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Submissions — How to Submit Your Work

New to poetry & to the perils of submitting your work to magazines? Go here.

Submitting to the magazine? Go here.

If you wish to submit a book manuscript to Shearsman please, you should send it to the press at

50 Westons Hill Drive
Emersons Green
Bristol
BS16 7DF
England

but please pay attention to the following fundamentals before doing so:

(1) We only publish poetry, although we do take on some critical work on poetry, and also memoirs and essays by poets. We definitely do not publish fiction, or books for children. We do not publish books with illustrations, except in very rare circumstances, and then only black & white photos, or line drawings.

(2) We publish mainly poetry by British, Irish, North American and Australian poets, plus poetry in translation from any language, but with an emphasis on work in Spanish and in German.

(3) Please do not submit a manuscript unless the majority of it has already appeared in UK or North American magazines of some repute, whether online or in print. 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 after you have a presentable portfolio.

(4) We do not publish chapbooks, and a manuscript would need to fill at least 64 pages (A5 or half-letter size, with an 11 point font) for us to take it on.

(5) Before sending anything in, please examine the work available on this website, in issues of the magazine, in e-books, and in book samplers, which will give you some idea of where we sit aesthetically. If your work is wildly out of synch with what you see here, it is unlikely that we would want to take it on. If you're a first-timer, please send no more than 6–10 pages from your manuscript. If we want to see more on the basis of that, we will ask. We receive a large number of submissions and authors can help us by following simple rules such as this.

(6) 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. Manuscripts will not be returned unless the return envelope carries sufficient postage and UK stamps.

(7) Electronic submissions can be made, provided they are embedded in the text of an e-mail message and sent to editor_AT_shearsman_DOT_com (remove the underscores and insert the usual versions of AT and DOT). If the formatting of your poems is affected adversely by the e-mailing process, this will be obvious and I will let you know if an alternative submission is required. Please avoid sending attachments with your e-mails, unless they are in PDF format. Any other uninvited attachments will be destroyed, unread, because of the possibility of computer viruses arriving in them.

(8) I am well aware that women are still somewhat under-represented on the list of authors here, although the North American list shows the reverse situation. Simple statistics do not tell the whole story, however, as a greater percentage of submissions by women writers is accepted. There is no discrimination against women authors, or indeed any authors. I think we discriminate against bad poetry, but that, I hope, is a given.

(9) If we DO take you on, then the following terms and conditions will apply. If you find them unacceptable, it would be preferable not to submit a manuscript in the first place, as these terms are not negotiable.

— We always need UK / Ireland rights, and also North American rights wherever possible; world rights would be preferable.
— We do not pay advances.
— Authors receive 10 free copies of their book.
— Authors are entitled to purchase further copies of their book at 50% of retail price.
— We do not accept payment from authors to publish their books.
— Our contracts include termination clauses, whereby the author can exit their contract with 6 months' notice, after 3 years have elapsed, without penalty.
— We offer royalties of 10% of the retail price, but this kicks in only after 150 copies have been sold. Thus, income on the first 150 copies is entirely for the press. Thereafter we share.
— We have an active North American poetry list, and welcome approaches from North American authors. Please be aware, however, that there are limits to the amount of support that we can offer from the other side of the Atlantic.
— We will not pay permissions fees, for reprints, for illustrations, or for quoted texts.
— We try to reply to all submissions quickly, but there are times when we fall behind. If you do not hear within two or three months, we do not mind being chased for a reply.
— Decisions are final, and we will not enter into further discussions concerning rejected manuscripts.
— We reserve the right to control the design of our books and their covers, although we will try to take the author's wishes into account when doing so.
— We do not arrange reading tours or publicity, but can sometimes provide reading slots in our own London reading series, and occasionally manage to arrange readings elsewhere, although there are practical limits to this, given the nature of the UK reading scene and the general lack of funds to support it.