Submissions

Important

Gray Dog Press is now open to submissions again. Yay! Thanks, all, for your patience during our blackout month of January. We were able to do a lot of catching up, and while we're not quite back to the timeline we aim for, we feel confident we can reach it shortly and keep it there.

Additionally, please note: As of March 1, 2012, Gray Dog Press will no longer accept emailed submissions. We will still accept hard copy submissions through the mail, but we encourage you to submit digitally via our Submittable (formerly Submishmash) account by going to graydogpress.submishmash.com. Submittable allows us to track and read submissions much more easily than email, and any time saved in responding to submissions is good for us and for you. So. March 1. Remember it.

Gray Dog Press considers both agented and unagented submissions in both fiction and nonfiction. We do not consider poetry, technical manuals, cookbooks, memoirs, or children's books, and we are not a self-publisher. (If you are looking for a book printer in the Spokane area, we recommend contacting Booker Media, which handles production for GDP.) You are encouraged to check out our previous titles to get a feeling for what we've published, but we have a very open mind. Completed manuscripts should be more than about 35,000 words and preferably less than 125,000, though if the right book comes along and happens to be either small or huge, we'll run with it.

We want to be affected by your manuscript. Seriously, impact us in some way. Good fiction should cause the reader not only to keep flipping pages, but also to see the world in some (small) new way. Nonfiction should give the reader something; a simple recounting of facts or events isn't interesting, and we are most drawn to nonfiction with some kind of narrative. We are in the business of establishing relationships between authors and readers. Give your reader something.

The current lead time for submissions is 4-5 months, though it varies throughout the year depending on how many projects are currently in play. If you ever have to wait more than five months, six days, and three hours to hear back from us, we invite you to write and inquire about the status of your submission. Otherwise you can rest assured that we haven't forgotten you. We accept submissions via email, post, and now through our handy Submishmash page; details are at the bottom of this page.

Current Needs

GDP is currently seeking more nonfiction proposals, especially those of regional interest. Proposals with a historical angle are especially enticing if the writer is capable of crafting engaging prose. If you have a proposal worked up, we'd be happy to hear from you.

Guidelines

Our guidelines are pretty informal, but otherwise fairly typical of the publishing industry. Still, please read the entirety of this page; it will only take a couple minutes. Failure to follow these simple guidelines will result in your manuscript being ignored, discarded, or laughed at. They are not difficult. If you have questions about them, please ask.

Our Requirements

You do not need to send us a query letter before sending us your submission. We've tried that before, but it's a bit too old-fashioned for us. Just provide us with the documents listed here, and we'll get down to business reading. If you are using the post office to send your submission, a first-class SASE is recommended if you want to hear back from us regarding your submission (or you can tell us to email you). Also be aware that your manuscript will not be returned unless you provide a SASE with sufficient postage.

We require five things of writers. Specifics for each item are listed farther down the page.

1. Introductory letter
2. Synopsis
3. Marketing analysis
4. Sample chapters
5. SASE if sending via post

The Letter

Your introductory letter should include your name, contact information, basic information about the manuscript (genre, length, etc.); essentially everything you'd find in a good query letter. There are dozens of good guides for writing such letters available on the internet and your local library. Look them up.

We wouldn't mind knowing (briefly) why you chose to submit to us. There are many other publishers out there; why is Gray Dog the right place for your manuscript?

In the case of e-mailed submissions, simply include this as the body of your email; there's no need to create a separate attachment with it. All other parts of the submission package should be attachments, not included in the body of your email. Please.

Synopsis

This can be a matter of a single page, or even five pages summarizing each chapter in detail. In general, lean toward the former. We want to know what the book is about, but we don't need the instructor's edition. This is the place to display your key plot points (fiction), the general scope of the book, the approach to the argument (nonfiction), and the various subtleties of your writing. This is not the place to give your life story.

Email submitters take note: All attachments should be either plain text (.txt), Microsoft Word (.doc), portable document format (.pdf), or rich text format (.rtf). Other formats will simply not be read. Do not send a compressed archive of your attachments; we will not open it. If you do not know how to save in any of these formats, here is a useful tool that should help: Google.

Marketing Analysis

Don't be put off by this. We are not asking for you to earn a business degree and provide a thirty-page analysis and marketing plan. When we accept a book for publication, we ultimately prepare the marketing and promotion, but those efforts are greatly enhanced with the author's input. Yet many writers suddenly lose their typing ability when it comes to this part, and some queries come in with the marketing statement reading, simply, "I don't know anything about marketing, but I'll do whatever you want." This is not helpful to us or to your book, and will likely result in your manuscript being rejected without much further review. All we ask is for you to do a little forward thinking and answer a couple basic questions. Specifically, who will buy this book? What is the marketing plan? Why and how is this book different from all the others?

Who will buy this book?

When we get proposals that say, "Anyone old enough to read will like this book," it indicates that the writer has not done his/her homework. "The general population" is not a target audience; it's all of humanity. Be a little more specific. Is it geared toward middle-aged people? Young adults? People in rural areas? Veterans? Start with broad groups and then narrow it down further. If you've written a book so broad in mind and scope that it's meant to appeal generally to everyone, chances are it won't appeal strongly to anyone.

Take a few minutes and consider who will be drawn by what you've written. Are there fan groups dedicated to your subject? Are there professional organizations who would be interested? Do you have a 20,000-strong audience for your weekly newspaper column?

What's the marketing plan?

Telling us to "put it in bookstores" is not very helpful. We already know that. There are hundreds of thousands of books published every year, and a given bookstore might stock 20,000 to 50,000 at any one time. We'll do our best to get it into stores, but once it's there, people still need to seek it out. (Think about how many books you walk past every time you go into a bookstore; those people all want to be seen, too.) So, this is where your connections come in. If you're the president of a statewide farming association, and you're proposing a manuscript about the future of farming in the state, then you have both a target audience and a way to reach them. If you have written a novel about a county prosecutor and your sister writes the monthly newsletter for the national county prosecutors association, then you have a target audience and a way to reach them.

This doesn't mean that you need to be at the top of a professional organization to reach people. The real question is, who do you know? Do you have a friend who can set up a book signing at a bookstore across the state? Are you a fixture at bingo nights in the region, and you've written a murder mystery that takes place in a bingo hall? Don't be afraid to elaborate in this section. Tell us how we can reach people. To whom should your book be visible, and what ability do you have to make it visible? This information is especially helpful for nonfiction submissions.

How is this book different?

Why would someone buy your book about duck feeding habits and not the one next to it? Remember those hundreds of thousands of books a year that get published? You're competing against all of those. And even if you have a huge audience and manage to get the attention of all of those people, if your book about duck feeding habits is less interesting than the book about duck feeding habits written by Joe Smith (which he's also marketing to the same audience), your book won't sell. What about your book is different and better?

And please do not tell us that no book is truly unique and everything's already been done. We'd be glad to talk philosophy sometime over a drink, but don't use platitudes to avoid answering this simple question. It really isn't that difficult to answer; if it is, perhaps it's time to re-examine the manuscript.

Sample Chapters

Send us 3-4 chapters or 25-40 pages. You are welcome to send chapters/pages from throughout a book instead of sequentially, though it's not always in your best interest for engaging a reader. For nonfiction submissions where the manuscript is not complete, send us a writing sample and be very thorough with the other parts of your submission.

Do not send us the whole manuscript. If we are pleased with what we see in the sample, we'll ask for the whole thing. If you send us a complete manuscript, we'll send you a note that asks you to read our guidelines before submitting.

If you have further questions regarding what to include, please contact us. Email is the fastest way to get an answer, as not everyone is always available to talk on the phone (due to meetings, appointments, out-of-office duties, etc.).

Sending your materials

Now that you've prepared your submission, you may send it to us either digitally or via post.

To use our fancy new Submishmash page, click here. Submishmash helps us be more organized, and that means more timely responses.

For email submissions: submissions[at]graydogpress.com
Note: Synopsis, marketing, and sample should be attachments, not in the body of the email.

For hard-copy submission:
Submissions
Gray Dog Press
2727 S Mount Vernon #4
Spokane, WA 99223