Our vision

Assembly Press will publish a balanced mix of voice-driven and concept-driven fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We want our books to be notable for engaging with contemporary issues with thoughtfulness, incisiveness, and passion in equal measure.  

We welcome submissions by all writers regardless of publication history or writing experience, and especially by equity-seeking writers marginalized by attitudinal, historic, social, and environmental barriers based on age, ethnicity, disability, economic status, gender, nationality, race, sexual orientation, and transgender status.  

We are committed to driving change in the publishing industry, and one way we can do so is to prioritize submissions written by equity-seeking writers. To serve this priority, we will push proposals and manuscripts of all genres by these authors to the front of our reading queue.

What we’re looking to acquire

Fiction 

• Our taste is literary, in that we prioritize quality of writing above all else, but we’re not afraid of plot. 

• Inventive and innovative ways of telling stories, and work that plays with form and style. 

• We love a good mood, especially writing that’s sly or has a witty sense of humour or that embraces dark or gritty emotions and that leave us with feelings. 

• Genre projects (romance, speculative, mystery, etc.) that centre craft and writing quality just as much as the narrative. 

• We’re big fans of short(er) novels and novellas. 

We’re not a good home for straightforward historical novels that don’t have a contemporary hook. We’re also not looking for straight-up commercial projects, including crime, thriller, mystery, romance, speculative fiction, and chick-lit.  

Nonfiction 

• We want to see writers grappling with their passion for their subject matter on the page. 

• Voice-driven and concept-driven nonfiction with contemporary relevance, especially nonfiction from historically underrepresented voices, that engages with the world. 

• Our interests include ideas, science, psychology, nature writing, culture, memoir, business, and to a lesser extent, history and politics, as well as books that visit the intersection of those subjects. 

• Work that plays with inventive and genre-bending narrative structures. 

We’re likely to pass on straightforward surveys of subject matter; memoir without any tie-in to larger cultural of social issues; political biographies; and books without any central narrative or intellectual hook.  

Poetry 

• We are interested in a wide range of contemporary poetry, including lyric, experimental, and visual poetry.  

• We’re especially keen on poems with a strong sense of voice, and poetry collections with a unifying concept or outlook and that engage with a specific idea, problem or cultural issue. 

• Visual and experiment poetry manuscripts should be reproducible in a standard book format by commercial printing. 

Formatting your submission

A 1–2 page letter of introduction to you and the project you’re submitting. Include a 250-word synopsis of the project you’re submitting and a short bio (who you are, the communities you come from, the job(s) you work, any other personal details that will give us a good sense of who you are, and a list of publications, if you have one) as part of your letter. Additional context is always helpful; if it’s applicable to your project, please include any/all of the below info in your letter: 

• what made you write (or want to write) this manuscript and why you’re the ideal writer to tackle such a project  

• traditions or cultural conversations your manuscript participates in  

• your manuscript’s ideal reader/audience 

• books you’ve read and think would be good conversation mates for your manuscript 

• your hopes for your writing career  

The work. A full manuscript for fiction and poetry, and either a full manuscript or a proposal for nonfiction. We have no word-count requirements, but our preference is for completed prose works between 35,000–90,000 words, and poetry manuscripts in the 60–100-page range. Nonfiction proposals should include a chapter outline and a writing sample of at least 10 pages. 

Please package your submission with your letter of introduction and the work in one file. We accept any Word (or Word-adjacent) or PDF file formats. Please do not submit links to Google Docs or Google Drive. 

Housekeeping notes

• We accept only digital submissions, and only through the online form available below. Emailed submissions will be deleted, and hard copy submissions will be recycled. Why? Our online system is what lets us keep track of what’s come in and what we’ve read. 

• Submit only one manuscript at a time, please and thanks. 

• Let us know if you’re submitting your manuscript elsewhere (what’s known as a “simultaneous submission”). We get it, life is short! If you receive and/or accept an offer to publish your manuscript elsewhere, or want to withdraw it for any reason, we ask you to please let us know via email.  

• We do not publish plays, scholarly or strictly academic texts, or children’s books (young adult or picture).  

• As we’re a small team, our TBR piles are often very high. It may take us up to six months for us to review and respond to your submission. Please only email us to check on the status of your manuscript if you haven’t heard from us after that six-month window.