Have you got a story to tell? At Brighton Independent Press, we want to help you get your story into the hands of readers.
We accept submissions from authors at any stage of their journey, including unagented submissions from debut authors. We care about the quality of your writing, not your past experience.
We’re especially interested in stories from traditionally underrepresented communities in publishing including LGBT+, BIPOC, Neurodivergent and Disabled authors or authors from Low-Income backgrounds, though this is not essential.
If you think your story could be a good fit for us, please read our submission guidelines below to check we’re the right publisher for you before submitting.
We’re looking for short stories, anthologies and novellas. We are currently missing Adult Fantasy or Adventure in our catalogue, though we are open to considering crossover fiction or other genres if you feel your work is suitable for another reason.
Do I need an agent to submit to Brighton Independent Press?
No, you don’t need an agent. We’re debut-friendly and want to make it as easy as possible to share your story with us, not matter what stage of your author journey you’re on.
How do I submit?
We accept submissions through our online portal only. Unfortunately, we will not read or reply to submissions sent through other methods such as email or post. (All of our post gets sent to our wonderful accountants, and unfortunately your manuscripts aren’t tax deductible.)
When will I hear if I’ve been accepted?
If we have an interest in your submission and want to publish your work, we will endeavour to let you know within 6-8 weeks, so keep an eye on your inbox!
Do you offer feedback on unsuccessful submissions?
Unfortunately, due to the volume of submissions we receive, we simply don’t have time to offer detailed feedback for everyone. We understand this can be frustrating, and where possible we will reply, but we cannot guarantee that we will be able to do this for everyone.
What are you like to work with?
We like to think we’re pretty great to work with (if we do say so ourselves)! As a company, it’s our mission to foster log-term relationships and creative partnerships with our authors. We’re looking for people we feel like we can collaborate with for the rest of their career. This means we strive to make you happy–because if you’re happy, then we’re happy.
Will my work be fed to AI?
No, we do not feed your work to AI, nor do we use AI in any capacity. Your submission will be independently reviewed by our (very human) team of editors who will make a decision about your work.
“Whilst we are firmly anti-AI, we do promote our books on other platforms that may use AI as part of their processes. Unfortunately, we cannot control if third parties use AI to process, summarize, or scrape your work for training data once your book leaves our production and cannot be responsible for other companies using AI. We do our best to protect our author’s work and their intellectual property, but this is unfortunately reflective of the world we presently live in. If you have concerns about AI and the platforms used promote your work, please reach out to us and we will do our best to support you.”
Do you accept co-authored submissions?
Yes, we accept co-authored submissions, provided you have the consent of the other author to share your work with us. Be sure to let us know in the submission form if you’re working with another author, as we will need permission from both of you to publish your work.
We are currently accepting submissions of up to 40,000 words. Unfortunately, this is a hard cap. Whilst we’d love to accept longer works of fiction, we currently don’t have the facilities to process, adapt and print longer content. We’re working on it, we promise!
We’re currently looking for Fantasy and Adventure stories for adults, but we’re also interested in other genres. Our past works have included Sci-Fi, Romance, and Horror.
We aim to get back to you in within 6-8 weeks if we have an interest in your submission. Whilst we do our best to get back to everyone be it good news or bad, if we do not respond within that timeframe, then unfortunately we are unable to consider your work at this time.
If we reject your submission for any reason, you are more than welcome to submit to us again with another work. Just because this story isn’t the right fit for us, your next one might be, so we urge you to keep trying!
A note on simultaneous submission: We understand that when trying to find a home for your story, you will probably have several queries out at once. We encourage multiple submission, but ask that if your work is accepted elsewhere, you let us know so we can remove your submission from consideration (and send you a big congratulations!)
To submit, please use our submission window below. We accept submissions in the following file format; .pdf or .docx. Please note we will only read submissions sent via our portal and do not consider manuscripts sent via email or via post. If you send your manuscript via post, unfortunately we will not be able to return it to you.
Please note: we do not accept AI generated submissions. Please send us your original work.
Renumeration
We believe in a fair deal for authors, and offer generous renumeration. As a small independent publisher, we cannot offer large advance sums like the big publishers (even though we’d love to). Instead, we aim to offer fair compensation and a share of all sales of your work as follows;
50% royalties on NET eBook profits
25% royalties on printed book profits
Royalties are offered on a net profit basis, meaning you get half of the money we make after taking off our production costs. This means if we sell your book for £6, and it costs us £1 to produce it, we’re left with £5 to share with you.
You’ve probably spotted that we offer lower rates on physical book sales, this is simply because physical books take a lot more effort for us to sell. Not only do we have the printing costs, but we also have to pay the wages for our staff who typeset the books, package orders, and run our market stall come rain or shine to sell copies of your book. We believe these staff deserve a fair living wage, and for us to pay them fairly whilst maintaining our business, we need to offer authors a slightly lower rate on physical book sales to compensate for these increased costs.
A note on safety:
Please be aware that we are NOT a vanity press. This means we do not request money from you in order to publish your work. We will never ask you to foot the bill for costs associated with publication including printing, advertising or marketing.
If anyone contacts you requesting money and claiming to be a member of Brighton Independent Press, please ignore them as this is likely a scam. We encourage you to send any information you can to us so that we can report them to the right authorities and protect our authors from fraudsters.
Submission Form
In order to keep our submission process running smoothly, we kindly ask that you do not email us for updates on your submission status. This interferes with our reading process and makes it harder for us to respond to everyone’s work.
