Gaspereau Press - Submit a Manuscript

About Submitting a Manuscript

At Gaspereau Press, we are always on the lookout for exceptional writers and great books. If you would like us to consider your book project, here’s what you do:

1. Mail us a PAPER COPY of your manuscript (or a few sample sections or chapters). We delete all electronic submissions unread. Do not email your submission.

2. We are not likely to accept a book that is not at least in a completed draft. Please don’t submit ideas or proposals for work not yet finished.

3. We don’t mind receiving simultaneous submissions so long as the author is transparent about this fact. If your book is accepted by another publisher before you hear back from us, please let us know right away and we will withdraw it from consideration. We do not involve ourselves in bidding for manuscripts in which other publishers have already expressed an interest.

4. Your submission should be printed single-sided on standard 8.5 by 11 inch sheets using a legible typeface. Don’t get all fancy with presentation or bind it in any way.

5. Make sure that you tell us about yourself in a covering letter, including any relevant work and life experience and your publication history.

6. We typically reply to submissions within four to eight months of receiving them.

7. We will reply by a posted letter, not by email. You must send a self-addressed stamped envelope if you want a reply. If you want your manuscript returned, you must include sufficient return postage. If there is not sufficient return postage the manuscript and any supporting materials will be recycled.

8. Any materials you send, you send at your own risk. While we do our best, Gaspereau Press accepts no responsibility for the safe return of submitted materials.

9. We are unable to offer substantive editorial feedback for the projects we decline, but we do take the time to review every manuscript that arrives in by mail and to send a reply (if the author has provided a self-addressed stamped envelope).

Submissions may be sent to:

Keagan Hawthorne, Associate Editor
Gaspereau Press, Printers & Publishers
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS B4N 2M7

Tips and Observations

The books Gaspereau Press selects are primarily literary titles aimed at a Canadian readership. Authors are advised to glance through our on-line catalogue and familiarize themselves with Gaspereau’s publishing history to determine the suitability of their project. We try and select books that we know fit our production and marketing capabilities.

Projects that might interest us: Novels, short-story collections, poetry, literary essays and creative non-fiction, history, and biographies and memoirs with a literary sensibility. The titles we publish tend to be aimed at a national audience.

Projects that won’t interest us: Children’s books, cookbooks, coffee table books, books that are primarily pictures or graphics, genre fiction (historical fiction, romances, mysteries, thrillers, sci-fi), commercial mass-market fiction, self-help books, how-to books, puzzles, jokes and guide books. We tend not to publish titles if the audience is primarily local.

Generally speaking, we only publish authors who are Canadian citizens and permanent residents (although we once made an exception for Henry David Thoreau). This focus on Canadian authors has partly to do with the requirements of some of the Canadian arts funding programs that we participate in, but also with our own interest in fostering a robust literary culture in Canada.

We are unlikely to be interested in a project if it has previously been published in ‘book form’ (print or electronic) elsewhere, either by another publisher or by the author.

We receive and review between 300 and 400 unsolicited submissions each year; easily half of these submissions are works of a publishable quality. We only publish about a dozen new trade books each year, of which perhaps as many as four might be manuscripts that were discovered in the submissions pile. Those are your odds.