Guidelines

Use our Submission Manager to create an account or re-use your old one.

  • Use the genre dropbox to select the imprint to which you are submitting.
  • Author’s identifying information should not appear in the manuscript. The submission manager will save all of your information, linked to your submission, but no reader, editor or judge will see this until after final decisions have been made.
  • Acknowledgments should not be included in the manuscript but can be copied into the “Comments” box.

There is an entry fee of $25 if you are submitting to the Washington Prize (deadline March 15), the Hilary Tham Capital Collection (deadline May 1), or the Tenth Gate Prize (deadline July 15); $20 if you are submitting during our open reading period (May and June). Fees are collected through Paypal. If you do not have a Paypal account, you can still use PayPal to pay with a debit or credit card, or you can contact the editors at the email address below to make other arrangements. We do grant a limited number of fee waivers per imprint. You can send your rationale for a waiver to the editors at the email below.

The Word Works now accepts only electronic submissions, but if this poses a particular problem for you, please contact Nancy at editor@wordworksbooks.org.

Please note that each of our imprints has its own eligibility requirements. 

Also, while we accept manuscripts written in English by authors from the Americas and Canada, we cannot publish work that is otherwise eligible if the author lives overseas.