Publish

Your book can by a poetry collection, a collection of short stories, a novella, novel or nonfiction work such as memoir, essays, philosophy etc. (Please note books over 95,000 words will incur a small extra cost.) We are open to all genres in these styles but please note we don't publish play scripts or children's books.

We generally only take  books with black and white written interiors. If you have a project with illustrations (black and white or colour) please send a separate query. We do very few of these projects so we need to look at schedules and individual costing.

You must hold the copyright for the material none of which should be quoted from copyright sources without written permissions. This means that if the author and/or translator was alive in the last 70 years you will need a permission to quote. Sadly, there is no such thing as 'fair dealing' in UK copyright law for creative writing.

We are now reading submissions sent to us by September 15 2023 for the late summer/early auttumn 2024 list. You will find the submission form below. There is no reading fee.

Sadly, we only have capacity for a small number of projects in each round. We will have future reading periods, so there are opportunities to submit again.

We will email back to all who sent succesful submissions by end of November 2023 (possibly sooner if possible). If you do not hear back from us by the end of November please check your spam filter and if you don't find an email get in touch to check that an email hasn't gone astray.

Our Leaf by Leaf books will go into the distribution chain so they will be available on Amazon and other major websites and in any shop to order. You benefit from the already set up distribution channels of a 18+ year old press. But you should also remember that this is a hybrid model so the other main seller will be you. To be honest, authors are increasingly the main sellers even with many larger presses so it's always good to think about ways you can promote your book and make direct sales to get maximum returns on your investment. You might want to set up a simple author website through Wordpress or another platform as well as organising readings, for instance.

We will also send you a full marketing guide and promote your book on our website, through our newsletters and via our book reps.

This is a collaborative work so unlike the traditional figure of 10% royalty, our Leaf by Leaf books will accrue a 50% royalty rate.

We will keep a full record of your sales through our distributors and update you each March before the end of the tax year when there are funds owing. To make the payments as simple as possible we offer a £500 advance on royalties applied against the costs of the service. This cuts down admin costs and time for us and reduces upfront costs for you.

We generally plan for eight-ten months to ensure everything is done to a high standard.

You can find a full table of costs here.

Please note, Leaf by Leaf offers a full service of editing, proof reading, layout design, cover design and distribution and we are not able to offer only parts of the service.

We're not able to offer this facility as we pay professionals up front for their work. This means that payment is due on signature of contract. However, we don't ask for payment for the actual print run until we're ready to put in the order with the printer so you'll have a bit more time to budget for that.

Yes. You will have a contract detailing all the work to be undertaken, your contribution and how royalties work.

Simply use the application form, which you will find below only during submission periods, to send us the complete manuscript of the book you would like to work with us on and a synopsis of the book (including the word count of the full manuscript/number of poems).
Please note, the documents must be PDFs -- for the security of the website no other file types can be accepted.