Please note: We’re currently on a hiatus in submissions while we catch up on reading. We hope to reopen in a few months, and shall update the website with an expected opening date when we can. In the mean time there’s a bit more information on what to expect from our submissions below.
Poetry open calls: Even while closed to general submissions we still run poetry open calls, usually once a year in late spring – you can find out more here.
What are we looking for?
We’re currently considering both non-fiction and fiction with a literary bent, as well as poetry (collections only; see info on open calls above) and playscripts. Generally speaking we’re not looking for science-fiction, romance or crime – but if you feel your work is literary and only partially defined by one of these categories, please feel free to send it our way. If you’re submitting a playscript please indicate any performance plans.
We receive thousands of submissions, and it cannot be overstated enough that we have to turn away many brilliant books because we cannot offer them the right context. Independent publishing is about building context – a list of like-minded titles – as much as anything else, so for this reason please familiarise yourself with the sorts of books we publish. Even better – perhaps buy one…
Explore our titles: fiction | non-fiction | theatre | poetry
If you decide that your book isn’t quite right for us, we would encourage you to have a look at the Indie Press Network’s shared submissions portal, where we and other small presses share what we’re looking for in submissions.
A note on AI
We do not accept submissions written by (either entirely or with the help of) Large Language Models (LLMs, ‘AI’), on legal, ethical and practical grounds. Such programmes operate by ingesting others’ work (at present for no fee or license, and without the copyright holders’ permission, so in contravention to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which governs copyright in the UK); and by nature these programmes are not capable of imagination or originality, which we think is key to good writing, and they are known to ‘hallucinate’, which we believe makes them unreliable in non-fiction writing. We consider the use of LLM output as akin to plagiarism, so please do not submit any work made this way. (NB: of course, in a landscape increasingly dominated by AI, we would distinguish between ‘output’ and ‘information’ – we know it is becoming increasingly common to use LLMs like ChatGPT in place of a search engine – indeed many of the main search engines now serve AI answers before other content – and some find answers to be quicker and more comprehensive; while users should be aware that this racks up a much larger carbon footprint, and so there is another ethical consideration here, we do not exempt works where writers use LLMs in place of trawling through pages themselves, so long as it is used for information purposes only, and no ‘output’ words are then used in the text itself.) There is some industry concern that ‘I have not used AI’ tickboxes and blanket policies can lead to underdeclaration of AI use; but we believe that transparency leads to a better working relationship. Our contracts ask for ‘I have not used AI’ assurances from our writers, and in return we include an assurance that we will not knowingly allow access by LLMs to our writers’ work.
What is our submissions process?
In order to spare a few trees, we do ask that all submissions are sent via Query Manager, rather than by post. Query Manager has the added benefit of allowing you to check in on your submissions, so you don’t need to worry that you’ve been forgotten about.
Please click here to submit.
NB: We’re often asked what we want you to submit – we don’t mind if it’s the first chapter of a novel or the last (though readers will meet your first chapter first, of course, so if you’re not submitting your first chapter then it’s worth clarifying why), and our initial query submission is set to ten sample pages rather than a chapter to allow for other genres (poetry).
Will we get back to you? When will we get back to you?
No one wants to be ghosted. You’ve taken the time to get in touch with us, so we will take the time to get back to you.
We have a very open submissions process, which can mean that we occasionally have a huge influx in submissions and take a while to get back to you – and we’re a small team, so please be patient while we read! We try to reply to queries within a month, and submissions within two, but can sometimes take longer. If you log into QueryTracker you can view the status of your submission – but if technology has beaten you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.