• Historical Fiction
• Crime/Thriller
• Biography/Memoir
• Non-fiction history, including social history
• Modern Life/Contemporary
• Literary Fiction
• Young Adult (may be published under our Aelurus Publishing imprint)
• Science Fiction/Fantasy (may be published under our Aelurus Publishing imprint)

• Short stories
• Poetry
• Children’s
• Erotica
• Pure Romance (we will accept Historical Romance or Romance with a Literary quality)
• Anything that runs counter to our Social Purpose

We receive hundreds of submissions every year. We’re a very small team so it’s not unusual for us to have a lot of submissions waiting to be read, but every submission will be given full consideration. We have three stages your manuscript could go through before we make a decision on whether to talk about a publishing contract with you. These are:

Reviewing your sample

You should have submitted to us sample chapters, a synopsis, and a query explaining why you think we’re the right publishing house for you. We’ll read all of these and assess your submission against a standard set of criteria.

You should also have included links to your social media and website (if you have one). We’ll also look at these. We want to see how engaged you are online, but we also want to know that your public persona doesn’t run counter to our social purpose.

Every submission will then be discussed to determine whether to move to the next stage.

Reviewing the full manuscript

If we want to read more, we’ll then request the full manuscript. Because we have standard communication in place for each stage of the process, you might receive an email requesting the full manuscript even if you’d already sent it with your original submission.

Once again we have standard criteria against which we assess a manuscript. After reading your manuscript, we’ll also have a full discussion about the pros and cons of your submission.

We have to love a manuscript to proceed past this stage.

Second full read of your full manuscript

At this point, we’ll have another full read of your manuscript by a second person. It’s worth noting that even though we have to love your manuscript to get to this stage, most still don’t go forward to a discussion about a possible publishing contract. There are a lot of factors influencing this final decision, some of which can’t be helped by you or us. For example, if we had two excellent manuscripts but they were very similar to each other, we probably wouldn’t want to publish both. We also have a limit on the number of books we can publish each year, meaning we do, unfortunately, have to turn away some really excellent manuscripts.

Only a tiny proportion of our submissions will end up with us offering a publishing contract to an author. We can’t even publish all the submissions we love. Nothing will guarantee your manuscript will lead to a publishing deal, but there are ways to give yourself the best chance. Here are some of them.

• Read and follow the submission guidelines. We have the guidelines for a reason and if you decide not to follow them it suggests you’re not serious about working with us.
• Make it personal. By this, we mean that we want to know that you’re submitting specifically to us – to Impress Books. If your query is obviously copied and pasted from another query, it raises the chances of it being disregarded.
• Polish the whole manuscript. We’re not asking you to have had your manuscript professionally edited before you send it to us, but you do need have done your utmost to send us a ‘clean’ version. We don’t need error-free, but if it is riddled with mistakes it is very unlikely to go to the next stage. This applies to the full manuscript and not just the 3 chapters of your original submission.
• Does it fit with our social purpose? We’re not exclusively publishing titles focusing on our social purpose, but if your manuscript opposes that social purpose it will be rejected out of hand. If we have to decide between two excellent manuscripts one of which supports our social purpose while the other neither supports nor opposes it, we’re likely to choose the first.
• Can we sell it? We love books; we love reading, and we’d love to publish everything we liked, but we can’t. Somehow, the sales of our books need to bring in enough money for us to publish new books. It means that if your manuscript is one we just don’t think we’d be able to sell, we’re less likely to move it to the next stage.

None of these are hard and fast rules (other than if your manuscript opposes our social purpose), but they each influence a decision to move a submission to the next stage of the review process. If assessment against the criteria makes a submission borderline as to whether we want to take it to the next stage, it is almost always a case of one or more of these suggestions tipping it one way or the other.