Manuscript Submissions

The vast majority of our new titles come from development work by our publishers, existing authors, and submissions via our website. There are some recent comments from authors in our Publishing Guide: The Way We Work

We are looking for books that will inspire, inform and illuminate the lives of readers — with subjects that push the boundaries, are unusual or definitive (maybe even both), delve into new areas of popular subjects, and could never be classed as generic. We want authors with talent, who are ambitious, committed to working with us to promote their books and know how to connect with their community. This alchemic mix of author and subject is what makes our list so unique and successful. Are you ready to be part of it?

There is an initial screening process. Authors that make it through that are asked to fill in a full Proposal. Each Proposal gets a number of in-house reader reports, visible to the author. Our readers are experienced, knowledgeable about the market, and usually authors themselves. The reports assess both the quality of the book and its "marketability". We only offer to publish if we like the book. Depending on how many we think it could sell, we offer varying levels of contract. About one in ten of the titles on the list have a subsidy from the author, directed either towards more editorial or marketing work than we can normally provide.

The number of subsidy contracts varies across the imprints. They are more frequent in fiction, which we find harder to sell than non-fiction. If you are a first-time fiction author, have little or no experience of the market, and the proposal is likely to be thin on the marketing side, and if you would be offended by being asked to pay a subsidy, please move straight along to another publisher. There is more about this in the Publishing Guide, in the section on Contracts.

A criterion for getting published with us is being able to use a database, and to be willing to contribute to it. Manuscripts and proofs are exchanged through the database rather than by post or email. Your book will have several pages of its own on our database, with the scheduling and copy visible; you can add to it and amend it, monthly sales figures will be there, and all the marketing on every title is visible for you to see. We add around a thousand new "activities" a month to the database, several hundred new contacts, and send out a few hundred review copies a month.

It doesn't matter where you live. Around half our new authors are from North America, the others from the UK and most countries where English is a major language.

We only publish titles for which we have at least worldwide English-language rights. Our systems are based around all books being available everywhere, for review and for sale.

We do not reply to submissions through the post.

We cannot re-issue books that one of the larger publishers has dropped, or a self-published book. Even if the publisher has declared it out of stock there will still be copies around with wholesalers and distributors for years to come, at heavily discounted prices, and bringing out the same book with a different ISBN invariably causes confusion and trouble.

Updated so this is in line with The Way We Work page. Also added links

• We work with over 70 sales reps worldwide.
• Royalties are competitive on both print books and ebooks.
• Distribution and sales is international rather than national.
• Monthly sales are available for you to see, along with your marketing.
• Access to thousands of industry contacts via our shared Contacts Database.
• Access to author communities, discussions and help forums.

We do work with:

• Communications through the website.
• The Forum.
• Social-media groups.

We do not work with:

• Post.
• Phones (we do not have them on the desk)
• Emails (except in limited circumstances)

First, find the right imprint for your book. See our list here or watch a video about them here.

Tell us a bit About You, your Previous Books if you have any, give us a Brief Description about what it’s about, who it’s aimed at and how much you think it’s going to sell.

• ✅ We only accept one manuscript at a time.

• ✅ Your book doesn’t need to be finished but the sample text needs at least 5000 words

• ✅ Upload your file as a doc or docx file.

• ✅ Please submit only one document, not several for different chapters.

• ✅ For supporting documents, PDF, JPEG, and Excel files are okay.

• ✅ Files up to 4MB supported

• ❌ Make sure there are no special characters in your filenames such as / " ! etc.

• ❌ Files over 4MB not supported.

• ❌ If your files and filenames are not in the correct format or the wrong size they will not upload or issue a warning.

Our "default" position is to run the business without the one-to-one relationship that publishers traditionally provide, which is expensive, labor-intensive, and results in high sales expectations for each book published.

This doesn't mean close relationships aren't formed, they are, just that the nuts and bolts of seeing a book through to publication are dealt with efficiently by the email notifications and this Publishing Guide, saving us time answering dozens to hundreds of individual queries for each title.

This allows us to more freedom to publish more good books, irrespective of whether they're likely to sell 500, 5,000 or 5,000,000, spend more on sales, marketing and social networking, and keep them always in print..

• If we like your inquiry, we will invite you to submit a full proposal.

• We respond occasionally in hours, usually days, and unlikely over a week.

• If we like your proposal, we will offer you one of our four contracts.

• The time between submitting an inquiry to a decline or offer of a contract is usually about two weeks.

For full detail on the process, please read How to Publish with Us