How to submit your creative writing to university presses
It's like submitting to small presses but...also totally different
University presses have long published creative writing, but they’ve gotten increasing recognition in literary circles as Big 5 publishing becomes more consolidated. This is because, like independent small presses, university presses have the opportunity to focus on concerns beyond marketability (see Margot Atwell’s argument on behalf of small presses in Literary Hub in 2022). Unlike small presses, however, university presses have the advantage of consistent financial support from their home institutions.
If you’re submitting, a consistently funded publisher means more labor on behalf of your book as well as more resources to print and promote the book. Depending on your job, it also might mean a greater sense of prestige. If you work at a college, for example, publishing a book with a university press might mean more to your colleagues and higher-ups than publishing a book with an independent press who is only recognized by fellow creative writers.
Submitting to university presses is similar in some ways to submitting to small presses. For one, you can do it without an agent (although agents do submit to university presses). As with small presses, you’ll want to make yourself familiar with the university press’s catalog and think about how and whether your book will fit into their publishing practice. It will also be up to you to do most of the promotion yourself once the book is published.
In other respects, however, the submission process will be significantly different. Many university presses require submissions to go through a process of peer review, whereby fellow creative writers who are not associated with the press read your work and judge whether it is ready for publication. With creative writing manuscripts, you will usually receive an acceptance or expression of serious interest before the peer review process, even if your book must eventually be approved through peer review.
The main difference is that, especially if you are submitting nonfiction, you will have to write a proposal for your book. A proposal is an extensive document that will likely take you months to work on, if you take it seriously. At the bottom of this post, I give you several resources for how to write a proposal, as well as a brief description of what presses will be looking for in a cover letter.
Most of this post, however, will focus on how to find university presses to submit to.
How to Find University Presses that Publish Creative Writing
Finding university presses that publish creative writing is harder than finding independent small presses because university presses don’t publish exclusively creative writing. University presses are typically built on a foundation of scholarly/academic/critical writing, and if they publish creative writing it’s just a small part of their overall catalog.
This means university presses aren’t as active in the creative writing landscape as indie presses are; it also means university presses’ creative titles can get lost amid the scholarship that forms the bulk of their publications. This can be a good thing, however, for those of us looking to publish our creative writing. University presses fly under the radar as places to submit, and their potential as publishers are often quite a bit greater than their profile would lead you to believe.
Below are several ways you can go about finding university presses to submit to, which follow similar steps to my guidance for finding literary magazines and independent small presses but direct you to entirely different resources.
1. Ranked Lists
Unlike literary magazines, there are no specific rankings for the “best” university presses that publish creative writing. If you want to gain a sense of the university presses that get the most attention, you’ll have to turn toward the prizes given to already-published books. You can use any prize from the Lambda Literary Awards to the PEN Book Awards to regional book awards in your area; you could also compile your own personal rankings from a combination of awards, like Brecht de Poortere does here for literary magazines. Additionally, you could browse major book review venues, most-anticipated lists, and end-of-the-year reading lists to find out which university presses are mentioned in the same breath as major independent presses and Big 5 publishers.
For now, I’ll give you an example from the National Book Awards, which have honored books published by number of university presses in recent years. Below is a list of the university presses whose books were longlisted for the National Book Awards in each genre during the last five years:
2023
Nonfiction: Yale University Press
Poetry: Wesleyan University Press, University of Georgia Press, University of Chicago Press
2022
Poetry: University of Nebraska Press
2021
Nonfiction: Princeton University Press, The Feminist Press at City University of New York, New York University Press
Poetry: Yale University Press
2020
Fiction: West Virginia University Press
Nonfiction: Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press
Poetry: Wesleyan University Press
2019
Nonfiction: University of Texas Press, University of North Carolina Press
Poetry: University of Pittsburgh Press
This list gives you an idea of some of the university presses whose books have the highest chance of breaking into the mainstream. It also is a good indicator of the genres that are more likely to receive recognition with university presses: nonfiction (often heavily researched nonfiction) and poetry.
It took me all of five minutes to look up the above stats, and they are necessarily limited to the specific criteria of the National Book Award during the last five years. If you do this across a wide array of prizes, however, you can get a good sense of the more prestigious university presses when it comes to creative writing.
As a submitter, do note that appearance on these major prize lists (especially the National Book Awards) often shifts the profile of university presses and increases the number of submissions they receive. The appearance of West Virginia University Press on the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2020, for example, raised the profile of the press significantly and likely precipitated a flood of fiction submissions.
2. Unranked Lists
The above metrics of prestige, of course, won’t give you a sense of the full field of university presses that publish creative writing. Beyond the prominent publishers you see listed above, there are numerous university presses who capably publish creative writing and who would be interested in considering your work.
The main resource for finding every university press that might consider your book is the subject area grid for university presses at the Association of University Presses’ website. This list tells you exactly which subjects (and in the case of creative writing, which genres) each university press publishes. Creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry are all included, as well as memoir. This list shows every university press that publishes these genres actively, although presses differ significantly in their commitment to these genres and how often they publish them.
Many of the unranked lists I include in my earlier post on where to submit will also include university presses, especially Duotrope and the Poets & Writers database of small presses.
3. Get Involved
It’s not as easy to get involved with university presses as it is to integrate yourself into the landscape of independent small presses. University presses tend to have paid staff and therefore be more professionalized than many of labor-of-love literary endeavors, which means that some of my advice about getting involved in literary community may not apply in the same way. But you can still:
Read widely, choosing three or four books a year to purchase that are published by different university presses;
Review books published by university presses;
Attend readings and events associated with university presses, either at literary festivals/conferences or at colleges and universities near you;
Consider working or interning with an academic publisher.
Additionally, as with any smaller publisher, it remains important to do even more in-depth research once you start to narrow down your list of where you’d like to submit your full-length manuscript.
These options won’t necessarily get you in the door or even get you a closer read by editors, but they will help you understand the corner of the literary world represented by university presses. That understanding will, in turn, influence your writing and how you present that writing—and especially how you construct your proposal.
How to Write a Proposal for Your Submission to a University Press
I’m not going to give you a full-on tutorial for how to write a proposal for a university press. There are already several books that do this, including The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors, which focuses on the specific case of university presses; How to Write a Book Proposal: The Insider's Step-by-Step Guide to Proposals that Get You Published, which is more focused on submitting proposals to agents and Big 5 publishers; and The Business of Being a Writer, a comprehensive guide that includes a brief discussion to the sections of a nonfiction book proposal.
As you can see from these titles, agented submissions to the Big 5 and submissions to university presses both use the proposal model. With the Big 5, you typically need to write a proposal only for nonfiction. With university presses, you may need to write a proposal or use elements of a proposal for fiction and poetry as well.
Additionally, just as university presses and Big 5 publishers require different things from proposals, each university press will have a slightly different variation on the proposal (as listed in their submission guidelines).
Once you’ve figured out which presses you want to submit to and what they ask for, it makes sense to build a boilerplate proposal with all of the sections you’ll need, then tailor it and cut it down to fit the criteria of the press where you’re submitting. Typically, book proposals include the following sections:
One-page description of the book.
Table of contents.
Word count and details such as images in the manuscript.
Intended audience.
A marketing plan. (This section is rarely requested by university presses, since they are less beholden to the market. A marketing plan is more often a requirement for agents and submissions to Big 5 publishers.)
Critical background or notes on the significance of your book in the field. (This is not always required for creative manuscripts, so you might be able to skip this potentially laborious section.)
Comparable books, also known as “comps.” A list of three to six books that are comparable to your own, with notes on how your book differs meaningfully or adds something new to the conversation.
An outline of the book, with about a paragraph describing each chapter.
Your curriculum vitae.
One, two, or three sample chapters.
As I mentioned above, university presses almost always require proposals for nonfiction. Poetry and fiction, however, rarely requires a proposal. University presses that specialize in publishing poetry, such as Wesleyan University Press and Carnegie Mellon University Press, have submission guidelines that prioritize the manuscript itself. Others, like University of Iowa Press, run on the contest system. The same usually goes for fiction, as with University of Pittsburgh Press (which runs both poetry and fiction contests each year) and University of Wisconsin Press (which has two open reading periods for fiction each year), although you’ll occasionally see a proposal requested for fiction manuscripts (as with Northwestern University Press).
A few university presses that publish nonfiction also avoid proposals in favor of considering the manuscript itself straightaway. Mad Creek Books (an imprint of Ohio State University Press) and Texas Review Press (an indie-friendly university press imprint), for example, takes nonfiction submissions through Submittable at certain times of the year. Other university presses publish nonfiction both through regular channels and through contests, like University of New Mexico Press (through River Teeth’s annual contest) and University of Georgia Press (through the annual AWP Book Awards).
When you submit a proposal to a university press, be prepared to wait for two to three months before receiving either a polite rejection or a request for the full manuscript. While scholarly books typically aren’t finished when they submit their proposal and are offered publication, it is more typical for editors to want to choose creative works based on finished manuscripts, since their merit has less to do with their argument and more to do with their execution.
If you’ve already submitted a full manuscript—as with poetry, fiction, and contests for any genre—you will likely wait longer, since the readers have more material to consider. Six to nine months is a reasonable expectation.
Finally, especially for non-contest submissions, pay special attention to writing a thoughtful and professional cover letter. The cover letter go beyond the scope of what I want to cover in this post, but university press cover letters should look more like a query letters to agents than the casual cover letter you might send with a literary magazine submission.
Some university presses, such as University of New Mexico Press, even have a guide to the kind of cover letter they want in their submission guidelines. Pitching yourself—and being specific about why your book might be a fit for the press—is an important part of what you communicate in the university press cover letter.
At the end of the day, the important thing is to find a home for your writing that feels right to you. If you’re sending out a full-length book, take the time to look closely at university presses. These publishers are an ever-growing haven for important creative writing, and it’s worth learning the language of academic publishing in order to explore whether your writing might be a fit.
Thanks for this!! Very helpful as I think about sending my ms out :)