If you’re a writer of colour
You can join Megaphone Community, our FREE, friendly, closed, moderated forum for children’s writers of colour. Activities include workshops and Q&As with publishing professionals, book clubs, a calendar of events, and more. If you’re a person of colour writing for children or teenagers,contact us to find out more and join. Writers at any stage of their journey are welcome.
Mentoring runs when we have funding. To be kept informed about when we open a new mentoring scheme, subscribe to our newsletter, below. You can also follow us on Instagram.
If you or your organisation would like to partner with us or support us with funding…
Megaphone Writers CIC has no permanent source of income. The mentoring schemes cannot run without funding, which to date has been largely accessed from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants. Match funding has come in the past from generous supporters The Publishers’ Association, Usborne Publishing Ltd and The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. We also greatly value our in-kind support from our partners, especially Writing West Midlands. We would love to hear from companies or organisations who are interested in partnering with us to support new voices of colour in children’s literature.
If you would simply like to make a donation, as a community interest company (number 13808064) we can guarantee that it will be used only for the benefit of our community: actual and aspiring children’s and YA writers and creators from racialised and/or ethnic minority groups and child readers of any ethnic heritage. You can make a donation to our Starling bank account (contact us for account details). We are enormously grateful for your support.
If you are an author who is interested in being a Megaphone mentor
We’d love to hear from you. Our mentors are published authors of children’s or YA literature. Ideally you would have some mentoring or critiquing experience too, although training can be provided. Because we think it’s important for this to continue to be an organisation which is led by writers of colour, we particularly look for writers of colour to be mentors. For more information and to express interest, please email Leila on megaphone.writeATgmail.com or via Contact Us. Mentoring is freelance work and we pay according to recommended rates set by industry bodies such as The Society of Authors and NAWE.
If you are an editor or another type of publishing professional and would like to be involved
We would love to hear from you too! We are hugely grateful to all the editors, agents and other publishing professionals who have volunteered their time to help Megaphone writers become better writers for children. To date this has involved Q&A sessions and giving feedback on (short) pieces of writing, synopses, etc, but we are also open to creative ideas that help you find the talent you need! Please contact us to register your interest and tell us how you’d like to be involved.
CIC number 13808064