The Emma Press is relaunching our submissions program – first up, ESSAY COLLECTIONS

Dear writers,

Since 2013, The Emma Press has run 34 calls for submissions and published over 1000 people. 

We’ve always been committed to transparency in our acquisitions process, and to increasing access to the publishing industry for both newcomers and underrepresented groups.

Anthologies used to be at the heart of our publishing programme, but after publishing 28 (!) of them, we are retiring from the anthology game in order to focus our energies on single-author books. This will allow us to offer more frequent calls for manuscripts, and to work more closely with authors on developing and promoting their work. 

And so we’re very excited to announce that we are relaunching our submissions programme!

How it will work

We’ll start our new programme with a soft relaunch on 21 – 27 June 2021. For this call we will be looking exclusively for essay collections, to continue our series that began with Nina Mingya Powles’ Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai.

After this initial round of submissions, we’ll be opening for one week every quarter and calls will be for general manuscripts. These can fit into any of the existing The Emma Press series, though there may occasionally be a special thematic focus. We will put the exact dates for each upcoming quarterly window on our submissions page, and we will keep you updated on our progress through our newsletters.

We are hoping that this new programme will help existing followers to plan ahead for the window that suits them, and as well as allow newcomers can jump in quite easily too. If you come across The Emma Press and you’ve missed the most recent window by a hair, you’ll only have to wait 3 months max until the next window. Previously, we ran calls for manuscripts every 2 years.

Click here to learn more about our new submissions programme, including more details about our upcoming call for essay collections, and information on what we offer our authors.

Look forward to…

We’ll be sharing tips, prompts, and updates on submissions windows through our newsletter, so make sure to sign up for that!

Additionally, we’ll be hosting an Instagram Live for any questions about submissions, as well as a Twitter Q&A session. We’ll keep you updated on dates for those.

On Wednesday 16th June we’ll be hosting a casual writeathon for people trying to get their manuscripts into shape to submit. We’ll be hosting this across our social media platforms, with timed writing and editing periods, as well as an editing workshop from members of our staff through the form of tweet threads.

If you want to get a better idea of what we look for (recommended!), then we’d advise checking out our curated The Emma Press Bundles. They are a good indication of the sort of work we are looking for. We have a Prose Bundle, an Art Squares Bundle, a Poetry Bundle, and a Children’s Poetry Bundle.

June isn’t so far away, so get started! We can’t wait to read your submissions.