As many of you know, Trouble Department opens to unsolicited submissions during the month of September. This year, we received a bit more attention than usual; specifically, we were sent about 10x as many manuscripts as we typically receive during open reading periods. Many of them are impressive, and it’s going to take a bit longer than usual to issue final decisions.
For the sake of transparency, our goal here is to select all of our forthcoming books through the end of 2023. A few manuscripts have already been acquired for this period, but we are looking to fill between 3 and 5 more spots, depending on length and the outcome of some inquiries already in progress. Because we received far, far more quality manuscripts than we have the budget to turn into books, we’re going to have to make some difficult decisions. However, we are hoping to respond to all active submissions by end of the 2021 calendar year.
As of this posting, all manuscripts have received at least a first read. We are beginning to send out some responses, but can only do so many per day without our email service giving us trouble (pun always intended) for potential spamming. Authors of manuscripts we have shortlisted will be notified first, since a final decision is likely to take much longer in these cases. Hopefully, everyone will have heard something one way or the other my the end of October, but it may take slightly longer.
Please note that, per our submission guidelines, all manuscripts sent to us must include the author’s contact information. We tend to be relatively lax on formatting preferences, but unfortunately this rule is a necessity, because we accept submissions via FTP upload and not a submission manager or email address. When we receive a manuscript, we get only the contents of the file and an IP address. If you submitted to us and your manuscript did not include contact info, we will still make a reasonable attempt to get in touch, but if you haven’t heard from us by the New Year, this is likely why.
As always, thank you to all the authors who have trusted us to give your work a shot. We are a very small house, and what we publish has as much to do with our particular editorial preferences as it does with quality, but it is constantly inspiring to see so much amazing work being done by so many writers all over the world. Trouble Department’s mission has always been to do our part toward making sure that underrepresented and under-prioritized voices are able to find the audience that is out there waiting for them. It’s good to see so clearly that we are filling a genuine need in this.
