Tin House is an established and respected small press. They used to be responsible for one of the most respected and established literary journals, although that closed a few years ago. They still run residencies, workshops, and bookstore in Portland, Oregon. They still publish a wide variety of respected and admired books, including some bestsellers. They publish fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, and poetry. This includes essay and short story collections, as well as novels. They also are open to graphic nonfiction and graphic novels.
They are not currently open to submissions, but will be open to submissions of debut novels and graphic novels starting Saturday May 6th through 7th. Because this is such a small window of time, we have to review them the ahead of the window.
They have excellent distribution, have published some of my favorite books in the last decade, and publish books with appealing covers. They recently brought on one of my favorite writers, Hanif Abdurraqib, as their Editor-at-Large, and he acquires three nonfiction books a year for them.
This is what Abdurraqib has said about what he’s searching for:
“My world was built reading writers who wrote, relentlessly, away from the comfortable center and into the so-called ‘margins,’ where one could be a little more free, a little more playful, a lot braver. Punk writers who scrawled things in zines, aspiring rappers who filled notebooks that few people would ever read, and so on. This is the work that renews me and that challenges my own writing.”
Since September 2021, they have started hosting open reading periods again. They host three brief fee-free submission periods a year, in the hopes of finding more previously underrepresented writers including “—but not limited to—those who are Black, Indigenous, POC, disabled, neurodivergent, trans and LGBTQIA+, debuting after 40, and without an MFA.”
In order to submit you must not currently have an agent, and you cannot have previously traditionally published a book in any genre (although chapbooks are permissible).
The following is their schedule for reading periods for 2023–early 2024.
First weekend in May (5/6–5/7, 2023): Poetry collections + Short Story collections that focus on Food and/or Place
First weekend in September (9/2–9/3, 2023): Nonfiction Nature Writing (including Memoirs, Essay collections, and Graphic nonfiction)
First weekend in January (1/6–1/7, 2024): Debut novels
Usually we only review a press when they are open to submissions, but given our publication schedule and their limited submission windows, that was not the case in this particular situation. We thought writers would appreciate some time to prepare for their submission period.
To learn more or to submit (during a reading period), go here.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2022 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.