Bloomsbury Publishing was founded in 1986 in Britain and has since expanded with offices in a number of other countries. They are very established with excellent distribution. They publish a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, but are only open to submissions for their academic imprint. For this imprint they accept textbook and academic proposal forms, including proposal forms for play anthologies and collections, and series proposals.
They also encourage academics who have an idea, but not a proposal yet, to research and reach out to potential commissioning editors here. They even say on their main submissions page, “While experienced authors may prepare perfectly constructed proposals, more frequently book ideas are raised and developed in discussion – by email, on the phone or in person. Please don’t hesitate to contact your relevant Commissioning Editor to discuss your ideas.”
You can download their proposal guidelines here. They have additional tips here. Because it’s nonfiction they do not expect the proposal to be based off a finished work. Your potential manuscript should very much be in the early stages, although they do link to this advise in terms of revising a PhD thesis into a book.
To learn more about their submission guidelines and the overall submissions process, please go 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.
