Submissions
Open twice a year. Currently closed — reopening 1 February.
What we're looking for
Novels and novellas between 30,000 and 140,000 words. Folk horror, the gothic, literary science fiction, and the unlabelled middle ground between them. We have a weakness for books with a strong sense of a specific real place.
We do not publish: high fantasy, cosy crime, romance, memoir, poetry, short story collections by a single author who hasn’t published with us before, or anything primarily for readers under sixteen.
What to send
- A covering email. Who you are, what the book is, roughly two hundred words. No synopsis of your writing journey.
- A one-page synopsis, including the ending. We need to know how it lands.
- The first three chapters or first 8,000 words, whichever is shorter, as a single attached document.
- Nothing else. No cover ideas, no comparable-title grids, no marketing plan.
What happens next
Everything is read by Marged or Dan. We reply to everything, which is why we can only open twice a year. Expect eight to twelve weeks; if it’s longer, chase us, because we’ve lost it.
If we ask for the full manuscript, that is a genuine signal rather than a courtesy. Around one in six full reads becomes an offer.
We pay
A modest advance against royalties, and a royalty rate we’ll state in the first conversation rather than the fourth. We do not charge authors anything, ever, for any reason. Any publisher that asks you for money is not a publisher.
Agents
Welcome, and you can submit outside the open windows. Email Dan directly.
Translation
We publish roughly one translated book a year and we pay translators a royalty as well as a fee, with their name on the cover. Pitches from translators are as welcome as pitches from authors.
On AI
We don’t publish machine-generated fiction, and our contracts prohibit us from using your book to train a model or from licensing it to anyone who will. If that clause matters to you, it’s in every contract we issue as standard.
submissions@lunewickbooks.co.uk — opens 1 February