Lund Humphries’ tagline is “Publishers on Art, Architecture, and Design since 1939”. It is easy to get a feel for what they publish here. They are an established and respected independent publisher. Their books are beautiful and widely distributed. They publish books by Visual Arts scholars, professionals, students and art enthusiasts. It’s easy to see if they might be a good fit for your project or not, because they have clear perimeters in terms of what they do and do not publish.
They are open to proposals for new books on Visual art. They have a proposal form interested authors can fill out here and then share via email with the right editor. They currently link to the email addresses of the editors for the following disciplines: Modern & Contemporary Art and museum co-publications, Art History, Architecture & Design, Art Business, Museum Studies & Curating.
They stress that “The closer the proposal adheres to the structure of our Proposal Form the easier it will be for us to review and make comment on it.”
They also share significant questions they ask when they receive a proposal for a new book, which include the following:
“Is the book economically viable? Art books are expensive to produce and an art book on a specialist subject may have a limited market. We may require highly illustrated books to be supported by a grant or other external funding.
Does it make an original contribution to the field?
How and to whom will we sell the book? We need to be clear about the market for your book and how we will reach it.”
I’m bringing attention to the line, “We may require highly illustrated books to be supported by a grant or other external funding.” Sometimes publishers require the author to acquire that additional support. While this is more common with academic presses, including respected and established ones, it still should not be the responsibility of the author. Please reach out to support@authorspublish.com if they expect the author to do the work in terms of finding the money (or providing it themselves). We were not sure about reviewing them because of this, but it didn’t seem like something they always did, and we wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt (especially because they publish good work).
Additional details on submissions are available here.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2024 Guide to Manuscript Publishers. She regularly teaches three acclaimed courses on writing and publishing at The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish. You can follow her on Facebook here.
