From the very start, we’ve always warned authors not to submit to manuscript publishers unless they spent time with the publishers’ back catalogue and submission guidelines, to make sure the manuscript publisher was a good fit, and to meet all of the publisher’s requirements.

We’ve also published many free resources that have also emphasized this. For a while that seemed to help, and then, starting in 2020, we started to hear a lot more complaints from publishers.

We published even more firmly worded articles like this one, and we started adding warning boxes about submitting work to the wrong publisher to every review.

The issue persisted. Publishers would still be flooded with unpolished and inappropriate submissions, and they’d reach out and ask to be delisted, or they would close to submissions. Others asked to be removed from lists and only to be mentioned in the guide.

Over six months ago, I decided that we had to change our approach. We’d always released one manuscript publisher review a week, but now we were going to release a whole list of at least nine places a month that were open to submissions. Some would be brand new reviews, others would be publishers with limited submission windows, others would be publishers that I liked that were open. I talked more about why we started that approach here, but my hope was to diffuse submissions across a larger list.

This approach has not helped, and in fact I have heard from just as many presses, if not more, that they are being deluged by submissions.

We started Authors Publish with the vision that offering free, quality information, based on research and lived experience would help create a more diverse and interesting publishing environment. We still very much believe this. But if presses close to submissions (or even close period) because of our reviews, that is very much not the intended result.

This is something we very much have to work together on. Our first step was adding a form that readers have to review before accessing information. This is the step we’ve already implemented.

If this step does not help, we will have to take further actions, including perhaps no longer reviewing publishers at all outside of our annual guide, or releasing them only to paying subscribers (right now every subscription is free and we’d like to keep it that way – this obviously is far from ideal, and not what we want to do, and it does not support our mission). If this issue persists, we’d have to stop reviewing publishers entirely, even though this would negatively impact our business.

We are being transparent about this because we know most of our subscribers are thoughtful and wonderful submitters, and we do not want everyone to be impacted by those who unintentionally cause harm by submitting to the wrong place.

If you have any questions or feedback please email us at support@authorspublish.com.

The reasons for this are threefold:

We have a lot more subscribers than we did when we starting out.

When we started out, our reviews made little impact on the number of manuscripts a publisher received. Over the years as our readership has grown, the submission influx from a review has grown truly massive. Some publishers don’t mind this, but for a lot of them this is overwhelming.

Many of our subscribers mass submit to the publishers we review.

You can read one of our articles on what mass submitting is and why it a problem here, but it basically boils down to this: Publishers receiving tons of submissions of work they would never ever publish and aren’t open to submissions for, such as a children’s book publisher receiving adult romance novels.

These mass submissions never result in success, but they do encourage publishers to close their doors to unsolicited submissions or have more limited windows.

We have published a lot of warnings in our articles, and in text next to our articles, to try and prevent these mass submissions. We’ve published a LOT of educational articles about submitting appropriately.

As far as we can tell, none of the efforts we have made have helped actually decrease these mass submissions.

Our goal is to make publishing more equitable and approachable, but causing publishers to close to submissions is not supporting that.

AI has only complicated the issues.

Before AI became commonplace and more adaptable, at least all of the submissions these publishers were received were written by humans. Now they are not. Science fiction publishers have borne the brunt of this, but even here at Authors Publish it has caused significant issues in terms of our inbox.

Because of the three previous points, more publishers are closing to submissions or asking to be delisted.

This is still very much the exception not the rule, but we do not plan to continue down this path. We want to support equitable and approachable publishing.

I will still be reviewing about 52 publishers and their imprints a year and I will use this information to update the Guide to Manuscript Publishers twice a year as well as special issues articles that round up 20 or more publishers. Our monthly list for underrepresented authors will still contain manuscript publishers as well.

These longer lists and the guide have never caused the same issues, because people do not use them to mass submit the same way and submissions tend to be dispersed over all the publishers, so it’s more like a heavy storm than a waterfall.

We still have a few more scheduled manuscript publishers to go, but by June we will have fully shifted away from them.

We’ll see if this strategy works over time and there might end up being other ways to bring more regular reviews back over time. This isn’t the route forward we would have chosen for ourselves, but it seems like the only way given the circumstances.

We will still publish a review of one literary journal a week, as that has been less of an issue. Moving forward we will focus more on list articles, even in the issues themselves, as well as covering publishing industry news more consistently, something we have already been working towards.

In the meantime please keep supporting indie publishers by buying books directly from them, or local bookstores as much as you can.

We already have some options for replacement articles but we are always open to hearing more, and if you have any feedback on any of this, please feel encouraged to send us an email at suppot@authorspublish.com.

Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2024 Guide to Manuscript Publishers. She regularly teaches three acclaimed courses on writing and publishing at The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish. You can follow her on Facebook here.