Guidelines for
Book Submissions.
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We are happy to consider book submissions from anyone, regardless of publication history, agent, or spelling. However, one effect of this policy is that we tend to fall behind very quickly; we apologize in advance for our very slow response.

Before you send anything, please make sure you’ve looked at (and maybe even read) some of our other books. Our interests are fairly wide-ranging, but some manuscripts clearly don’t fit, so it’s best to have some idea of what we might like. Second… oh, we don’t know. Send whatever you want. We’ll probably take forever to respond, and personal replies are often impossible. And we can only publish a few each year, and our decisions are idiosyncratic and sometimes inexplicable. We feel bad about all this, and we’re continually tinkering with our system, but to some extent it’s just inevitable.

Include some short description of the plot or contents in your cover letter. Please don’t mail the physical manuscript; it’s harder for us to manage, and just seems kind of wasteful. If you really want to mail the actual paper thing, we won’t aggressively ignore it, but we can’t promise a response. Definitely please don’t send us anything you want returned.

Thanks for considering McSweeney’s.