How To Submit Your Manuscript for Review

We receive an overwhelming number of book proposals and at the moment we can accept only 20 manuscripts per year for publication in the following seasons. In total we publish approximately 35 books per year, and the remaining books accepted come from 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 co-directors Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, eileen@punctumbooks.com, and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, vincent@punctumbooks.com. We won’t read, review, or accept any manuscripts sent to us outside those dates or if they are sent within those months but are not complete. As regards books that might not be complete, you can send brief queries about such any time by email, but we will only respond to say "this interests us" or "this isn't quite right for us," but we won't read or review sample chapters. So to reemphasize, we will only review completed manuscripts during our open reviewing period.

Submissions should include proposals and the manuscript itself. By proposal for the book, we mean a brief description of the book’s historical, intellectual, and cultural the book emerges from and/or challenges, the overall aims and ambitions of the book, its organization and rationales for such, with chapter summaries (which can be brief paragraphs). Full manuscripts and proposals must be sent assembled into a single PDF file, including a cover sheet with author name(s), institutional affiliations (if they apply), and contact information. Please don’t send any other materials with your submissions, as in, don't include your c.v.

Manuscripts are reviewed by the co-directors, Eileen and Vincent (punctum books is a scholar-led press, which means that this first round of review is, in fact, already 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). 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 open access and 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.

If you would like to contact the co-directors in charge of acquisitions with just a very brief book pitch (no materials of any kind to be attached) outside out submission season, we’ll try to respond to say whether it interests us or not, depending on our availability: write to Eileen and Vincent (email addresses above). Depending on our workload at any particular moment, this may take while. We apologize in advance.

Finally, please also keep the following in mind:

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.

We do not mind if authors want to submit their manuscripts to other publishers at the same time as they submit to us (and we understand the necessity of this, too), but we do ask that you inform us of this at the time of submission and also keep in touch with us when and if another publisher wants to publish your book so that we don't duplicate labor.

Note on Edited Collections

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 for the edited collection, as detailed above, including when you expect the book to be finished, and sample chapters (ideally, at least 2 chapters, if that's possible). Assemble all of this into a single PDF document, including a cover sheet with author name(s), institutional affiliations (if they apply), and contact information.