Opening to Submissions
Week 13 – in which we sign a distribution deal, craft a submissions policy, and prepare to enter the Field of Dreams
OK, the big news first: WoodPig Press will open to submissions on 5th January, 2026.
I cannot pretend that this doesn’t fill me with not a small amount of trepidation (to use my acknowledged talent for understatement). But I’m sure it’ll all be fine. Yes.
Anyway, I’ll get into what this will involve shortly, but before that some other big news: we’ve just signed a distribution deal with the Books Council of Wales. This will make it easier for WPP titles to get into high-street bookstores and libraries, and also means that we can use a higher-quality printer – instead of print on demand, we can do modest print runs and stock them in the BCW warehouse. Perhaps I’ll do another post on this in the future, but it basically means that we’re all ready to go. More or less.
Right, submissions. I’ve been mulling over what form these should take for a while. As an author, I’ve been through the submissions process quite a few times myself, so chief among my motives was to avoid some of the things that I’ve found annoying, dispiriting and even dehumanising. Here goes.
As I said last week, most publishers and agents seem intent on chasing trends. Their thinking seems to be that, in order to sell books, we must look at what’s currently doing well – “smell what’s selling”, as Lord Sugar puts it. That’s fine, if your bottom line is financial, but it’s not exactly a recipe for originality and quality; it’s a blueprint for uniformity and run-of-the-mill.
Instead, we want to encourage authors to write the sort of book that is most meaningful to them, perhaps one that they themselves would like to read, especially if that’s something that they don’t currently see on bookshop shelves. If you’re just in it for the money, or you’re motivated by churning out cookie-cutter instalments of a series in a popular genre, then respectfully we probably aren’t your sort of press. But if you don’t know where your book might fit, it’s unfashionable or a weird mashup of God-knows-what, but were compelled to write it anyway, then perhaps you should look us up.
The first thing I decided was that we will not ask for a synopsis, a hook line, a list of competing titles, or anything at all about your book, other than whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. That’s it. When you think about it, the purpose of such things is really only to make it quicker and easier for the agent or publisher to reject you; they don’t even have to read your sample. If there’s a “problem in concept”, then the whole thing can be dismissed in advance, regardless of the quality of your writing, the richness of your characters, or the ingenuity of your plot. I’m not saying that all publishers and agents are like this – I assume that at last some aren’t – but, judging from their submissions process, enough of them are that it shapes the publishing landscape in a restrictive way. “Let’s not be them!” I thought.
Another decision was to request only full manuscripts, as opposed to samples. Not only does this simplify the submissions process, but it follows as a logical consequence of the above decisions (no synopsis, hook, list of competing titles, etc). It seems to me that the sample is really just a hangover from the days where physical paper was posted to an agent or publisher, and therefore to minimise the task of waste disposal/recycling. Since the submissions process has now almost universally switched to digital, there no longer seems any good reason to limit submitters to a sample – the difference in terms of file size is negligible. So, the logical thing is just to start reading the whole book and stop only when a decision has been made (whether that’s at page 1 or the final paragraph).
Next up is anonymity. Another thing I hate about mainstream publishing is how the author only matters in a shallow sort of way. This might be good for you, if you’re in possession of those characteristics that they’re looking for. My first agent was “looking for a philosopher” to round our their roster (it didn’t seem to matter what type of philosopher – Analytic? Deconstructivist? Hegelian? – or what my philosophical views were, which on reflection suggests that all this was irrelevant). Some publishers or agents might want to foster a reputation for diversity or the championing of certain issues, others might simply want to know how big your social media following is. But what they all have in common is that they have a template, and you’re just the latest candidate to fill it.
This is not to say that I don’t care about diversity or underrepresentation – I do. It just means that I want the book to come first and be judged on its own merits. Don’t you want that too? For those purposes, your age, ethnicity, sex, political views, etc, shouldn’t really matter. Many publishers who say they champion diversity actually don’t, because in terms of being treated fairly it shouldn’t really matter who you are. Let me elaborate.
The political philosopher John Rawls argued that a just and fair society should be built on principles that are devised behind what he termed “a veil of ignorance”. Imagine that you didn’t know what type of person you would be in such a society – you were, in a sense, blind to or ignorant of your own individual characteristics. If you were responsible for establishing how that society was run, wouldn’t you be more likely to agree to laws that favoured that everyone was treated fairly, no matter who they were? Using this as an inspiration, I therefore decided that not only would our editors not know anything about your book, we wouldn’t know anything about you – your name, your author bio or CV, your personal history, nationality, sexuality. Even your email will be hidden from us until we make a decision. This will allow your book to speak for itself, regardless of who you are. This may not be a perfect solution (every reader will have their own unconscious and conscious biases), but it seems preferable to favouring this or that type of person, arguing over what criteria should be used, or who qualifies. We’ll let the book speak for itself.
So, WoodPig Press will read your manuscript without preconceptions, and make a judgement based purely on the quality of your writing and whether we want to read on.
My other bugbear is ghosting. You spend ages on your manuscript, pore over the submission criteria, agonise over the cover letter, synopsis, etc, email it off, and then … nothing. Sometimes the criteria state that, if you don’t hear within a certain time, assume it’s a no. You feel like you’ve bought a lottery ticket. That’s impersonal too, but at least you know for definite you haven’t won – and why.
Or, if you do hear, it’s a boilerplate response. If you’ve been through the submissions process, you start to recognise the phrases – it’s like playing rejection bingo: “We read with great interest…”, “We greatly admired your writing…”, “This is a very subjective process…”, “We just didn’t connect with it enough to take it further…”. And I understand why this is, of course. When you’re wading through a mountain of submissions, then you simply haven’t got time to respond to every single one in detail – or even briefly. That’s what happens when you are not judging books on their own terms, but by your very specific and prescriptive requirements: you have to cast a broad net in order even to have a chance of finding something that fits your needs. It’s like dating, where you know in advance what your ideal match would look like, what their politics will be, and which TV shows they’ll like. Think how many potentials you’d have to audition! Perhaps that’s why romance has been reduced to swiping left or right on suggestions made by an algorithm. But don’t take it personally! It’s just maths!
How then to address all this? Well, the most important thing is to be accountable. WoodPig Press will open to 50 submissions at a time, and we will not re-open until every one of those has received a response. This gives each submitter a better idea of where they are in the process, and we aim to respond to submissions in three months. Also, everyone gets at a line or two of personal feedback. We can’t go into depth, nor correspond about your book’s virtues and flaws, but we promise to have read as much of it as we need in order to arrive at our decision, and that we’ve tried to treat you as a person, not a candidate template filler.
So, anonymous, fair, accountable, personal, non-commercial. And, of course, human centred.
I’ve written before about our values, and chief among these is our opposition to AI when used for creative purposes. Just to clarify, this does not mean opposition to AI per se. I’ve used it myself to draft GDPR and privacy statements, or just to treat it like a (somewhat drunken) Wikipedia. It isn’t ideal for any of these purposes, and I still have ethical reservations and environmental concerns, but there is fast coming a time (if not already here) where any online activity will use AI in some form. So, you can’t avoid it. But you can restrict its use to those things that are better left to machines (or lawyers), and you can push back against its impact on the creative professions by celebrating and supporting human creativity.
Which is what WoodPig Press was created for – to put the person back into publishing. Let’s retire that horrible phrase “the slush pile”, which tells you pretty much all you need to know about what publishers and agents really think about the mass of human aspiration. Instead, let’s have a Field of Dreams (to borrow a phrase), an organic growth of diverse flora, rather than a money crop. I can’t promise that we will pick your dream, but we will read it, consider and respond to it in a personal way, respecting the work you’ve put into it and what it means to you. Publishing has been algorithmic for far too long – even before AI – genre-obsessed and market-driven, caring more about its financial bottom line than recognising creativity, concerned more with chasing trends and meeting schedules than finding hidden gems. Let’s change all that. We have time. Why is everyone in such a rush? The ability to go faster only serves financial goals. Let’s move slow and make things.
Whenever you’re ready.
What a fresh breeze of an attitude to publishing, this. And here I was about to give up on tradpub altogether.
Wow, what a great take on submissions.