We welcome proposals and manuscript submissions but please read these guidelines before contacting us:
What you should know about us:
– Before sending us your proposal or manuscript, if you are not familiar with our existing titles, please take a few minutes to browse our existing list and consider how your work might, or might not, sit alongside our already published books.
– We don’t deal with agents. If you are an author, please contact us directly. Publishing your book will be a collaborative process – we want to work with you, and not an intermediary.
– We are predominantly a non-fiction publisher, our key interests being previously neglected or rejected areas of research and investigation. Ideally your research will be breaking new ground, or presenting new perspectives on a story that has been told previously. We look for books that present their author’s depth of research through engaging and accessible writing. We are not an academic publishing house, though we are distributed via MIT Press, but we do expect your research to be credible, backed up by evidence and fully referenced.
– While we are not really a fiction publisher, we have published a handful of novels and short fiction anthologies and shall continue to do so. Broadly speaking we are interested in fiction that sits uneasily alongside other strange tales of science fiction, fantasy or the supernatural.
– Please do not send us your poetry. We are not a poetry press, though we have published poetry as part of archival collections.
What to send us
– First of all, please send us a brief summary, about 800 words long, of what you have written, or intend to write. A separate breakdown of chapters is useful if you have one. We can then decide whether we want to see your completed manuscript, or discuss a commission with you. Finished manuscripts will be read by us and our readers for assessment.
What else you should know before approaching us
– Please do not expect an advance. We do, however, offer authors a very generous share of profits. We will also produce your book to the highest standards possible, and it will be distributed worldwide via MIT Press. We are a small independent press and unfortunately are unable to pay authors in advance, except in very rare instances, for example if we know for certain that we can presell a specific number of copies of a title.
– We usually publish in paperback, though we sometimes also produce short hardback runs, either independently or as part of the edition.
– Once your book is written and all other materials – such as illustrations – are in place, it will take six months to a year for a book to be published, though the process can sometimes be shorter, or longer, determined by our own production schedule and distributor’s catalogue schedule.
While the above may sound daunting, please don’t be put off – we want to hear from you.
Join us!
