Glows and Publishers

I have spent a long time today drawing a picture of a girl, and then editing it on the computer using a handy program called GIMP. It depicts a girl holding some sort of glowing thing, and this is the picture before I added any confusing glows or shadows or anything:I saved it like this because I knew that I may mess it up when adding more things. I have never made a picture with so many new lighting techniques like this!

I know very well that there is something very odd about the shape of her head and features, but I shall worry about that some other time.

So after I had played around with the lighting effects on GIMP, this is what I got:



It's totally not what I want it to look like - for one thing, I want the background to be a lot darker, and the girl to be a bit lighter. I also want the glow to be coloured either green or red. But for today, this was enough work on that picture.

I am hoping to send a short novel - or a novella, whatever - soon to a publisher, and am looking up Australian publishers. Does anyone know any good ones besides scholastic - which quite personally I would rather not publish on? I have considered Pan McMillan too, but they seem to publish mainly for an older audience than I am looking for, and are filtering through their stuff more than others.

Anyone know any other Australian publishers??
Yours faithfully,
Miss Cooper