Please have a good look at the 'About Us' page on this website and in particular the 'Why We Publish' section, and think carefully about whether your work really falls into the category of writing that we're looking for before approaching us.

We welcome new and original submissions direct from authors, as well as through literary agents. However, due to the huge volume of unsolicited manuscripts that we receive and that we don't have the manpower to manually process, and most of which bear no relationship to the kind of book that we publish, we have an email-only submissions policy. We do not receive enquiries or submissions by post and we do not take telephone enquiries about submissions.

In spite of this policy having been in place for many months now, we continue to receive many manuscripts, often including books, by post. Please DO NOT send enquiries/ unsolicited manuscripts/ materials of any kind by post, even with return postage; we have to discard them unread, as there are just two of us running all aspects of the business and we simply don't have time to process them.

In the first instance, whatever you're submitting, please send us an email enquiry (to one of the email addresses below). In the main body of this email — not as an attachment; we don't open unsolicited attachments — please include a synopsis of your piece of work and a paragraph about your background and writing experience. If you're submitting a short story or poetry collection it is important to tell us what is the theme /idea that binds the poems/stories together, and to tell us why you think we would want to publish such a collection. Please also include your full postal address. We will let you know whether we're interested in a submission and if we are, we'll ask you for the first section of your rmanuscript as an email attachment. If we are interested in your work we may then require a hard copy of the entire manuscript.

Please do not enquire about manuscripts — whether fiction or poetry — that are not complete. We cannot consider them.

The only kinds of books we publish are:

1. High quality literary fiction. Contemporary, cutting-edge. We do not publish children's books (including teenage books), genre romance, chick-lit, westerns, horror, science fiction or fantasy, family sagas, regional sagas, historical sagas or any other kind of sagas. We are not currently considering short story collections unless by previously published authors – we simply can't sell them. We also are interested in innovative literature and work that doesn't fit into conventional genres. We are interested in full-length work: not novellas.

2. Poetry – with the exception of comic verse. We want poetry that has something original and unique to say. Not just nice description. Poetry that shows us a different way of looking at the world. We will publish only collections i.e a group of poems that have some theme or coherence: we're not interested in submissions of poems that just happen to make up the right number of pages for a book but that have nothing else to hold them together. When you email your initial enquiry please make sure to tell us what this theme/ coherence is — i.e. what your proposed collection is about, and why we would want to publish it!

We will publish the occasional non-fiction book but these are also likely to be very literary in nature — please don't send us local history books or autobiographies or illustrated travel books or anything similar. Have a look at the non-fiction books we've published to date for guidance.

Just because we are a small press doesn’t mean we will compromise on quality. Quite the opposite: our standards are high, and because of the personal attention we give each of our projects, we only publish work that we really believe in and that we love! This (and limited resources — we can only publish so many books a year) means that we turn down a lot of work that just doesn't interest us for whatever reason — sometimes just personal taste — at the initial enquiry stage, and much more at the submission stage. A rejection doesn't necessarily mean your work is bad or inherently uninteresting: often it just means it's not for us.

We do not of course charge a reading fee for looking at manuscripts that are submitted to us for publication. However, if we choose not to publish your manuscript, we will be unable to offer you a detailed response covering the reasons for this: there simply isn’t time to do so. If you would like detailed comments on your manuscript and a full assessment of its overall suitability for publication, then please look at our manuscript appraisal service, which is independent of our submissions process and of our publishing business. If you would like a full editing service we are also able to offer this. See writers’ services for more information.

Send your fiction and non-fiction submissions to:

Sharon Blackie

E-mail: sharon[at]tworavenspress[dot]com

Send your poetry submissions to:

David Knowles

E-mail: davidknowles[at]tworavenspress[dot]com