Menu:
Submissions — How to Submit Your Work
New to poetry & to the perils of submitting your work to magazines? Go here.
Submitting a book manuscript? Go here.
Shearsman magazine now operates a "reading-window" system, and no longer accepts submissions throughout the year. The windows run from 1 March to 31 March, when we read work for the October issue, and from 1 September to 30 September, when we read work for the April issue. Please note that this window system applies only to the magazine; books may be submitted at any time—see below for further details.
Manuscripts intended for consideration by the magazine should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Poems (5 or 6 pages for a first submission) should be typed on one side of a sheet of paper, and each sheet should carry the author's name and address. Would international correspondents please note that our local Post Office will no longer exchange International Reply Coupons, and therefore it is practically impossible to guarantee return of your manuscript, unless you have access to British stamps. In view of this, it is suggested that you supply recyclable copies of your manuscript and permit e-mail replies wherever possible. Likewise, would UK correspondents please ensure that their return postage is in line with current Royal Mail pricing policy. If you can live with the pages being recycled, and replies by email, so much the better.
If you wish to submit a book manuscript please only do so if (a) most of the ms has already appeared in the UK or the USA in magazines of some repute, whether online or in print, and (b) it has sufficient work to fill 70–72 pages of half-letter or A5 pages. If the manuscript meets these criteria, then you should send a initial sample selection of 6–10 poems, or 10 pages, whichever is the shorter, which should be enough for us to work out whether your work fits with what we're doing here at Shearsman. It is very unlikely that a poet with no track record of publication in magazines in either the UK or North America will be accepted for publication, as there is no obvious audience for the work. We do have to sell the books. My advice to those of you from elsewhere in the world is to develop some exposure to the UK and US magazines and try to assemble a manuscript only later. The mailing address is:-
58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
England
Please note that postal submissions that are not accompanied by sufficient return postage will be destroyed, unacknowledged. Submissions that are accompanied by penalty charges for bearing insufficient postage will be rejected, and presumably returned to source by the Royal Mail. Therefore, please put the right amount of stamps on your envelope if you wish to be sure of a reply. Also, manuscripts will not be returned unless the return envelope carries sufficient postage. Please remember that, in the UK, the upper weight limit for a 2nd class stamp is 100 grams, and that bulk also counts. Would non-UK correspondents please note that stamps from your country are not usable in ours. Just try to mail an envelope with a British stamp in your own country and you will see what I mean.
Electronic submissions can also be made, provided they are embedded in the text of an Email message and sent to editor_AT_shearsman_DOT_com (remove the underscores and insert the usual versions of AT and DOT); rich-text emails are acceptable. If the formatting of your poems is affected adversely by the Emailing process, this will be obvious and I will let you know if an alternative submission is required. Please avoid sending attachments with your Emails, unless they are in PDF format. Any other uninvited attachments will be destroyed, unread, because of the possibility of computer viruses arriving in such attachments.
Would-be contributors often fail to carry out even the most cursory of checks on the market to which they wish to 'sell' their work. In the case of Shearsman there should be enough content on this website for you to judge whether your work fits in with the overall aesthetic of the magazine or the press. If you can't see what that aesthetic might be, then you're very likely in the wrong place to start with. If you don't like the kind of poetry you see on the website, or in the printed version of the magazine, ditto, and you can probably save yourself a lot of wasted time, effort, and postage stamps. And, if you don't like it anyway, I would have to ask why you would wish to be published in it. Unsolicited material does have a good chance of getting into Shearsman, and most issues contain some such work, frequently from writers with whom I have had no previous contact. The key to their acceptance was that they either brought something new, and of quality, to the magazine or that their work was in tune with what the magazine was all about. Without such editorial surprises, the magazine would die from atrophy: new blood is always needed. As with real blood transfusions, however, the blood needs to be of the right type.
One difficult issue is that of female representation in the magazine and amongst the authors of books published by Shearsman. I am well aware that women are under-represented: percentage representation in the magazine is running at slightly over 30% by head-count for the current series (i.e. from 1991–2007), although the balance has improved in recent issues to around 45%. Also, in 2007, the press published 14 books by women, 5 of them first collections; in 2008, 19 books by women authors were published, 9 of them first collections. Simple statistics do not tell the whole story, however, as a greater percentage of submissions by women writers is accepted, and a number of our books by women are the result of solicitations. Against that, a number of solicitations have been ignored, or agreed to and not followed up. Why that should be, I do not know; other, of course, than the possibility that those being solicited were not attracted by the idea of involvement with the Shearsman list. When I have asked women poets why they think I might be having problems attracting the right kind of work from women, the answer has invariably been that more women will send in their work when they see more women represented. Now that may well be so, but it is a circular argument, and the circle is difficult to break. So, ladies: please do not be put off. Send in your work and it is likely to be responded to quickly and fast-tracked, if accepted.
If you are a frequent contributor, or would-be contributor, to poetry magazines, please do try to buy a book from one of their associated small presses from time to time, or indeed from Shearsman Books. Most of these presses survive only through sales, even if they do receive some subvention, and, if they cannot sell to people who are actually part of the tiny minority that is interested in poetry, they are almost certainly doomed. Small presses keep the art of poetry alive, not the big publishers—who take very few risks and tend to be closed-minded concerning new developments. The more small presses and journals that disappear through lack of sales, the less potential homes there are for your work. A few years ago, the director of one fine small press that was closing down observed that, had even one in ten of his unsolicited correspondents actually bought a book from his press, then the press would not have had to close down. It's worth remembering. Needless to say, purchasing a book or a subscription does not guarantee publication of your work, so please do not be disappointed if, after having bought something, your work is not accepted for publication. Vanity presses do that: we don't. But we would hope that you enjoy the book that you've acquired, and that you've learned something from it.