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Submissions

Please read our submission guidelines carefully. Any submissions that fail to meet our criteria and do not follow our format requirements will not be read — don’t go to all that effort for nothing!

Submissions in 2024

Scribe accepts unsolicited and unagented submissions. However, to help us cope with the volume of submissions we receive, we now only accept pitches and short writing samples in the body of an email during seasonal three-week windows. In 2024, these are as follows:

1 April through to 21 April
1 September through to 21 September

Any submissions received outside these periods will be neither read nor responded to. 

Criteria for eligible submissions

Your manuscript
We are a trade-publishing house (that is, we publish books for general readers that are made available nationally and internationally through the book trade). Accordingly, we only consider proposals for books of this nature. We are generally interested in literary fiction and serious non-fiction.

Please note that, at present, we do not accept poetry, plays, young adult fiction, individual short stories, or children’s picture books for Scribble (see the Scribble site for their submission window).

Your experience
You must be able to provide evidence of having previously written for general readers.

If you are submitting non-fiction, please list in your email your previous non-fiction publications:

  • books published by trade publishers, or
  • articles — not letters — published in newspapers or in journalistic outlets such as Good Weekend or The Monthly.

If you are submitting fiction, please list in your email your previous fiction publications:

  • books of fiction published by trade publishers, or
  • short stories published in literary journals or magazines

And/or mention if you have received awards or commendations for your writing.

We encourage all who submit to familiarise themselves with our list. If you can see your work sitting alongside other Scribe titles, and you and your work qualify for submission, we look forward to reading your piece. 

Format
To submit to Scribe, please send an email to submissions@scribepub.com.au during one of our submission windows. The email subject should be the title of your manuscript and your name. In the body of the email (NOT as an attachment), please include the following:

  • a 500-word synopsis of your manuscript (A synopsis is a short but comprehensive summary of the work. It covers the full argument or plot from beginning to end and gives the reader the basic but informative outline of the book. It is not a blurb or teaser.)
  • an excerpt from your manuscript of up to 1500 words
  • a brief writer’s CV listing your most notable previous publication history and/or awards and commendations

Please adhere to the points above. We do not accept attachments, multiple submissions, or hard copy submissions, and if you send them, your submission will not be considered.

What happens next

When you send us your submission, you will receive an automatic reply acknowledging receipt of your email. If we want to see more of your manuscript, we will be in touch within four weeks of our closing date. If you do not hear from us, we are not proceeding further with your submission, and you will not receive any further communication from us. Due to the large number of submissions we receive, we are unable to respond to every submission or provide individual editorial advice.

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