How To Submit Your Manuscript for Review

If you would like to contact the co-directors in charge of acquisitions with a very brief book pitch (no materials of any kind to be attached), we’ll respond to say whether it interests us or not: write to Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy (eileen@punctumbooks.com) and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (vincent@punctumbooks.com). We receive an overwhelming number of book proposals and only 20-30 manuscripts per year will be accepted for publication in the following year. In total we publish 35–40 books per year, the remaining manuscripts coming to us via our imprints.

In order to manage as best we can the flow of proposals as well as our production schedule, our procedure is to only receive and review completed manuscripts accompanied by brief proposals sent to us between May 1 and July 31 of each year (to both Eileen and Vincent).

We won’t accept or review any manuscripts sent to us outside those dates (except in some special cases: see below).

Submissions should include proposals and the manuscript itself. By proposal for the book, we mean a brief description of the book’s intellectual and/or historical backgrounds, the intellectual and other work the book emerges from and/or challenges, the overall aims and ambitions of the book, and its organization, with chapter summaries. Full manuscripts and proposals must be sent assembled into a single PDF file. Please don’t send any other materials with your submissions.

We prefer to receive only full manuscripts during our review period, but we understand that for some editors, a provisional “yes” might be helpful and also necessary to move an edited collection forward (especially for editors situated at universities where oversight of professional progress can be extreme). In this case, send a proposal of edited collection, as detailed above, including when you expect the book to be finished, and sample, finished chapters (ideally, at least 2 chapters). Assemble all of this into a single PDF document.

We do not review unrevised dissertations. Dissertations are written for a very specific audience and cannot be published as is for a more general readership. Only dissertations fully rewritten with a general (scholarly/academic) readership in mind will be considered.

We do not review multiple submissions by the same author. Please do not submit more than one manuscript per year.

Manuscripts are reviewed by the co-directors, Eileen and Vincent (punctum books is a scholar-led press, which means that the first round of review counts as peer review). At some point from mid to late October, Eileen and Vincent will tell authors whether it is a “no” or a strong yet provisional “yes.” These manuscripts will then be reviewed by members of our Editorial Advisory Board with expertise in the proposal’s subject area(s), and when there is no board member whose expertise matches the subject area(s), then punctum draws upon external experts. Any additional peer review will be discussed with the Editorial Advisory Board and author(s)/editor(s). It is not always easy to know with perfect precision when final decisions are made, but usually by the end of January.

In general, we follow AAUP’s guidelines for “Best Practices for Peer Review,” but we are also an author-centered press, and are open to authors choosing the sort of review process that they feel will best serve the development of their work: double-anonymous, single-anonymous, open and transparent, online and crowd-based, etc. Philosophically, we feel that open-access publishers should be embracing more open forms of review, and our feelings accord fairly well with the opinions expressed HERE and HERE.

All works published by punctum books are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License. We are also open to authors choosing their own Creative Commons license or other form of Copyleft licensing.