the subject matter (presuppositional theology), that isn't too surprising.
I really don't know how self-publishing works with illustrated books though. You could check out the Lulu site and see if they had any info on that. Good luck!
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