January 28TH UPDATE: They are now charging 2.95 cents for submissions, to cover their submittable fee. They no longer fall in line with Authors Publish Guiding principles, even though the fee is small and understandable in this situation. This review is left up for posterity’s sake.
Sunbury Press is a small publisher of hardcover, trade paperback, and eBooks based in Pennsylvania. They currently have about 600 titles available over nine different focused imprints.
The covers they publish range from very professional to goofy. You can get a good feel for their covers and the range they publish by visiting their catalogue here.
Sunbury Press has a staff page listed here, although only some of the staff have bios up, and no one seems to have a lot of publishing experience outside of the Sunbury Press. But they were founded in 2004, so they have been around for a while.
Sunbury Press has distribution with Ingram, which is not particularly impressive, but I have encountered their books in bricks and mortar bookstores before. Their about page is detailed and gives some helpful additional information.
They are not interested in genres not covered by one of the following imprints. They recently started accepting children and YA books but the information about this is only available once you log into submit table.
Sunbury Press is our primary Nonfiction and best known for history, politics, and self-help publications.
Milford House Press – our primary fiction imprint, including historical, murder mysteries and spy thrillers.
Brown Posey Press – our literary fiction and creative nonfiction imprint. We also publish our art and music titles under this imprint.
Hellbender Books – our horror, psycho-thriller, and fantasy imprint.
Ars Metaphysica – our spiritual, new age, paranormal, and metaphysical fiction imprint.
Distelfink Press – our Nonfiction Pennsylvania Dutch / Pennsylvania German imprint.
Oxford Southern – our Nonfiction Educational and Academic imprint.
Verboten Books – our imprint for mature content.
Speckled Egg Press – our juvenile fiction and nonfiction imprint.
All submissions must be made through the submission manager Submittable. They ask that you select an imprint before submitting. They also ask lots of additional questions of authors, as part of their submission form, some common, and others I have not encountered before.
They are only interested in complete manuscripts. Only submit to them if you think they would be a good fit. Follow all of their submission guidelines and make sure to submit the first three chapters.
To learn more, visit their submission manager here.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, The 2019 Guide to Manuscript Publishers, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The Authors Publish Guide to Children’s and Young Adult Publishing.
She occasionally teaches a course on manuscript publishing, as well as a course on publishing in literary journals.
You can follow her on Facebook here.
