Young adult is one of my favorite genres to read, even though when I was a young adult I struggled to find good YA books. These days the young adult genre is profitable, diverse, and covers a wide variety of genres, from science fiction to romance and everything in between.
A lot of young adult publishers are open to submissions without an agent. Not as many as in the romance genre, but a great deal more than literary fiction (for example). Below is a list of all the publishers we have previously reviewed that are open to young adult manuscripts.
Some of these publishers exclusively publish young adult novels, others publish children’s books as well, while others are open to a wider variety of genres and age groups. Not all of the publishers are currently open to submissions, but the majority of them are. If you click on the name of the publisher it will link to our full review of them. All our full reviews contain links to the various publishers’ submission pages.
The list is in no particular order.
Page Street Publishing is a publisher of YA and Children’s publisher. They have excellent distribution.
Shadow Mountain
Shadow Mountain is an imprint of Deseret Book. Both publishers are Mormon, but Deseret Book focuses more on producing faith-based content. Shadow Mountain publishes primarily fiction and they have published a number of New York Times bestselling books. Because the company is Mormon run, books have to be approved by in-house censors in order to be published. They are very firm about publishing “clean books only”. However the authors need not be Mormon.
Charlesbridge publishes high quality books for children and young adults with the goal of creating lifelong readers and lifelong learners. They have good distribution.
This Philadelphia-based press publishes just 25 books a year in a whole range of genres, from children’s books to nonfiction to science fiction. Unlike most publishers that tackle a large range of topics, Quirk Books has a clear marketing plan and to a certain degree their books have a cohesive feel, because they all are quirky.
They have published a wide variety of bestsellers and they have excellent distribution. Some of their bestsellers include The Last Policeman, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
The books they publish tend to be on the younger end of the young adult genre (think thirteen-year-old readers primarily). They are an established and respected publisher.
A large independent publisher based out of Illinois, they also have offices in Connecticut and New York. Source Books was started in 1987 by Dominique Raccah. They also have several imprints, all founded within the last decade. They started out publishing business books but then expanded to gift books.
They now publish fiction and nonfiction in a large variety of genres, with a particular focus on young adult books.
Arsenal Pulp Press is a Canadian small press based out of Vancouver. They have won the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award (from the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia), and they have been a finalist for Small Press Publisher of the Year (awarded by the Canadian Booksellers Association) five times. They have good distribution in Canada and on the West Coast. I’ve seen a number of their books in stores in the Pacific Northwest. They also regularly host and promote events for their authors, and that is a good sign as well.
Red Deer Press is a small press based out of Canada. They focus on publishing children’s books. They publish books for a whole range of ages starting with picture books and culminating with young adult books. Their books have good covers, are generally well reviewed, and have good distribution.
Tradewind Books is a small publisher of books for children and young adults located in British Columbia, Canada. They publish beautifully illustrated books, chapter books, books for middle grade readers, and for young adults. They publish primarily fiction but also some poetry. They are not interested in nonfiction. It is important to note that they cannot accept novels by non-Canadian authors unless they are chapter books that require illustrations. They can accept submissions for picture books. If you are not Canadian, only submit books that require illustrations. All other books will not be considered.
Tell-Tale Publishing is a small press founded in 2009. They seem to focus primarily on eBooks but also they have print options (largely print on demand). They publish six imprints which include Dahlia (romance, and various romance subgenres), Stargazer (fantasy, steampunk), Nightshade (horror), Casablanca (mystery), Thistle (middle school, YA, new adult), and Déjà Vu (reprints for all genres).
The Parliament House is a small eBook and print press started in 2016. They specialize in fantasy, including paranormal, contemporary, and urban. Their website is well-designed, and the covers too are well-designed and market-appropriate. They seem active on social media and more focused on recruiting readers than writers. The fantasy novels they tend to list as favorites are aimed at young adults, although they themselves do not say that they are a young adult publisher.
They publish a wide variety of genres including young adult fiction but they are only interested in publishing work with an environmental or ecological focus.
BelleBooks was founded in 1999 by a number of writers of Southern fiction. They focused on publishing works of Southern fiction before creating the now substantial imprint BelleBridge, which is open to a wide variety of genres, including cozy mysteries, women’s fiction, romance, fiction, nonfiction, science fiction, horror, fantasy, young adult, mystery, suspense, and thrillers.
Persea Books is an independent book publisher based out of New York that was established in the 1970s. Since then they have gained a reputation for publishing thoughtful books in a variety of literary genres.
At this time they are particularly encouraging submissions to their growing young adult list in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. These books are aimed at the educational market as well as literary readers.
Albert Whitman & Company has been around since 1919. I grew up reading a series the best-known series that they have published The Boxcar Children. Over the past few years they have started to focus on publishing a larger number of books each year. Their goal is to be publishing 150 new books a year by 2020.
Entangled Teen is the YA imprint of the romance publisher Entangled Publishing. Entangled Publishing is a newer company but they have had a lot of success in the genre of romance and they have sold a lot of books. They primarily operate on a digital first model, which usually means print runs only happen if/when the digital book has been successful. Also look at their Teen Crave (paranormal/scifi/fantasy YA category romance) and Teen Crush (contemporary YA category romance) imprints.
Bancroft Press is a small press that publishes a wide variety of work, both nonfiction and fiction. They publish memoirs and legal dramas and everything in between. They usually publish between 3-5 books a year, so while they are open to a wide range of work they actually publish very little.
Polis Books is an independent publisher of fiction and nonfiction, founded in 2013. Their focus is on publishing new voices. They are a technologically driven company. They publish print and digital books. Polis Books was founded by Jason Pinter. Mr. Pinter had over a decade of experience in editorial, marketing and publicity for a variety of publishers including Random House, St. Martin’s Press, and The Mysterious Press.
Versify
Versify, a new imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers, is accepting submissions via email. Versify was started by the Newberry Award winning author Kwame Alexander, who you can learn more about here. The goal of Versify is to publish risky, unconventional books for children. They are looking for novels, non-fiction, picture books, and graphic novels. They also are probably the only imprint of Houghton Mifflin that has a Tumblr.
Text Publishing in an Australian press that has published a wide variety of best sellers. They have won the small publisher of the year award three times. You can get a feel for what they publish here. One of their biggest hits in recent years is the internationally bestselling novel The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion (the first in a series of Rosie novels).
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, The 2019 Guide to Manuscript Publishers, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The Authors Publish Guide to Children’s and Young Adult Publishing.
She occasionally teaches a course on manuscript publishing, as well as a course on publishing in literary journals.
