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, including edited volumes, 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 very 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," and 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 backgrounds the book emerges from and/or challenges, the overall aims and ambitions of the book, its organization and rationale for such, with chapter summaries (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. or letters of recommendation.

Manuscripts are reviewed by the co-directors, Eileen and Vincent, and as punctum books is a scholar-led press, this constitutes the first round of 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.” The manuscripts with a provisional "yes" 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, and authors can suggest some who they believe have the requisite knowledge to review their book. Any additional peer review will also be discussed with the Editorial Advisory Board. 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 therefore we are open to authors and anthology editors 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.

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. Many dissertations authors have benefited from two books by William German, From Dissertation to Book, On Revision, and Getting It Published.

We do not review multiple submissions by the same author or editor. 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.