The generator above shuffles the whole bank. Below is the rest of it, laid out block by block, so you can read the words before you paste them anywhere.
Hero lines
- We read every submission
- Books that earn their shelf space
- Open to unagented manuscripts
Eighteen to twenty-two titles a year across fiction, memoir and illustrated non-fiction – few enough that each one gets a full year of attention.
Send three chapters and a two-page synopsis. We reply to everything, and the median wait last year was 11 weeks.
Independent since 1998, distributed in nine territories, and still small enough that your editor answers her own email.
Team bios
Colette Warrender — Publishing director
Colette founded the list after twelve years at a much larger house, where she calculated she had spent more hours in acquisition meetings than in reading. She still takes on two titles a year herself and is a merciless cutter of first chapters.
Marek Zawadzki — Senior editor, fiction
Marek reads unagented submissions on Thursdays, from 09:30 until the pile is done, and protects the day fiercely because it is the only one the office is quiet. He has acquired four debuts in three years, two of them straight out of the slush pile.
Naomi Ekwueme — Rights & contracts
Naomi negotiates translation and audio deals and explains contracts to first-time authors in plain language, clause by clause, for as long as it takes. She is the reason our standard agreement fits on six pages instead of nineteen.
Quotes
“They came back in nine weeks with four pages of notes on a manuscript they had not yet offered for. I would have taken the deal on that alone – the advance was almost beside the point.”
Hester Vaughan-Mills, Debut novelist
“My editor cut 22,000 words and I fought her on most of them. She turned out to be right about all but two. That is a better ratio than I manage on my own!”
Tobias Lindgren, Author of three titles
“The royalty statement arrives in March and I can read it without a calculator. After eleven years and two other publishers, I cannot tell you how rare that is.”
Amara Nwosu, Memoirist
FAQ answers
Do you accept unagented submissions?
Yes, and about a third of our list arrives that way. Send the first three chapters as a single document, a synopsis of two pages at most, and a paragraph about yourself. Please do not send the whole manuscript until we ask for it.
How long will I wait for a reply?
Twelve weeks for the opening chapters, and eight more if we request the full manuscript. If we have gone past that, a polite chasing email is entirely welcome – it usually means something slipped rather than that the answer is no.
What advance can I expect?
Between €2,000 and €18,000 for a first book, depending on length, format and what production is likely to cost. We would rather offer a figure the book can earn back than one that makes a press release and then hangs over it.
Do you charge authors anything?
Never, for anything. No reading fee, no contribution to production, no “marketing package”. If a publisher asks you for money to publish your book, you are not being published – you are buying a printing service, and the difference is worth knowing.
Closing lines
The guidelines sit on the submissions page and they are short. Follow them and your manuscript joins the reading pile the same week; ignore them and it still gets read, only rather more slowly than you would like.
Booksellers, librarians and rights buyers can request the seasonal catalogue, which goes out in January and July. Everyone else is welcome to simply read something we published and decide about us from there.
Sample copy written for this trade. The businesses, people and prices in it are invented – that is the point of placeholder text.