Book Submissions

Please send all manuscript submissions to [email protected] with a subject line that follows this format—Genre + Submission date [ in other words, Novel Submission 2.14.2025 ] as well as a brief cover letter including the following:

Your name, the name of your piece, the genre, and the word count. Please provide a boilerplate overview but take care not to over-explain or tell us all the reasons this is right for us and/or the market. We will be able to discern whether or not it is right for us once we read it and, frankly, we don’t give a shit about the market. If it’s good and it resonates, we will find a way to market it. Include a BRIEF bio. We aren’t interested in details about nominations, but it would be great to know if the manuscript was short- or long-listed for anything.

Please confirm your submission has met the additional below requirements before sending.

1. We have a strict A.I. policy: no submissions written, outlined, brainstormed, or edited using A.I. are permitted. Yes, this also includes plugging your work into A.I. to “make it better” or improve upon existing prose or structure. No A.I., period. Unless you are using an A.I.-powered accessibility tool that provides, for example, voice-to-text assistance. But that assistance should be limited to transcription and should not assist in editing. Although we know that writers and artists are doing interesting work that is in dialogue with A.I., we choose not to contribute to the ecologically disastrous impacts caused by utilizing this patently racist, misogynist technology. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, we are happy to provide research materials. You can also watch Ghost in the Machine for info. We also feel strongly against publishing work containing crowdsourced language and phrases created by A.I. tools that have been ‘trained’ by subsuming existing authors’ and artists’ work without consent, credit, or compensation. Should we unwittingly publish work created using A.I. and discover it later, it will be removed, and the author will be banned from future submissions.
2. Include subject line and cover letter as outlined above.
3. Address the appropriate editor: If you don’t know who to address in the email, you can find your person on our masthead page. Please do take the time to get our names right—it’s kind of bare minimum and our masthead is spare. Hint, Ryan-Ashley is our books editor. Yes, the appropriate genre editor will be brought in when the time is right, but she is the one doing all the first reads.
4. Submit only previously unpublished work (this includes publishing online via social media, substack, etc.). Story, essay, and poem collections are excepted here on a case-by-case basis: books already published entirely online via any method/platform not considered.
5. Please submit only one manuscript per reading period and please withdraw immediately if you get accepted elsewhere. It’s a real drag to get 100 pages into a submission only to see a publication announcement on social media but no withdrawal email. Mistakes happen but part of the ‘job’ of writing is to be respectful to people’s time and I, Ryan-Ashley, am allergic to wasting time.
6. Submissions should be submitted as a Word Doc/Pages email attachment–i.e., not a Google Drive link and not a PDF.
7. First page of submission should include:
   1. Your name and email, word count, and title.
8. Submissions should be formatted throughout as follows: 
   1. Double-spaced
   2. Contain page numbers
   3. Be single-sided
   4. Contain a header with: your name and the submission title

Questions, email Ryan-Ashley at [email protected]