Madelyn Bennett Edwards
DIRECTORY OF PUBLISHERS FOR NEW AND
EMERGING WRITERS
I decided to earn my masters degree in Writing in 2015 at the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative, Lenoir Rhyne University in Asheville, North Carolina. As I neared the end of the program in 2017, I was required to do an internship, which I was allowed to develop with the guidance of my department head, Laura Hope-Gill.
I wanted to learn about publishing—to discover how new writers could, somehow, find publishers who were interested in our work.
I ordered the Writer’s and Literary Agent’s Guides for the past few years and began to study them. They are like dictionaries of agents and publishers, full of great information, several inches thick, compiled in alphabetical order by publisher’s name and divided by book and periodicals. The periodicals have separate genes for everything from animals to science fiction. The book publishers are simply listed in alphabetical order.
You have to read through all the fine print under each publisher to determine what they are looking for—Romance? Memoirs? New Age? Experimental? Young Adult? Children? And which ones accept unsolicited submissions, new authors, untested waters? In other words, which of these thousands of publishers are looking for me—and you—and our works, especially if we’ve never been published or have self-published.
I set out to make a list of every publisher that might be open to receiving queries and writing samples from new and emerging writers and, in so doing, not only found hundreds of them, but learned a lot about how to communicate with publishers, how to write query letters, how to track submissions and so much more. My internship project turned into a labor of love and I published the Directory of Publishers for New and Emerging Writers.
This is what you’ll find in the directory:
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Only publishers who accept works from new authors.
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Organized lists of publishers separated by periodicals—for articles, essays, poetry and stories—and books—for fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus a list of contests. All three of these categories—periodicals, books, contests—are divided into fiction, nonfiction and poetry and each of those three subjects is divided into genres. Every listing has contact names, email addresses and websites of the publishers. In addition there’s a plethora of information about query letters, how to review publishers, how to know which publishers are right for your material and lots more.
The book is in print and is also in digital format. You can purchase the print version for $12, the digital version for $9, or the pair for $15. You have to pay shipping for the printed volume, but if you buy the pair I include a flash drive with the digital links to the websites and email addresses—just a click and you’re there. If you only want the digital copy I can send it via email attachment, no shipping cost.
I plan to update the material every year, so in January, 2018, I’ll have an updated edition which will be discounted for those who purchased the original.
If you are a new writer, this book will match you with publishers who are looking for your work. Happy writing!