This article exists because we have been regularly hearing from publishers who are deluged with submissions that do not fit their needs in any way. Examples of this include unpolished work, work that in no way fits the submission guidelines, fiction submitted to non fiction publishers, etc. This is in no way acceptable behaviour for submitting authors, and it negatively impacts publishers.
From the very start, we’ve always warned authors not to submit to manuscript publishers unless they spent time with the publishers’ back catalogue and submission guidelines, to make sure the manuscript publisher was a good fit, and to meet all of the publisher’s requirements.
We’ve also published many free resources that have also emphasized this. For a while that seemed to help, and then, starting in 2020, we started to hear a lot more complaints from publishers.
We published even more firmly worded articles like this one, and we started adding warning boxes about submitting work to the wrong publisher to every review.
The issue persisted. Publishers would still be flooded with unpolished and inappropriate submissions, and they’d reach out and ask to be delisted, or they would close to submissions. Others asked to be removed from lists and only to be mentioned in the guide.
Over six months ago, I decided that we had to change our approach. We’d always released one manuscript publisher review a week, but now we were going to release a whole list of at least nine places a month that were open to submissions. Some would be brand new reviews, others would be publishers with limited submission windows, others would be publishers that I liked that were open. I talked more about why we started that approach here, but my hope was to diffuse submissions across a larger list.
This approach has not helped, and in fact I have heard from just as many presses, if not more, that they are being deluged by submissions.
We started Authors Publish with the vision that offering free, quality information, based on research and lived experience would help create a more diverse and interesting publishing environment. We still very much believe this. But if presses close to submissions (or even close period) because of our reviews, that is very much not the intended result.
This is something we very much have to work together on. Our first step was adding a form that readers have to review before accessing information. This is the step we’ve already implemented.
If this step does not help, we will have to take further actions, including perhaps no longer reviewing publishers at all outside of our annual guide, or releasing them only to paying subscribers (right now every subscription is free and we’d like to keep it that way – this obviously is far from ideal, and not what we want to do, and it does not support our mission). If this issue persists, we’d have to stop reviewing publishers entirely, even though this would negatively impact our business.
We are being transparent about this because we know most of our subscribers are thoughtful and wonderful submitters, and we do not want everyone to be impacted by those who unintentionally cause harm by submitting to the wrong place.
If you have any questions or feedback please email us at support@authorspublish.com.
