Find more information about how to submit to Indirect Books on this page.
We use Submittable for all open calls, including the 2026 J. Alfred Prufrock Prize for Poetry.
Indirect Books sources the majority of our published work from the slush pile, building relationships with talented authors and championing their work at all stages. As we move into production for next year’s list, we are currently closed to submissions of novels, story collections, essay collections, memoirs, and full-length hybrid projects, although we aim to re-open for long-from prose later this year.
In keeping with our mission to be open to work of aesthetic excellence and risk-adept urgency, we are excited to begin accepting novella submissions; please refer to this page for more information.
For poetry, see the Prufrock Prize. We will gladly consider translations accompanied by all necessary rights. We do not consider genre work.
Above all we are seeking risk-adept, language-driven writing that pushes the boundaries of form and rests comfortably beyond convention.
Substantive Guidelines
Please send us sample pages from a section of your manuscript, beginning with the opening, up to 5,000 words. To accompany your submission, please include a brief author bio, including publication history, alongside a query letter with the following information:
- Word count
- 1-2 sentence pitch
- 2-3 paragraph synopsis
- Comp titles
We respond to all submissions, and we work to do so within six weeks. If you need to edit your submission (query letter or sample pages), please use the ‘request edit’ feature on Submittable. Minor errors and typos will not affect the result of your query.
If we feel your submission may be a fit with our acquisition interests and production capacities, we will request a full manuscript. At that stage, we will do our best to read and reply to material within 1-2 months. We estimate a publication timeline of 1-2 books per year.
Formatting Guidelines
- All submissions should be in Times New Roman, 12pt font, double spaced, one-inch margins.
- Please include page numbers.
- We can only consider work written in English, but welcome British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand English in addition to American English.
- Please proofread and only send us polished, completed work.
Process and Procedure
If accepted for publication by Indirect Books, a manuscript will receive extensive and thorough editing, marketing, and publicity support. We are extremely invested in helping all our titles succeed, and will do our best to make this happen. We offer considerably more publicity support than most presses our size, and pride ourselves on approaching each project as writers ourselves. We help our authors in securing blurbs, reviews, and physical readings events, and travel as much as possible in order to be there for in-person support. We also attend AWP each year with both a table and off-site reading.
Please note that we are an all-volunteer run press (including the Publishers); while we are a team of people deeply committed to championing important literature, this is not our day job. We will do our best to reply quickly at all stages of the submission process and beyond, but there may be occasional delays.
Part of our mission is to champion literature that exhibits aesthetic excellence and pushes the boundaries of artistic form; accordingly, we have spent a great deal of time and resources on the visual design of our books and, especially, the covers. All our titles are released according to the same cover template, custom made for us after an extensive process by the freelance designer Hadley Hendrix.
While we will take authorial tastes into account, ultimately the final cover decision will be made by the Publishers. We believe that a book’s physicality is an important aspect of its presence in the world as an art-object, and strive to prioritize those elements alongside the editorial vision achieved in tandem with the author.
We look forward to reading your work. Please follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on these projects and help support fearless writing.
Indirect Books 