Unthank Books is a new independent publishing house. Based in London and Norwich, UNTHANK aims to publish the kind of books you used to read and enjoy, but struggle to find any more.

Without new work and new writers coming through, Unthank Books believes that the industry will stagnate. It seems logical to say this but the logic somehow seems to have escaped the larger houses. We don’t assume that an author’s first novel is his ‘magnum opus’ or his ‘bestseller’. We do think that promise can be shown in a first novel, hopefully can be seen and published by us and the author encouraged to write on toward his ‘meisterwerk’. If we decide after reading not to publish your novel we do offer reasoning and feedback as to why we felt this was not possible. If your query or submission remains unanswered then you are entirely safe to assume that it is because we are not interested – pressure of workload prevents us from replying simply to explain this.

FICTION

We are essentially interested in innovative and important literary fiction – something we feel we have not read enough of in recent years given the state of mainstream lists. We have read an awful lot of genre fiction between us, for both personal and professional purposes, and for this reason have decided we don’t want to publish it at the moment. This means that unless exceptional circumstances or quality apply, we are not publishing horror, westerns, science-fiction, crime and mysteries, police procedurals, fantasy, supernatural, spiritual fiction, chick/mum/lad-lit etc. We do clearly reserve the right to change our minds on this of course if we are bowled over by something which arguably falls into one of these categories. We are open to ‘thrillers’ of a literary bent, but not those which are technologically focused, adventure and action driven, or environmental/apocalypse commentaries.

With the help of the note above, please send suitable samples (cover letter, synopsis and 50 pages by hard copy, double-spaced, single-sided, consecutively page-numbered) with a SAE to: Unthank Submissions, PO BOX 3506, Norwich, NR7 7QP

Further details here.

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