Submissions

Many thanks to everyone who submitted their work during our recent open call which closed January 15, 2024. We have now concluded reviewing manuscripts.

Due to limited resources and funding, we are only able to publish a very small fraction of the large number of manuscripts we receive each year. We continue to work hard to try and expand our capacity to publish more new work and increase the space for new writing from Australia and internationally.

July 2024 OPEN CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS

We will be accepting manuscripts again from July 1-15, 2024.

We are looking for collections of short stories, essays, novellas, novels and poetry. We are always interested in works in translation from Asia Pacific.

Please be familiar with the type of work we publish before submitting work to us. If you haven't read one of our books previously, start there.

As a basic rule of thumb, we're looking for poetry collections of 60-90 pages in length (approximately 30 lines per page). We're expanding our prose list at present and interested in fiction and non-fiction of up to 90,000 words, but moreso shorter works in memoir and novellas. Again, please read a few of our already published fiction and non-fiction writers to get a sense of the kind of work we're interested in.

Manuscripts must be by a single author.

We do not accept co-authored books or edited anthologies outside of funded creative partnerships.

If you have multiple unpublished manuscripts, only send one.

We do not accept incomplete manuscripts and are at present not accepting chapbooks.

Do not submit a manuscript that you plan on submitting elsewhere at the same time as we are reviewing your work.

To submit your manuscript, send the following in a single PDF:

  1. Cover letter – providing (a) the author’s contact details, including postal address, and real name if writing under a pen-name; (b) author bio and publishing history; (c) a brief synopsis of the work (please note if you have previously submitted the manuscript to a publisher); (d) a brief explanation of how publication will impact your career and why you want to publish with us.
  2. The manuscript – remember to include a table of contents, list of acknowledgments for previous publications where applicable.
  3. (Optional but recommended) Letter of support from a writer/editor/mentor familiar with your manuscript or work more broadly. Note if we are interested in publishing your collection, we will need a letter of support from a writer/editor/mentor for funding applications.
  4. (Optional) Some recent publications have had a publishing subvention attached from an institution such as a university (for example, Wago’s Since Fukushima and Macken’s Our Concealed Ballast). If similar support via a university or other source is available or possible, let us know. While we welcome such support, submissions are selected on the quality of the manuscript.

Formatting of the manuscript: if in doubt, keep it simple (A4 page, standard margins, standard font at 10 or 12pt). Please save and send the above as a single PDF using your family name + the title of the manuscript + the genre as the file name. (For example, ‘Farrugia_SearchHistories_fiction.pdf’, ‘Holt_ThreeBooks_poetry.pdf’.)

Please send submissions to <submissions[at]vagabondpress[dot]net>. Submissions won't be accepted outside the open call dates noted on this page.

We remain interested in forming a partnership with university-based creative writing schools wanting to develop and fund new works or a new list of works of poetry, prose and translations stemming from their faculty and program.