Steerforth Press was launched in 1993, with a catalog featuring a “Manifesto for a New Press” which stated “Our interests fall into no category, no field, no niche; our tests of a book’s worth are whether it has been written well, is intended to engage the full attention of the reader, and has something new or important to say.”
The four founding partners were Michael Moore (1941 – 2014), Thomas Powers, Alan Lelchuk, and Chip Fleischer. As individuals they were already established and respected in their fields. They started out focusing on classic literature and new fiction, and published a number of well known books, including the book of poetry Close to Death by Patricia Smith, and I Heard You Paint Houses (the source material for Netflix’s The Irishman) by Charles Brandt, and Under the Red Flag by Ha Jin.
More recently they have focused on publishing narrative nonfiction. For non-agented submission they exclusively consider works of narrative nonfiction, such as investigative or literary journalism, true crime, and history for a general audience. You can see previous nonfiction books they’ve published listed here. Do not submit to them unless you feel like your work is a good fit.
It is not clear if their imprint, T2P Books, is still active. It was launched last year, but the website for the imprint is not currently working.
In the US and Canada, Penguin Random house is their distributor. Their covers are mostly well designed.
Please send a query or proposal to submissions@steerforth.com. They do not accept unsolicited manuscript submissions.
To learn more, or submit, go here.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2021 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.
