Updated March 2025
Founded in 1911 and located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company is an independent publisher of religious books. They have a large range, including academic books and reference works in theology, biblical studies, and religious history to popular titles in spirituality, social and cultural criticism, as well as literature. They are primarily a print publisher with excellent distribution. My local independent bookstore regularly carries a number of their titles.
They also have a popular imprint called Eerdmans Books for Young Readers which publishes a variety of books for children, including board books, picture books, novels, and nonfiction. A book they published won the Caldecott, which was awarded to A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet. It is important to note that River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams is not overtly religious.
They publish between 18 and 20 books a year, and seek “high-quality manuscripts that are honest, wise, and hopeful, and we publish stories that simply delight us with their storylines, characters, or good humor. Books that celebrate diversity, explore the natural world, share stories of historical or cultural significance, and relate to contemporary social issues are of special interest to us.”
They include a number of additional specific calls on their website, including one focused on STEAM and another on stories from Latin America.
They also stress that they are not currently interested in the following.
- Didactic and moralistic stories
- Storybook Bibles or other longform retellings of biblical text
- Horror, fantasy, or other genre-driven stories
- Early reader manuscripts
- Young adult manuscripts
No AI of any kind should be submittied.
Please spend time with their catalog before submitting.
To read their complete submission guidelines for their imprint Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, please go here. They do not respond to submissions of books that they are not interested in, and only accept emailed submissions. They also accept submissions from illustrators.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2020 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.
